Africa

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This file photograph shows Thomas Sankara as he reviews troops in a street of Ouagadougou, during celebrations of the second anniversary of the Burkina Faso’s revolution. Photo by Daniel Lane/AP.

Thomas Sankara remains a global icon
By Owen Schalk (Posted May 17, 2024)

Originally published: Canadian Dimension on October 9, 2024 (more by Canadian Dimension) |

“We encourage aid that aids us in doing away with aid,” asserted Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987.

But in general welfare and aid policies have only ended up disorganizing us, thus beguiling us and robbing us of a sense of responsibility for our own economic, political and cultural affairs.

In order to restore that sense of responsibility, Sankara implemented a socialist, anti-imperialist agenda aimed at cultivating a self-sufficient economy run by the Burkinabè people, for the Burkinabè people. His agenda included, among other things, refusal to pay Burkina Faso’s debts to Western-run institutions on the grounds that, one, it was illegitimately accrued, and two, constant debt serving was anathema to African development.

As ideologically void military coups rock Burkina Faso and the debt crisis across the African continent grows more urgent by the year, the Burkinabè people are readying to commemorate Sankara on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his assassination. Sankara’s four years in power proved that alternative development models that do not subscribe to the imported precepts of neocolonial institutions are not only possible, but necessary if underdeveloped nations want to develop in endogenous and sustainable ways.

When Sankara seized power in 1983, his government represented a radical break from the past. Named “Upper Volta” by the French and underdeveloped in a classic colonial fashion, formal independence brought little material change to the country. A series of puppet rulers kept the country in France’s neocolonial dominion, while the majority of Upper Volta’s population remained undereducated and undernourished. When Sankara, a military captain who espoused the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, took power in a coup, continent-wide hopes for African socialism were reinvigorated. The Zanzibarian socialist A.M. Babu summed up the hopeful feeling:

Captain Thomas Sankara… can be instrumental in reviving that post-colonial enthusiasm which most people had hoped would be rekindled by [Mugabe’s] Zimbabwe but was not; the enthusiasm that cleared bushes, built thousands of miles of modern roads, that dug canals on the basis of free labour and the spirit of nation-building.

A man of informal style and modest values, Sankara nevertheless espoused an ambitious development program for the African continent. Firstly, he renamed his country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso⁠—“the land of upright people”⁠—and nationalized the majority of its resources, most importantly the farmland and mineral reserves. He launched a series of “commando” operations to build a nation-spanning railroad (the people constructed almost 100 kilometres of railway in two years), increase literacy in the countryside (tens of thousands were taught to read), and vaccinate children against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever (two million children were vaccinated in two weeks, saving 18,000 to 50,000 kids who usually died in the yearly epidemics). All these initiatives were undertaken without accepting funds from international financial institutions or encouraging foreign investment.

“We don’t want anything from anyone,” said Foreign Minister Basile Guissou. “No one will come to develop Burkina Faso in place of its own people.” At a time when Africa’s debt was around $200 billion and 40 percent of the continent’s export earnings were going toward debt payments, this was a brave stance to take. Sankara went one step further when, in 1987, he urged the rest of Africa to reject its foreign debt and follow Burkina Faso’s successful model of self-sufficiency.

Sankara’s goal was to ensure the population’s access to food and clean drinking water, a basic but demanding ambition on a continent where hunger and thirst were enforced on whole peoples through the financial institutions and foreign policy agendas of the “civilized” Western world. “Our economic ambition,” he said,

is to use the strength of the people of Burkina Faso to provide, for all, two meals a day and drinking water.

His policies bore fruit. Between 1983 and 1986, cereal production rose 75 percent and the new Ministry of Water helped many communities dig wells and water reservoirs. Journalist Ernest Harsch recalls:

Ordinary Burkinabè seemed to readily embrace Sankara’s approach, as they mobilized in their local communities to quickly build new schools, health clinics, and other facilities that had once seemed but a remote fantasy.

Sankara’s independent development policies, combined with a non-aligned foreign policy that saw him enjoy good relations with Cuba, Libya, and the Soviet Union, led the Europeans (and particularly the French) to turn against the revolutionary government. Much like other revolutionary processes in Cuba and Venezuela, Sankara’s government was successfully implementing a new development strategy that spurned the racist paternalism and interventionist austerity of Western financial institutions in favour of a model of self-sufficiency rooted in popular mobilization. Moreover, Sankara demanded respect from the Global North, and especially from Burkina Faso’s former colonizer. “What is essential,” he stated,

is to develop a relationship of equals, mutually beneficial, without paternalism on one side or an inferiority complex on the other.

The French government’s attitude toward Sankara grew increasingly negative during his time in power. For example, during a brief border war between Mali and Burkina Faso in 1985, France sold weapons to Mali. Overall, Sankara had deprived France of influence in West Africa, and the success of his alternative path portended an even greater diminishment of French influence as other peoples in the region would likely realize that self-sufficiency was possible. As such, the French retained close ties with conservative governments in neighbouring Togo and Côte d’Ivoire, especially the Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, whose country was home to many Burkinabè exiles who opposed the Burkinabè revolution.

When Sankara traveled to Côte d’Ivoire in May 1984, he was initially banned from visiting Abidjan, the largest city, because Ivorian authorities were worried he would be welcomed more enthusiastically than the country’s own president.

Everything fell apart on October 15, 1987, when former Sankara compatriot Blaise Compaoré launched a coup of his own. His soldiers murdered Sankara and his closest allies and unceremoniously buried their bodies in a mass grave. Harsch reported that, when word of Sankara’s death spread, mourners flocked to the mound to lay flowers and weep.

Compaoré ruled until 2014. Some of his earliest actions included reversing the state monopoly on the mining industry and allowing the International Monetary Fund and the World to return to the country. “Without shame, we must appeal to private investors,” he announced in a clear break from Sankara.

We need to develop capitalism… We have never considered socialism.

In further contrast to his predecessor, Compaoré built an opulent presidential palace and purchased a luxury jet once owned by Michael Jackson. The West’s immediate embrace of Compaoré and the new leader’s closeness to France (and particularly French ally Félix Houphouët-Boigny) have fed theories that the coup was launched at the behest of Burkina Faso’s former colonizer. To this day, the French government refuses to open its archives on Sankara.

By the late 1990s, foreign exploration teams had discovered huge gold reserves in Burkina Faso. Canada, with its growing investments in gold, was especially interested. By 2003, the following Canadian companies were exploring or developing mines in Burkina Faso: Axmin, Orezone Resources, Etruscan Resources, St. Jude Resources, SEMAFO, and High River Gold. Within fewer than twenty years, Canadian interests would own the majority of gold operations in the country, dominating Burkina Faso’s most profitable export.

In 2014, a popular uprising overthrew Compaoré, bringing an end to decades of openly neocolonial rule. However, the political process that followed failed to break with the past as Sankara would have advised. Canadian pressure was instrumental in preventing substantial reform. As Business Monitor Online explained, “Burkina Faso is heavily dependent on foreign aid, much of it from Canada, the home jurisdiction of most of the miners that would be hurt by significant review.” Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper further protected Canadian investments by finalizing a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA), negotiated with the Compaoré regime, while the unelected transition government was in power.

A 2015 meeting between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré revealed the continuing prevalence of Canadian capital in the country today. As Canadian mining investments in Burkina Faso and all West Africa continued to rise, Kaboré shook hands with Trudeau and “underscored the importance of Canadian investments to Burkina Faso’s economy.”


This year, Burkina Faso has been the site of two military coups. The first, on January 24, overthrew Kaboré and brought officer Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba to power, and the second, on September 30, dislodged Damiba and elevated officer Ibrahim Traore to the head of the military regime. Neither of these coups impacted Canadian investment in the country. An October 3 article in Canadian Mining Journal notes that operations owned by Canada’s Endeavor Mining and IAMGOLD “have not been affected by spreading social unrest following an internal coup d’état.”

Sankara’s vision of an independent, socialist, pan-Africanist model of development⁠—one in which wealth produced in Africa remains in Africa to develop the majority of the population⁠—was not buried with him. He remains an inspiring symbol for people in Africa and beyond. In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Aziz Fall, coordinator for the International Campaign Justice for Sankara, explained that Sankara “symbolized for most African youths the hope of a sovereign Africa. He actually gave his life for that… And so he’s an icon, I think."

https://mronline.org/2024/05/17/thomas- ... obal-icon/

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Sudan: Revolutionary Movement Plots the Path to Peace
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 17, 2024
Mohammed Amin


A street in the city of Omdurman damaged in the year-long war in Sudan, May 2024 (Reuters)

As fighting between the RSF and army rages on and the situation in Darfur worsens, Sudan’s resistance committees have difficult choices to make.

Early in April, leaders of Sudan’s radical revolutionary group Anger Without Borders met with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the country’s de facto ruler.

Members of the group had been fighting alongside the army in its war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been ongoing since 15 April last year, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of people and displacing over eight million Sudanese from their homes.

But while Anger Without Borders had taken up arms alongside the army, its meeting with Burhan started an argument on social media. Burhan, after all, was the man who, along with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF chief better known as Hemeti, had orchestrated the military coup of October 2021 that blew up Sudan’s transition to full civilian leadership.

And so, Anger Without Borders was accused of seeking to legitimise military rule in Sudan through its meeting with Burhan who, over the Eid al-Fitr holiday of 10 April had announced that his aim was not to return the country to any kind of civilian government.

Appearances, though, can be deceptive. What really happened, according to group member Nuha Abdul Gadir, who spoke to Middle East Eye, was an ambush. The revolutionaries had been set up as part of a “piece of propaganda”.

“The members of Anger Without Borders were summoned for a normal meeting, then suddenly found themselves in a room with Burhan. Our leaders tried to leave but the soldiers prevented them. They were lured there so Burhan could be photographed with them,” Gadir told Middle East Eye.

‘We can’t put our hands on the hands of Burhan, which have been dirtied by the blood of the revolutionaries’

– Nuha Abdul Gadir, Anger Without Borders

“We can’t put our hands on the hands of Burhan, which have been dirtied by the blood of the revolutionaries. Our leaders joined the army to defend our people from the violations of the RSF,” she said, specifying that fighting the RSF was not the same as fighting for the army, and referring particularly to the army and RSF-led operations against protesters in 2019, which left hundreds of civilians dead.

With Sudan’s war now more than a year old, the country’s revolutionary movement, as well as its technocratic civilian leaders, has been trying to forge a pathway to peace that does not end up solidifying military rule.

Sometimes, this has meant taking difficult decisions, with different civilian actors seeming to offer support to one or other of the warring parties. The army is now made up of a constellation of different groups representing wildly diverging ideologies, from radical revolutionaries to ultra-conservative Islamists.

Many of those groups see the army as a means to an end: namely, defeating the RSF, which international human rights groups have concluded is committing genocide against “non-Arab groups” in Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan that serves as its powerbase.

Heart of the revolution

The resistance committees – nationwide groups of local activists that have been at the heart of Sudan’s revolutionary movement – have, along with the affiliated emergency response rooms (ERR), been organising lifesaving wartime support across Sudan, and are actively trying to bring the war to an end.

In a document titled, “The political vision to end the war in Sudan,” the resistance committees have detailed their bottom-up approach to solving the crisis in Sudan through political pressure and popular organising. This stands in contrast to the approach taken by technocratic civilian actors like former prime minister Abdalla Hamdok’s Taggadum coalition, which is seeking to convince the warring parties to head back to the negotiation table.

The next round of US- and Saudi-mediated ceasefire talks, scheduled to being in Jeddah, are now no longer happening.

At a recent conference in Paris, the international community pledged $2bn in aid for Sudan. Neither the SAF nor the RSF was invited to take part in the conference, which was attended by Sudanese civilian actors.

The resistance committees have expressed doubts over the commitment of international donors and hit out at world actors for “forgetting” the crisis in Sudan.

A leading resistance committee member from Gezira state told MEE that the groups’ roadmap called for the dismantling of the RSF and the creation of a new army that would stay out of Sudan’s politics and allow the building of full civil rule.

The source, who asked for anonymity for security reasons, said this would not be possible under the SAF’s current leadership, which is against the revolution and against civilian rule.

“The question of how to build a new army is the main challenge for the war in Sudan. We are working with retired officers and officers who have been dismissed to formulate the creation of a professional army that accords with the process of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration,” he said.


Sudan updateAfrica Confidential’s Sudan situation update (Courtesy of Africa Confidential)

The resistance committee leader said they were against the RSF “and against the leaders of the SAF who failed to protect the people. We also warn the elites that are supporting the militias and foreign countries that are supporting the militias to stop what they are doing”.

The United Arab Emirates is the RSF’s main patron, while Africa Confidential has reported that the army has been operating Iran-supplied drones, notably the Mohajer-4 and Mohajer-6, since January.

Middle East Eye recently reported on Russia’s role in the war, as Moscow moves to play both sides, strengthening relations with the army while continuing to facilitate the supply of the RSF through the Wagner Group.

“Our roadmap also includes the formation of revolutionary governments from the grassroots in different states after the design of new interim constitutions through a dialogue between the Sudanese people,” the resistance committee source said.

‘Impossible balance’

Muzan Alneel, a Sudanese scholar, described the resistance committees as the only genuine democratic group to face the militarisation of politics in Sudan.

“The success of the resistance front in advancing its position was captured in the slogan of the ‘Three Nos’ – no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimisation – against the military council,” Alneel, co-founder of the Innovation, Science and Technology Think-tank for People Centered Development, told MEE.

‘We believe that junior army officers, who have no interest in continuing the war, will stand with our vision’

– Resistance committee leader

In the period leading up to the beginning of the war in April 2023, this slogan was chanted at protests and, Alneel said, even the civilian Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) coalition, made up mostly of technocratic, elite politicians, “felt compelled to include it at the bottom of their statements”.

However, the argument the resistance committees made – that “the latest coup would only encourage further violence and perhaps even a war” was, Alneel said, ignored by international political and media organisations.

“For the two warring entities – both of which had expanded their influence using violence, massacres, and coups, and faced no consequences other than further legitimisation – it was only logical to attempt a full takeover via further violence,” Alneel told MEE.

But she criticised the resistance committees for now supporting the army to protect the state, saying they had “attempted to strike an impossible balance between calling for an end to the war and supporting the army of the coup government”.

“For months, they attempted to hold together two contradictory goals: namely, the revolution’s goal of protecting and prioritising human life, and the counter-revolution’s goal of protecting the state,” Alneel said.

“The counter-revolution, boosted by decades of bourgeois propaganda promoting patriotism over human life, appears to have defeated the revolution,” she said.

Situation on the ground

Facing little real pressure from the outside world, both sides have escalated the fighting, with the army targeting Khartoum and Gezira states.

There is fierce fighting in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where there are fears that the RSF could massacre non-Arab civilians. Across Darfur, there is already “clear and convincing” evidence that the RSF is committing genocide.

Currently, according to a military analyst monitoring the battle, the RSF is maintaining static positions around el-Fasher, with clashes and exchanges of artillery taking place in the northern and eastern sectors of the city.


Sudan update ACAfrica Confidential’s Sudan battlefield update (Courtesy of Africa Confidential)

Former rebel movements from Darfur and Blue Nile are fighting alongside the army and they have shifted the balance of power slightly, advancing towards Gezira state, which has been under RSF control since the paramilitary stormed through it in December, meeting little army resistance.

The army is laying siege to the RSF-controlled al-Jili oil refinery north of Khartoum, alongside rebel fighters from Darfur governor Minni Minnawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement.

“The pro-SAF Darfur rebels are fighting hard in al-Jili and Gezira but not really making advances. There are serious coordination issues between the SAF and rebel groups,” the military analyst said.

“We are besieging the RSF in al-Jili around the Khartoum oil refinery and we believe that its seizure is only a matter of time for us. We have destroyed 37 vehicles and captured 18 others from RSF,” Alsadig Alnur, a spokesperson for the SLM/ Minnawi faction, told MEE earlier this month.

The former rebels of another faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, led by the deputy head of the Sovereign Council, Malik Agar, are advancing from Sennar state towards RSF-controlled areas in the south of Gezira state. Eyewitnesses told MEE there had been fierce fighting in Wad Alabas, eastern Gezira.

The war has devastated Sudan. According to the UN, almost 25 million people will be in need of humanitarian assistance in 2024, while 8.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

Mass killing, rape and sexual assault, theft and looting have all been widespread, as the Sudanese people struggle to see an end to the bloodshed.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/05/ ... -to-peace/

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Russia’s Planned Base In Sudan Might Be Downgraded To A Naval Logistics Support Facility

ANDREW KORYBKO
MAY 27, 2024



The US’ interests are in keeping Russia out of Sudan and the broader Red Sea-Gulf of Aden region in general, and it’s much easier to apply pressure against Sudan in this respect than against Somaliland and even Yemen.

The latest Sudanese Civil War that’s been raging for over a year already created further complications to the implementation of 2020’s agreement on setting up a Russian naval base in Port Sudan, which were previously impeded by October 2021’s military coup. Then came the news earlier this year that Sudan was secretly arming Ukraine and even hosting its mercenaries, who reportedly fight against allegedly Wagner-backed rebels, all of which served to reduce confidence in Russia’s naval base plans even more.

Amidst this uncertainty, some speculated that Russia was exploring a naval base in neighboring Eritrea, but this analysis here explained why their first-ever joint exercises earlier this year shouldn’t be seen that way. Meanwhile, this analysis here argued that nearby Somaliland would be a more suitable alternative to Sudan, while this one here explained why Yemen might be even better. Be that as it may, it just turned out that Russia’s naval base plans in Sudan might soon come to fruition, albeit at a lesser scale.

Member of the military-led Sovereign Council Lt. Gen. Yasir al-Atta told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hadath TV that “Russia proposed military cooperation through a logistical support centre, not a full military base, in return for urgent weapons and ammunition supplies. We agreed to this but suggested expanding the cooperation to include economic aspects like agricultural ventures, mining partnerships, and port development. Russia agreed to this broader scope.”

He added that “A military delegation is scheduled to depart for Moscow shortly, followed by a ministerial delegation led by the Deputy Chairman of the Sovereign Council, Malik Agar. Upon the conclusion of the talks, the Chairman of the Sovereign Council will finalize a comprehensive agreement.” His words inspire optimism that the reportedly planned downgrading of Russia’s naval base in Sudan to a “logistical support centre” might indeed be implemented, though obstacles still of course remain.

For instance, the continued absence of a civilian government could prove a legal hurdle in terms of ratifying the agreement, which was one of the excuses for why the previous one hasn’t yet been fulfilled. Additionally, even though the latest plans only concern a “fuel supply point” as publicly financed Sputnik described it in their report about al-Atta’s words and he himself said that Sudan is open to hosting other countries’ such facilities, the US will almost certainly try to stir up some trouble over this issue.

It’s unclear exactly what they’d do to pressure the military government into reconsidering this deal or indefinitely delaying its implementation, but sanctions threats and speculative support for the rebels could be in the cards, as could incentives like corrupt dealings with that country’s leadership. The US’ interests are in keeping Russia out of Sudan and the broader Red Sea-Gulf of Aden region in general, and it’s much easier to apply pressure against Sudan in this respect than against Somaliland and even Yemen.

Moreover, it also can’t be ruled out that Sudan hopes that the US will compete with Russia for a naval facility of some sort and could thus give it better offers on all the economic aspects that its delegations plan to discuss during their forthcoming trips to Moscow. To be sure, the details that al-Atta revealed signal serious intent on his country’s part, but that’s not to say that they couldn’t scale back some of their commitments under a combination of American pressure and especially even better incentives.

Sudan’s interests are in multi-aligning between the Golden Billion, the Sino-Russo Entente, and the Global South in the New Cold War following India’s lead, though this is easier said than done for most countries, let alone one that’s suffering from a fierce civil war. It’s a positive development that two delegations soon plan to visit Moscow to finalize this new naval deal even though it’s a downgraded version of the original one, though it’s unclear whether they’ll ultimately see it through to the end.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/russias- ... udan-might

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Niger orders the U.S. military out and invites Russia in

Steven Sahiounie

May 27, 2024

The days of American domination are over, and the doors in Africa are wide open for alternative help from Russia and China.

Niger has demanded American troops to leave the country “no later” than 15 September, and the U.S. has agreed. The official statement said the two countries had “reached a disengagement agreement to effect the withdrawal of U.S. forces, which has already begun”.

The U.S. had relied on Niger as its primary military base, but U.S. threats led to the rupture of military ties, according to Niger’s Prime Minister Zeine, who blamed the U.S. for the breakdown in bilateral relations, culminating with the “Yankee Go Home” order.

In April, street demonstrators in Agadez, Niger demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

A crucial military relationship between Washington and Niger, its closest West African ally, dissolved after a visiting U.S. official made threats during last-ditch negotiations over whether American troops based there would be allowed to remain, according to Zeine.

On March 17, Niger broke off military cooperation with the U.S., as military leaders move closer to Russia. A senior U.S. delegation left the country the day before, following an unsuccessful 3-day visit to renew contact with the military leaders that ousted the former president.

The government of Niger decided to “denounce with immediate effect” the agreement relating to U.S. military and civilian employees of the U.S. Department of Defense inside Niger, which operated a desert drone base built at a cost of U.S.$100 million.

In July 2023, a military coup overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum, who had been close to Washington, and the U.S. had cut aid to Niger in the aftermath. Niger’s military had in the past worked closely with the United States, but are now looking to cooperate with Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Niger in 2023 in hopes of shoring up Bazoum, a stalwart ally of the U.S., but just four months later, the military deposed Bazoum and put him under house arrest.

The military took a hard line against former colonial power France, forcing the withdrawal of French troops in place for nearly a decade last year.

China has focused on economic engagement in Africa, while funding infrastructure development through its Belt and Road Initiative. China’s investment and aid without attaching conditions such as political and economic reforms have attracted many African leaders who have come to resent what is perceived as Western meddling in internal affairs, where U.S. aid is conditioned on domestic politics.

In March, Niger announced the end of its military agreement with the U.S. Military spokesperson Col. Amadou Abdramane accused the U.S. of raising objections about the allies that Niger had chosen. Abdramane condemned the U.S. for its “condescending attitude” and “threat of reprisals”.

American forces have used two military bases in Niger, and has more than 1,000 troops stationed at the base.

As Niger has distanced itself from the West, it has drawn closer to Russia, and last month, Russian military instructors arrived in Niger as part of a new agreement with its military leaders.

Niger has also quit the French-backed G5 Sahel force, saying it was ineffectual and undermined African sovereignty, and launched their own defense pact called the Alliance of Sahel States.

Era of Global Transformations

The U.S.-China rivalry revolves around global factors. The post-World War II global order is evolving, with the U.S. losing its dominance, while China emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse, extending its influence worldwide.

The Western-led global order is plagued with an ideological crisis driven by unfair distribution of wealth that breeds resentment among the poor.

The Global South, are gaining significant influence and power themselves. In Africa, China’s investments have empowered nations to diversify their economies and enhance their global standing while also reinforcing the nation’s leaders.

The U.S. prioritizes militarism and capital accumulation over values such as human rights and democratic governance, while China emphasizes socio-economic rights but restricts civil liberties to support economic growth and social cohesion. Capitalism became the governing logic of the economy, in both the U.S. and China, which has improved living standards for many but has sustained inequality, polarization, and distrust in institutions.

China has emerged as a significant state actor capable of challenging the dominance of the U.S. and its Western allies in the global landscape. India, Russia, and Brazil, China has emerged as the sole state actor displaying the ambition and capacity to bolster its military prowess, economic influence, and social credibility, while potentially curtailing the U.S.’ sway across the world. China has ascended to become the world’s largest manufacturing hub and foremost exporter of goods, concurrently reinforcing its worldwide military capabilities and presence in international governance organizations.

It positions the U.S.-China rivalry at the intersection of physical geography, social interactions, and global politics, while China’s overtly authoritarian political system has combined with a neoliberal capitalist economy.

The U.S., while publicly advocating for the ideals of human rights and democratic governance on the global stage, has often overlooked these principles when its brute economic interests are at stake. Such is the case in Gaza, where the U.S. supports militarily and politically the genocide of the Palestinian people. This underscores a systemic U.S. hypocrisy that leaves marginalized populations struggling for basic rights and equitable treatment. The people of Africa are all too aware of American double-standards and are rejecting it with a call of “Yankee Go Home” while open to new partners who are fair.

A wave of grassroots mobilizations for national sovereignty has been happening in countries including Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Military uprisings have seized power and expelled western military forces from their territories. These groups want control over natural resources and have received support from the population.

Niger, for example, is considered the world’s third-largest uranium producer; however, nearly all uranium in the country has been mined by French companies to this day, perpetuating a neocolonialist exploitation model that has persisted since the country gained independence in the 1960s.

In July 2023, when a military uprising ousted the then president of Niger, harsh sanctions were applied by the U.S., affecting the entire population, especially people in rural areas.

“The path to real peace in West and Central Africa lies in the full sovereignty of the people. Neocolonial interventions must cease,” the Niger Peasant Platform had stated in 2023.

The unfair, inhumane sanctions that have been imposed on Niger has led to a shortage of medications in drugstores, extreme energy shortages, and shortage of food and high food prices, and has limited the movement of entire populations.

Niger’s coup follows others, since 2020, in Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali and Sudan. Niger, like many African states created by European colonialism, has had periods of military rule since its independence in 1960. But since 2011, it has held three democratic elections, and it has generally been on a democratizing path.

From the voice of the people of Niger, we will hear the need for less traditional “development aid” and more economic investment.

Since 2020, Africa has seen more political unrest, violent extremism, and democratic reversals than any other region in the world. A wave of coups has washed across the Sahel and West Africa, leaving authoritarians in power in numerous countries. In addition, the continent has served as a stage for the escalating great-power competition between China, Russia, and the U.S.

U.S. engagement with Africa has long been deprioritized in Washington, with successive administrations devoting scant attention and resources to advancing democracy and resolving conflicts. The Biden administration has maintained this pattern, which reflects the persistent tension between an interests-based and values-based U.S. foreign policy.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Africa an “epidemic” of coups. The U.S. and its closest Western allies still lack a coherent and coordinated African strategy.

The citizens of Niger, and elsewhere, have come to perceive democracy as equating with the corruption by elected officials, and have looked to a non-democratic military coup as an option.

The U.S. would need to spend some money in Africa of developing business that will create jobs and economic prosperity. The U.S. has so far been unwilling to help Africans make a better economic life for themselves, and instead focused their heavy-handed military presence on keeping their ally in power, at the expense of the citizenry.

The days of American domination are over, and the doors in Africa are wide open for alternative help from Russia and China.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... russia-in/

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S.Africa: Border Authority on Alert for Elections


Commissioner of the BMA Michael Masiapato, May 2024 | Photo: X/ @TheBMA_SA

Published 27 May 2024 (12 hours 12 minutes ago)

In a statement, Commissioner of the BMA Michael Masiapato highlighted the importance of cooperation with embassies and foreign missions in verifying visa legitimacy and encouraged improvements in detection systems.


ON Monday, the BMA said that the South African Border Management Authority (BMA) is on high alert as the country prepares to hold the general elections on Wednesday.

"With just two days before South Africa's national and provincial elections, the Border Management Authority is on high alert at all ports of entry to monitor movements," the BMA said in a statement.

It arrested 28 Bangladesh nationals on Saturday evening at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg who had landed from Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, with no proper documents.

In the statement, Commissioner of the BMA Michael Masiapato highlighted the importance of cooperation with embassies and foreign missions in verifying visa legitimacy and encouraged improvements in detection systems.


"This operation underscores the importance of our continuous efforts to secure our borders and ensure that all entrants comply with our legal requirements," said the commissioner.

He noted that law enforcement has made huge deployments across the country for the elections, including escorting ballot papers and guarding national key points.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/SAf ... -0026.html

Tanzania & Uganda to Join for Industrialization Drive


Meeting Between Uganda and Tanzanian Authorities, May 26, 2024 | Photo: X/ @FalconpostsUg

Published 27 May 2024

Biteko said the two countries have resolved to drive the industrialization agenda forward by making significant investments in infrastructure, including roads, railways and electricity, to support its smooth implementation.


On Sunday. a Tanzanian official said that Tanzania is ready to bolster efforts to enhance cooperation with Uganda in implementing the two countries' industrialization drive.

The governments of Tanzania and Uganda agreed to collaborate on implementing the two countries' industrialization drive on Friday evening when they closed the 2nd Tanzania-Uganda business forum, said Doto Biteko, Tanzania's deputy prime minister and minister of energy.

The forum was held in the port city of Dar es Salaam to explore avenues for collaboration and partnership between the two countries.

Biteko said the two countries have resolved to drive the industrialization agenda forward by making significant investments in infrastructure, including roads, railways and electricity, to support its smooth implementation.


He said both countries are focusing on developing processing industries that will help add value to agricultural and mineral products, adding that Tanzania and Uganda had signed an agreement in the energy sector.

Biteko added that the forum also resolved to boost trade volume between the two countries.

According to statistics from the Tanzania Revenue Authority, Tanzania sold products worth 310.67 U.S. dollars to Uganda by 2023, and 46,000 tourists from Uganda visited Tanzania's tourist attractions.

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

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ANC suffers major loss in landmark elections, now prepares for coalition talks

The ANC suffered a heavy blow in the parliamentary election in South Africa for the first time in 30 years. The uMkhonto weSizwe party has emerged as the third-largest party in the country

June 03, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch


Cyril Ramaphosa during ANC pre-election rally. Source: Cyril Ramaphosa/X

For the first time in 30 years, the African National Congress (ANC) lost the absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in South Africa. The ANC suffered an unexpectedly hard blow, securing just around 40% of the vote, down from approximately 58% in the 2019 election. This result translates into 159 seats in the National Assembly, a loss of 71 seats.

ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa admitted the party was “dented” by the results but said the outcome reflects the democratic nature of the country’s political processes. He called on other political parties to prioritize unity and national interest as he launched the first steps toward forming a coalition.

The conservative Democratic Alliance (DA) secured the second-largest share of votes (close to 22%), consistent with past election results. The party, mostly associated with a white conservative voter base, secured 75% of the votes cast outside of South Africa. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the third largest in the previous National Assembly, secured 9.5% of the votes.

The biggest gain was achieved by the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, led by former president Jacob Zuma. This party, new to the National Assembly, managed to secure over 14% of the votes, significantly more than predicted by most polls ahead of the election and early results.

In the coming weeks, coalition talks are expected to continue leading up to the first meeting of the newly elected National Assembly, where the new president of South Africa should also be elected.

All major opposition parties indicated they would consider a coalition with the ANC under certain conditions. Members of the DA leadership stated they would choose “the least bad option,” which, for them, could mean forming a coalition with the ANC rather than seeing them walking away with the EFF or MK Party. However, the DA opposes key ANC policies, such as the National Health Insurance and the Black empowerment program.

The MK Party has stated it would negotiate a coalition if the ANC drops Ramaphosa. The relationship between Ramaphosa and Zuma has been tense since Ramaphosa succeeded Zuma as president, and these tensions remain high. The conversation could become even more complicated as the MK Party alleged election day irregularities, calling on the electoral commission to delay announcing the results and a rerun of the election.

As coalition talks proceed, all parties will need to consider the main grievances that brought people to the polls. South Africa is struggling with widespread unemployment, poverty, high living costs, and corruption, which has undermined faith in political parties.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/06/03/ ... ion-talks/

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JUNE 1, 2024 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
South Africa tiptoes towards coalition politics


Voters waiting patiently in hours-long queues in South Africa’s parliamentary election, May 29, 2024

The results of the election to the South African parliament on Friday confirmed the widely-held belief that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) which spearheaded the country’s liberation from apartheid in 1993 and since dominated the political landscape like a banyan tree is in steep decline. ANC’s vote share plummeted from 57.5 percent in the 2019 election to around 40%.

ANC’s halcyon days are ending but then, all good things come to an end, finally. ANC could at least hang on for thirty years tapping into the legacy of the freedom struggle, which is not an easy thing to do as politics gets more and more competitive and along with empowerment comes the challenge of accountability. In comparison, India’s Congress Party lost the majority in the parliament in less than 2 decades.

Broadly, outside of some largely rural provinces, support for the ANC is now in general decline with a strong undercurrent of anti-incumbency sentiment working against it on account of massive unemployment, extremely high level of interpersonal violence, collapsing social services, and brazen corruption.

ANC would need help from other parties to reelect Cyril Ramaphosa for a second term. The three other major parties are the liberal-oriented Democratic Alliance [DA], the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] and the new MK Party [MK] led by former President Jacob Zuma, who once led the ANC.

DA, which polled over 21% votes, is an established liberal party, white-dominated and also funded by white capital. EFF, on the other hand, is an authoritarian populist party, non-ethnic in its support base and orientation and polled a little over 9% of votes.

The big winner seems to be MK, a breakaway faction of ANC, which entered the electoral fray for the first time and surged on a tide of Zulu nationalism to garner 14.83% of votes.

The likely character of the incoming ruling coalition is not yet clear. Unsurprisingly, the western media is rooting for a ANC-DA coalition. DA has plateaued and is eager to align with the ANC despite its ideology of national liberation to share power.

The massive investments by the white billionaires in a set of new liberal parties failed to produce the desired results in Wednesday’s election. None of those parties gained traction. The DA is the solitary exception but even in this case, the mediocrity of its leadership and its inability to distinguish differences in pitch in the complex race politics puts inherent limits to the potential for growth beyond its current limits. Many black South Africans mistrust the DA, believing it favours the interests of white people.

Therefore, there is bound to be resistance within the ANC to a tie-up with the DA under white politician John Steenhuisen, whose free market programme of privatisations and an end to black economic empowerment programmes sits at odds with the ruling party’s traditions.

Nelson Mandela’s grandson and an outgoing ANC lawmaker, Zwelivelile Mandela told AFP, the DA held “different ideals” making it too difficult to partner with. He predicted that the radical left groups led by former ANC figures — firebrand Julius Malema’s EFF or Zuma’s MK — were more likely bedfellows for the ruling party.

But then, arguably, these radical options might also meet resistance within the more moderate sections of the ANC. Besides, the rift between Ramaphosa and Zuma — who has long been bitter about the way he was forced out of office as president in 2018 — remains to be mended.

Amidst all this maneuvering within the political class, it is difficult to gauge the popular mood, given the vice-like grip of the white liberal media over the national discourse. Thus, the gravity of the deep sense of political alienation driving many voters into forms of anti-liberal and at times anti-democratic populism is being blithely overlooked in the obsession to undermine the ANC’s towering presence on the political landscape.

Without doubt, the ANC has become an eyesore for the Western powers. South Africa’s active role in the BRICS and advocacy of multipolarity and “de-dollarisation”, its audacious move in the ICJ against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, its closeness to Russia and China and so on are hugely consequential to western interests in the contemporary world situation.

The hold on the digital media in South Africa by white capital gives it significant power to shape the national discourse, but there is no attempt to understand the deep alienation of deprived sections of society, leave alone address it critically. Suffice to say, this is fertile soil for ethnic politics to strike roots. The paradox is, the legacy of one of the most progressive movements in the history of anti-colonial liberation may turn out to be the rise of ethno-nationalism and populism under darkly comic political personalities similar to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro or Javier Milei.

The crux of the matter is that the left has failed to present a credible alternative to the predatory form of ethnic nationalism and populism spawned by the terrible circumstances of poverty and deprivation in which most South Africans struggle to live. Not a single leader in the manner of Lula da Silva or Jeremy Corbyn is to be seen who could unify the left. All this leaves the field open for the predatory and kleptocratic political class to unleash the demons of ethnic politics.

Come to think of it, Zuma convinced 2.3 million South Africans to vote for MK Party. The MK wants to increase the power of traditional leaders, nationalise banks and expropriate land without compensation, dating South Africa’s “prolonged period of national shame” back to 1652, when the first Dutch settlement was established.

As for the EFF, it describes itself as anti-imperialist and inspired by Marxism. EFF also advocates taking land from white farmers and nationalising mines, banks and other strategic sectors, without compensation. It says that apartheid did not end in 1994, arguing that the democratic settlement left the economy in the hands of “white monopoly capital”, a message that resonates in a country where four in 10 adults are unemployed.

The bottom line is that as with the mainstream Congress Party in India, there is no real alternative to the ANC as a unifier, which still retains the loyalty of many voters for its leading role in overthrowing white minority rule and its progressive social welfare and black economic empowerment policies are credited by supporters with helping millions of black families out of poverty.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/south-a ... -politics/

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France and Ukraine Are Organizing a Military Bloc in African Countries
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 5, 2024
Unted World International



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently announced that he had opened embassies in 10 African countries. This is presented as a consequence of his long-term work to build a “strategic relationship” with Africa. A year ago, Dmitry Kuleba went on a tour to Africa. During May and June he visited Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, Ethiopia and some other countries. His trip apparently bore fruit, as several countries agreed to host Ukrainian diplomats.

Cover up with the Grain Deal

It is noteworthy that Kyiv’s interest in the continent increased sharply at the height of the conflict with Russia. Ukrainian and Western politicians largely attributed this to the fact that Kyiv needs to strengthen relations with Africa in order to continue supplying food to the continent through the Black Sea if Russia refuses the Grain Deal. Last summer, Russia withdrew from the initiative, saying that the West was not fulfilling the terms of the agreement. After this, Ukraine decided to send grain via alternative routes, but it ended up in Europe and was sold at speculative prices. Then farmers from many European countries, including Romania, Poland, France and Belgium, took to the streets to protest in order to stop the import of Ukrainian agricultural products.

Ukraine now officially exports grain along the rivers and along the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria, where grain ships are accompanied by naval ships of the two countries. Ukraine’s Special Representative of Ukraine for the Middle East and Africa Maxim Subh said that Kyiv is supplying 250,000 tons of grain to Sudan, which is in dire straits because of civil war. Against this background, there are interesting statements that special units of the Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence were sent to Khartoum to help the Armed Forces resist the rebels from the Rapid Support Forces and the Wagner Group allegedly helping them.

Ukrainians have been in Africa for a long time

This news caused outrage not only in African but also in Turkish media, since Sudan is a zone of Turkish interests. Ankara has close trade and strategic relations with Khartoum. In 2017, Erdogan signed an agreement with the Sudanese government to lease Suakin Island to Türkiye for 99 years, which is still in effect. The port of Suakin faces the Red Sea and is a sphere of direct interests of the Americans. In 2022, the Biden administration published a new National Security Strategy, which explicitly states that the Red Sea is an object of US national interest.

However, through official channels, in the context of the war with Russia, Ukraine has achieved little in two and a half years. The only concrete result was Zelensky’s invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to join negotiations on the Ukraine’s “peace formula.” However, Pretoria remains neutral on this issue and does not take sides. The country’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor suggested that the Ukrainian leadership involve Russia in discussing the “peace formula,” but the Zelensky administration simply did not respond to this proposal.

Last June, African countries published their peace plan to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which included achieving a negotiated peace, security guarantees, ensuring the sovereignty of states in accordance with the UN Charter, ensuring the movement of grains and fertilizers between both countries and a closer relationship with Africa. In many respects, Africa’s plan coincided with China’s peace plan. Xi Jinping, in a conversation with Cyril Ramaphosa, supported the idea of ​​African countries to send diplomatic delegations to Russia and Ukraine.

Russia’s diplomatic successes and Ukraine’s shadow activities in Africa

In July 2023, a Russia-Africa summit was held in Moscow, attended by the heads of South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Egypt, the new governments of Mali and Burkina Faso and many other leaders. In his address, Putin spoke about speculation by Ukraine and the West on the topic of grain. Only 3% of the grain exported from Ukraine reached African ports, the Russian President said then. For diplomatic reasons, the leaders of the countries left these data without comment, but the success of this summit can be judged by the further development of Moscow’s relations with African countries.

For example, South Africa is one of Russia’s traditional and largest partners. Since the start of the Special Military Operation, South Africa has not joined Western sanctions against Russia and has not supplied Kyiv with any weapons or military equipment. Also in 2023, the country, together with Russian and Chinese troops, conducted military drills in the Indian Ocean, which caused concern in Western countries. In addition, South Africa cooperates with Russia and other countries within the BRICS framework, which affects the success of the African state in the economy.

Many African countries, mostly free from Western influence, cooperate or are friendly towards Russia. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba spoke about this with dissatisfaction during his first African tour in 2022. He said that during his trip to Senegal, officials told him that Russia is not at war with Ukraine, but with Western countries, and that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.

One of Kuleba’s tasks at that moment was not only to establish diplomatic relations with African countries, in which Ukraine had not shown any interest decades before. It was from Senegal that Kyiv’s attempts to recruit Africans to help its army began in 2022. In Senegal, 36 candidates have registered to join the troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. When Dakar became aware of this, Yuriy Pivovarov, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Senegal, was immediately invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he confirmed the existence of the appeal. The Senegalese authorities asked to immediately stop any procedure for recruiting men from Senegalese territory.

Ukrainian embassies and French interests

Ukraine already had embassies in Senegal, as well as in Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia. Special Representative of Ukraine for the Middle East and Africa Maxim Subh officially opened new embassies in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Rwanda, Botswana, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Tanzania, Mauritania and Cameroon. Zelensky considers the opening of diplomatic missions his second African success, after a joint summit with representatives of South Africa last year.

It is noteworthy that one of the first embassies was opened in Côte d’Ivoire, a country known for its unwavering support for the French strategy. According to political scientist Alaa Darduri, Ukrainian embassies are not interested in establishing classical diplomatic relations. Kyiv’s goal is to prevent Moscow’s influence in Africa. “It’s no secret that Kyiv, like Côte d’Ivoire, is actively supported by France. This is one of the main reasons why Kyiv chose this country as the basis for developing its presence. This is the West’s strategy to form an anti-Russian and anti-Chinese bloc in Africa,” says the expert.

After Ukraine opened an embassy in Cote d’Ivoire, a document appeared on social networks about recruiting mercenaries from among the country’s residents to join the Ukrainian army. On May 24 Vladimir Zelensky and the President of Cote d’Ivoire Alassane Ouattara discussed the upcoming peace summit and the possible participation of the Ivorians in the military operation in Ukraine. Faced with harsh criticism, the Ukrainian embassy tried to refute this information and published a communique in which it denied responsibility for the incident and indirectly accused Russia of provocation.

Kyiv plans to open 20 embassies in Africa in total, that is, another 10 diplomatic missions should appear on the continent. According to another political analyst, Cassi Kouadio, Ukraine intends to make Côte d’Ivoire the main platform for deploying its strategic influence in West Africa. Ukraine’s attempts to involve Africans in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict correlate well with the strategy of Western countries. Previously, Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly stated that nothing can be ruled out regarding the issue of sending foreign military personnel to Kyiv.

Who besides Africa could suffer?

Ukraine’s opening of embassies in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania, which are French enclaves in West Africa, could signal France’s attempts to return to the continent after last year’s fiasco. And the goal here is not only to prevent Russia from strengthening its position on the continent and using Africans as cannon fodder in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The return of France is a threat to Africa’s stable and productive relations with traditional partners such as Türkiye.

Türkiye has a strong foothold in Africa and is developing equal partnerships and trade relations with the countries of the continent. Above was an example of cooperation between Türkiye and Sudan. But with Ethiopia, for example, where the Ukrainian embassy recently opened, Türkiye signed military agreements in 2021. There were reports that Ethiopia purchased Bayraktar-TB2 and ANKA-S drones from Türkiye. In general, Türkiye is trying to build respectful relations, especially with the countries of West and North Africa, where France is not abandoning attempts to strengthen its neocolonial ambitions.

African leaders also understand this and no longer intend to be pawns in someone else’s chess game and endanger the lives of Africans. Countries such as Türkiye and Russia have proven themselves to be reliable partners who keep their promises. Instead, France, whose interests are guided by Ukraine, most likely, in exchange for Paris’s help in supplying weapons and sending NATO instructors to the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, intends to further exploit the resources and peoples of Africa. This is why the countries of the continent prefer mutually beneficial partnerships to empty promises and pressure from France.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/ ... countries/

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CovertAction Bulletin: Congo “Coup”? What’s Imperialism Got To Do With It?
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - June 5, 2024 0



CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin
Support this broadcast: become a patreon!

On May 19, forces calling themselves the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo launched what appears to be a failed coup attempt, attacking the home of the Deputy Prime Minister of Economy Vital Kamerhe, as well as the Congo’s presidential palace, Palais de la Nation. The country’s Republican Guard forces were able to put down the attack within hours. Three of the 50 people arrested were U.S. citizens, and another U.S. citizen who reportedly led the operation was killed during the attack. Christian Malanga was the founder of the DC-based United Congolese Party, which has deep ties to the west and the United States.

We talk with Maurice Carney, co-founder and Executive Director of Friends of the Congo, about the events of May 19, the history of the deadliest conflict since World War II, the role that the US and Israel play in the 3Ds: Displacement, Death and Destruction, and the resurgence of the anti-imperialist movement.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... o-with-it/

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Yevkurov’s visit to the Sahel and the uranium hysteria of the West
June 5, 2024
Rybar

The Russian delegation led by Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Yunus-Bek Yevkurov visited Mali and Niger, where they held negotiations with the transitional presidents: Assimi Goita and Abdurakhman Chiani .

The topics of the meetings are the same as in December last year: strengthening security, cooperation in the defense sector and energy projects.

In addition to the President of Niger, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov discussed with Prime Minister Ali Mahamane Zeine increasing cooperation in the areas of combating cybercrime, energy, and gas and oil production.

Despite the absence of other comments, as reported by the American agency Bloomberg, perhaps these negotiations were conducted with the aim of taking control of Niger’s uranium deposits. Allegedly, Rosatom plans, as American journalists put it, to “seize” French uranium assets in Niger.

Western media previously disseminated information that uranium mined in the country was secretly exported to Iran. Soon the Prime Minister denied this information, especially since it makes no sense to sell resources secretly.

And unfortunately, Rosatom denied this information, although such a turn would make it possible to benefit from African diplomacy, especially against the backdrop of Western pressure on neighboring countries with uranium deposits.

One might think that the problem is the difficulty of transporting raw materials, since uranium cannot be transported through the territory of neighboring Benin ( the pro-American government will not allow this to be done) . But it is for this purpose that it is worth paying attention to Senegal , which is becoming more open to conversations with Russian companies and diplomats.

And the media campaign initiated by Bloomberg turned out to be only a tool of pressure on nuclear enterprises that maintain ties with Rosatom, despite Western sanctions.

https://rybar.ru/vizit-evkurova-v-sahel ... ya-zapada/

Google Translator

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Anti-Zuma protestors in Cape Town complaining of the junk status that South African debt became valued at during the Zuma presidency. The term “se poes” is a slang insult in Cape Town (7 April 2017).

The beginning of the end of the ANC
Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) on June 6, 2024 by Luke Sinwell (more by ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy)) | (Posted Jun 08, 2024)

The newly minted Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party led by former President Jacob Zuma quickly established itself in the elections as the third largest party in the country obtaining about 15% of the votes, following the Democratic Alliance’s 22% and the ANC’s 40%.

Those on the right who support unfettered market freedom fear the ANC will partner with the left-leaning Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF—which obtained about 9.5% of the votes) and the MK (much more on this below). But, a coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA—the historically white party) is perhaps the greatest threat to those who seek historical redress.

The latter would crush existing hopes for redistribution of wealth and cement the misguided sense that we live in a “post-racial” world—like the one that republicans in the U.S. strive for where the past must be forgotten. The wounds that were inflicted by colonial-imperialist powers during colonialism and apartheid would likely be brushed aside.

We are consistently asked about the most “market-friendly” coalition, but one must ask: for whom? Those at the top or the bottom? South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. In 2023, Statistics South Africa found that 18.2 million people experience extreme poverty (living on less than US$1.9 per day)—it is highly unlikely that the trickle-down theory will work to their advantage.

Ramaphosa promised an end to corruption and a “new dawn”, but what we got was a new darkness. Our lights have literally been shut off often on a daily basis not only in poor communities who are disproportionately effected, but the middle class and big business has also been hit. Unemployment stands officially at a touch below 33%, but many have it at 50%. Even water runs dry in some suburbs and while South Africa used to have amongst the safest drinking water in the world, one now questions whether to quench one’s thirst from the tap, or to buy bottled water. Excessive inflation rates as well as high loan premiums for housing bonds means that the middle class too has been drowning.

The ANC’s vote dropped slightly in previous national elections from about 62% in 2014 to nearly 58% in 2019, but plummeted to just over 40% last week in what has been widely described as a humbling if not an utter humiliation for the former liberation movement.

On Sunday, the former trade unionist and anti-apartheid activist, President Cyril Ramaphosa, took centre stage as the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announced the results of South Africa’s elections. The IEC chairperson fumbled on his words when he introduced Ramaphosa on stage saying that the president was “extinguished” rather than “distinguished.” All jokes aside this election cements the beginning of the end of the ANC.

Or does it?

The party which came to power on the back of the liberation movement against apartheid promised “a better life for all” in 1994. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was intended as a state-driven policy to improve the lives of the black majority, but the 1996 “class project” adopted under the leadership of former President Thabo Mbeki rolled back the state.

Neoliberalism became ANC policy. White capital surged as South Africa was able to re-enter the global economy, as the working class experienced increased levels of poverty and unemployment.

There are a few black diamond billionaires who benefitted from Black Economic Empowerment including Ramaphosa, but this doesn’t sit well with the vast majority of poor people many of whom understandably feel as if they have been forgotten especially for the 9 million people still living in shacks.

South Africa’s Constitution is much touted, but it reinforces private property rights. Within this misguided framework, the land which was dispossessed from the black majority must be bought back for its market value. The white minority continues to own nearly 80% of productive land and about half of the country’s land overall, making the question of land expropriation without compensation a key item of contention.

The Making of a Martyr
Having spent a decade as a political prisoner on Robben Island from the age of 17, former President Jacob Zuma went into exile in 1975 before rising up through the ANC’s leadership ladder eventually becoming the Deputy President of the country between 1999 and 2005. The fact that he had been charged with corruption in an arms deal and was recently acquitted from a highly publicised charge of rape in 2006 did not prevent members of the party from electing him President of the ANC.

At Zuma’s rape trial he famously testified that he took a shower after having sex to avoid contracting HIV/AIDS. Zuma supporters were seen outside of the courtroom burning pictures of Khwezi (who accused Zuma of rape) and in one instance his supporters were seen stoning a woman who they apparently mistook as his accuser.

Zuma’s ascent to ANC Presidency at the ANC National Conference in Limpopo in December 2007 happened with the backing of the left-wing coalition of COSATU and the SACP.

Disgruntled with what he viewed as the ANC’s flawed decision to oust Thabo Mbeki (whose term was set to expire in April 2009) in favour of Zuma, Terror Lekota and others formed the first breakaway party from the ANC called COPE in 2008 which earned about 7.5% in the national elections. So neither MK, nor the EFF is the first breakaway.

A product of the ANC, Zuma is seen by many as a “man of the people”, and yet his nine years of “state capture” (or predatory capitalism) from 2009 to 2018 when he was president cost the country up to R500 billion. A self-described socialist, at the end of 2017 he introduced a programme of “radical economic transformation” which was supposedly aimed at redistributing resources to the poor and working class.

Ramaphosa was elected the president of the ANC at their 54th annual conference in December 2017 thereby ending Zuma’s term as president of the ANC, thus leading him to be recalled as president of the country prior to the 2019 elections. This set the foundation from which Zuma’s ardent supporters viewed Ramaphosa as their arch enemy.

In their press conference on Monday this week, Julius Malema—the Commander in Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—was asked about his own party’s decline of about 350,000 votes between 2019 and 2024. For him, it had to do with Zuma who—as it happens—he had campaigned for in the 2009 elections even going so far as to famously state that he would “kill for Jacob Zuma.”

Malema reflected at the press conference:

The people who were supporting President Zuma… [t]hey had no other political home because they didn’t want Cyril so they ended up coming to us… when it came to voting they said… “the closer to what we want is the EFF.” … In 2019 … we get 350,000 votes… in Kwa-Zulu Natal… We don’t know where those numbers came from. Now there is an explanation. Those people were never ours. They were President Zuma’s people. So it’s good they found their home.

Under Ramaphosa’s government, the Zondo State Capture Commission was established thus further pitting him against Zuma—who was pitched as the king-pin of state capture corruption. When Zuma was sentenced to jail in 2021 after refusing to testify at the Zondo Commission to answer questions regarding charges of corruption and cronyism, protests and riots spread starting in KZN, Zuma’s stronghold, and then the rest of the country leaving more than 300 people dead and costing R20 billion in damages to 161 malls and nearly a dozen warehouses.

In the press conference on Monday, Malema referred to a conversation he had with Ramaphosa where he reportedly said, “you can’t do what you are doing. You are going to make him [Zuma] a hero…. Even after taking him out of jail they [ANC] still go on to harass him.” From this perspective, the ANC solidified the sense among voters that Zuma is a kind of martyr.

However, he is false messiah and although there are certain benefits that the EFF brings to those who seek left-wing policies, Malema too is not a saviour of the working class.

Whither a Left Alternative?
Following the Marikana Massacre on 16 August 2012 which witnessed 34 mineworkers gunned down by automatic weapons under the auspices of the ANC, Julius Malema launched in 2013 the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). In a symbolic gesture, this ‘launch’ happened below the exact mountain where the shootings took place. The left-leaning party appeared at face value to have a radical economic agenda.

They even brought one of the leading woman activists in Marikana, Primrose Sonti, to parliament so that she could take forward the struggle of the mineworkers and the community who lived across the road from Lonmin platinum in shacks often without running water or electricity. The EFF spoke the language of the people, wearing mineworkers’ hats and red overalls. Many of us used to love watching how the party disrupted parliament on the one hand while on the other spoke truth to white supremacy and capitalism.

If anything, the people of Marikana had a loud and consistent “voice” in Parliament, and yet few changes have been evident in the lives of ordinary people in Marikana. The women I spoke to in 2012 who were standing alongside their mineworker husbands and running from the police raids in Nkaneng informal settlement, still live in shacks without electricity.

The EFF though has arguably been most effective on university campuses where it leds most Student Representative Councils (SRCs) thus reaffirming that the party has a strong base from which to flourish.

One might suggest that the vast majority of voters still want the ANC in power, but a different ANC—and perhaps even one that nationalises mines and banks as is written in the manifestos of both MK and EFF.

But, the MK is not the way to go for those who seek a left alternative. It claims in its manifesto to be committed to radical redistribution and to be run by the will of the people, but the experience of Jacob Zuma (the main engine of the party) suggests that this is mainly rhetoric. Early this year, Zuma addressed 3000 MK supporters whereby he opposed same-sex marriage which he has previously referred to as a “disgrace to the nation and to God.”

In part, as a response to rising calls for nationalisation, capital attempted to promote a new party, Rise Mzansi, but it failed only capturing less than one half of a percent of the votes in the elections despite the funding it was given by one of the richest families in South Africa, the Oppenheimer’s.

The MK and EFF have been relatively effective at building grassroots electoral machinery, but the independent left (those who fall outside of mainstream political parties and outside the ANC’s alliance), have been utterly incapable of demonstrating organisational capacity in this regard. While the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) stood proudly in the 2014 national elections using the platform to push forward pro-working-class politics, they obtained just over 8000 votes and could not obtain a seat in parliament.

Many placed hope in the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (“NUMSA Moment”) which broke from the alliance with the ANC in December 2013. The SRWP (Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party) which was formed to provide a socialist political home for workers and the unemployed also faired incredibly poorly in the 2019 elections obtaining about 20,000 votes despite it being NUMSA’s (which had an impressive trade union membership of 350,000 at the time) brainchild.

No credible alternative to build people’s power from below, uniting trade unions and social movements to make a wide set of demands within a socialist framework existed on the ballot in this election. This is a symptom of the independent left in South Africa which is in disarray. Ngoisation, whereby movements are watered down by organisations or academics with a bit of resources to throw for transport and pocket money, continues to be en vogue.

Following this year’s election outcome, the suggestion amongst some who I have spoken to informally is that we should stand candidates in the local government elections of 2026 to avoid a similar fate.

But, we don’t know what the people are thinking, for example, including those who did not vote at a moment when the percentage of voter turnout is the lowest it has ever been during our 30 years of democracy. We need to go back to the drawing board. We need to sit and listen to the people before propping up the next workers’ party or socialist electoral front which will, if history is anything to go by, in all likelihood have a very thin support base.

This week’s commentary by politicians, analysts and journalists mirrors this appraisal. But the assumption that because people voted, their voices have been heard is shortsighted and dangerous terrain for those who seek fundamental change.

We require a deeper, more robust democracy, not one where people vote every 5 years and then sit back in the hope that the new configuration of power within parliament will hand down some crumbs to make our lives slightly better.

What is clear is that the rules, norms and boundaries in which decisions are made at the ballot box, at public meetings and in the streets must be reimagined on the terms of the people themselves. Without this, elected officials will continue to break attractive promises. They will speak the language of the people as a means to pacify and control, thus denying present and future generations in South Africa our economic and political freedom.

https://mronline.org/2024/06/08/the-beg ... f-the-anc/



SACP Political Bureau statement
Originally published: SACP Political Bureau statement on June 5, 2024 (more by SACP Political Bureau statement) (Posted Jun 08, 2024)

The South African Communist Party (SACP) Political Bureau held a special meeting on Wednesday, 5 June 2024, in Johannesburg. This sitting was preceded by a meeting of the National Office Bearers with the Secretariat as the core on Monday, 3 June 2024, a day after the Independent Electoral Commission announced and declared the results of the May 2024 national and provincial government elections as free and fair. As part of the consultative process, the Political Bureau was extended to and attended by SACP provincial secretaries and chairpersons.

The SACP wishes to take this opportunity to thank all South Africans who exercised their democratic right to vote and to express the Party’s sincere gratitude to all the people, with the working class being the majority, who voted for our ally, the African National Congress. The SACP campaigned for the ANC across the length and breadth of our country within the framework of our ANC-led Alliance, its collective achievements, reconfiguration engagements and jointly consulted manifesto.

The votes received by the ANC maintain it as the largest party by electoral support in our country and reaffirm its outright majority in five provinces: Limpopo with 73.3 per cent, Eastern Cape with 62.16 per cent, North West with 57.73 per cent, Free State with 51.87 per cent and Mpumalanga 51.15 per cent. This is the will of the people. The SACP will defend it in advancing working-class interests across the board and considering the way forward nationally and in provinces where the ANC, although remaining the largest party by electoral support, did not secure the 50 per cent plus one required to form a majority government.

Matters of principle, guided by the interests of the working class, maintaining strategic consistency
We have campaigned against the anti-worker neo-liberal and corrupt state capture networks.

To maintain strategic consistency, the SACP is against seeking a coalition arrangement with the right-wing, DA-led anti-ANC neo-liberal forces. The core of the DA-led neo-liberal forces, highly supported by dominant sections of capital, mainly the white bourgeoisie whose roots can be traced to the era of colonial and apartheid oppression of the black majority, organised itself into the so-called multi-party charter. This grouping also received support from western foundations.

In the same vein, the SACP is against seeking a coalition arrangement with the MKP, whose origins can be traced back to factionalism, the corruption of state capture and resistance to accountability, as outlined in the report of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture and related Constitutional Court judgments.

Neo-liberal economic restructuring, which includes retrenchments—those announced during the May 2024 election campaign period in the mining and other sectors included, opposition to the national minimum wage, attacks on our collective bargaining framework and resistance to National Health Insurance, among others, has severely impacted the workers and impoverished populations of our country. These forces remain arrogant and anti-working class as evidenced in the DA’s reckless utterances.

The industrial-scale looting under state capture crippled many of our state-owned enterprises, public entities and financial resources, negatively impacting the capacity of our state to serve the people. The factional conduct and ethnic nationalism of those driving the MKP have negatively impacted our own, ANC-led movement, and the ANC’s electoral performance.

The votes and number of seats from the May 2024 national and provincial government elections offer coalition permutations, with the features of a developmental and transformation purpose-driven ANC-led Government of National Unity, excluding both the DA and the MKP. The SACP will actively pursue this to become the outcome of the ANC-headed Alliance coalition engagement process—both within the Alliance and publicly through campaigning and mobilisation of the working class. This strategic task, outlined in our programme adopted during the July 2022 Fifteenth National Congress of our Party, is crucial in defending and advancing the interests of the working class against its strategic adversaries.

The strategic adversaries of the working class include the neo-liberal and “looting” class networks, as well as fugitives from justice who have profited from state capture and fled South Africa to evade accountability. Intensifying efforts to track down and hold accountable those who were involved in and benefitted from the proceeds of state capture corruption and fraud must be a central component of the programmatic basis of the coalition arrangements that our movement should pursue.

In pursuing the ideal scenario under the circumstances and in the interests of the working class, the SACP will prioritise governance stability over the instability often associated with local government coalitions.

The coalition associated instability in local government has hindered effective governance and delivery of public goods and services and must be avoided, through clear guarantees. We will also insist on accountability and the interests of the people, especially the majority—the working class.

The interests of the working class encompass priorities such as large-scale employment creation to resolve the unemployment crisis through industrialisation and structural economic transformation, poverty eradication, the implementation of a developmental and transformative macroeconomic policy to achieve these goals alongside other working-class interests.

A more caring social policy, including a decisive advance towards a universal basic income grant and the rollout of the National Health Insurance to ensure quality healthcare for all, form part of crucial working-class interests.

The protection of workers’ rights and other achievements, along with addressing challenges impacting the delivery of public goods and services, including infrastructure development and maintenance in municipalities, should be integral components of the programmatic basis of the coalition arrangements that our movement should seek.

Rolling back austerity measures and other neo-liberal policy prescriptions will be crucial for achieving an economic turnaround and ensuring the provision of essential social services, such as quality healthcare. This must be included in the programmatic basis of coalition arrangements.

Internationally, we remain firm in our unwavering support for the people of Palestine against the genocide on them and expropriation by the apartheid Israeli settler state.

Maintaining the entire progressive thrust of South Africa’s international relations and co-operation policy, including deepening alignment with the BRICS Plus community of states and solidarity support for Cuba against imperialist aggression, should be upheld as part of the programmatic basis of the coalition arrangements that our movement should advocate for.

The Independent Electoral Commission
The Political Bureau commended the IEC but expressed deep concern regarding the issues that affected the elections from the commission’s side.

The concerning issues include major technological breakdowns, which contributed to delays in the voting process and system downtime disruption of the counting process. An investigation into why these issues occurred is essential.

The investigation must include examining where the IEC sourced the technology it used. If it was sourced from another country, the investigation must assess that country’s attitude and its current relations with ours at present and the implications these may have had.

The investigation is crucial to prevent future disruptions and secure the credibility of our elections, safeguarding our democratic national sovereignty.

Detailed assessment
The Political Bureau meeting focused on the immediate question of coalition arrangements in view of the imperative for a new government to be established in line with the tight constitutional and electoral law timeframes.

The next step, going forward, will be an in-depth assessment of the May 2024 national and provincial government elections, considering all variables that played a part in the results. This will guide the enhancement of the programmatic basis of the coalition arrangements that we wish to see our movement pursuing.

The in-depth assessment will also inform the direction that the SACP will take at its Special National Congress later this year, as well as at the 16th National Congress of the Party in 2027, regarding future elections.

Issued by the South African Communist Party,
Founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa.

https://mronline.org/2024/06/08/sacp-po ... statement/

[blindpig]

Shell’s Exit From Nigeria
June 17, 2024

Environmental campaigners say the oil giant should not be allowed to escape culpability for the environmental and societal damage it has caused in the Niger Delta.


Man shows the crude oil that has eroded the banks of the creek through his village of Goi in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta, May 2019. (Milieudefensie, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Andy Rowell and James Marriott
Open Democracy

Nigerian activists believe Shell’s apparent end to its 87-year operation in the country is an effort to avoid its legal responsibilities while holding onto the potentially profitable side of the business.

In January, the oil giant revealed it had “reached an agreement to sell its Nigerian onshore subsidiary” to Renaissance, a consortium of four Nigerian oil firms and one based in Switzerland.

But despite the $2.8 billion deal, Shell will effectively still own part of the business and will continue to bankroll Renaissance’s onshore exploration in Nigeria going forward.

The company’s press statement confirmed it will loan the new buyers up to $1.2 billion to help them buy their stake in the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC).

It will also provide Renaissance with “financing of up to $1.3 billion over future years.” This will fund its “share of specific decommissioning and restoration costs” and part of the development of gas resources for NLNG, a company producing natural gas in Nigeria to export to global markets, in which Shell will retain a 25.6 percent interest.

Renaissance, meanwhile, will take over responsibility for dealing with spills, theft and sabotage, as well as Shell’s ongoing contributions to the remediation of past environmental damage.

Campaigners have told openDemocracy that Shell should not be allowed to escape culpability for the environmental and societal damage it has caused in Nigeria.

Celestine Akbopari, a long-term environmental activist from Nigeria’s Ogoni region, said:

“Shell has to restore our environment and lost livelihoods before selling anything. Our environment should be restored to the level Shell met it.”

Akbopari believes the millions of oil barrels spilt in the Niger Delta over almost nine decades have significantly worsened his community’s finances. There were more than 10,000 oil spills between 2011 and 2022 alone, according to the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency.

“Our people enjoy their fishing and farming business but can’t do that anymore,” Akbopari said.

“In a situation where there is a complete absence of government as we presently have in Nigeria, it is monies we get from our fishing and farming business that we use in sending our children to school, provide health care and pay other bills.

“Now, we can’t even do that and we watch our children and dependants die of hunger and sickness because of poverty.”

Civil society and community opposition to Shell has been widespread in Nigeria since the early 1990s. Many have been angered by the pollution the company has emitted in the country, as well as its burning of natural gas — a practice associated with oil extraction that can save an energy firm money but is associated with serious health complications for those living nearby.


Gas flare in the Niger Delta, 2013. (Chebyshev1983, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Public discontent only grew after the executions of the Ogoni Nine, a group of activists who opposed Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta and alleged exploitation of the Ogoni people.

The activists were sentenced to death at a trial by Nigeria’s military in 1995, having been accused of inciting the murders of four Ogoni chiefs who disagreed with the strategy of their organisation, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People.

Shell had a “watching brief” at the trial, which was widely discredited even at the time – with then U.K. Prime Minister John Major describing it as “fraudulent.”

Several key witnesses have since claimed Shell actors and government officials “bribed” them with offers of money, a house and jobs at the oil company to say the activists had been involved in the murders. The oil giant has always denied these accusations, as well as claims it colluded with the Nigerian military on the trial.

In the decades since, Ogoni communities have sought justice and tried to hold the oil giant accountable for the role they believe it played in the activists’ deaths.


Extinction Rebellion activists drop banner —Shell to hell / Ogoni people are not forgotten — at Shell’s Berlin offices, Nov. 10, 2023. (Stefan Müller, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Shell, meanwhile, has tried to distance itself from its Nigerian subsidiary with a public relations response driven not by staff in Lagos or Port Harcourt but by its London head office, which suggested there was a problem with one local branch in Africa, but not a larger issue — a practice it began even before the trial.

In a 1993 letter, Shell said it did “not operate using a top-down management approach,” adding: “Each operating company not only has its own legal identity, but also responsibility for its own day to day operation.”

‘Legal Gymnastics’

Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake believes Shell has always responded to the backlash against its operations in Nigeria with a focus on “damage limitation” rather than sincerity.

This alleged strategy of reputation protection is seemingly present in the oil giant’s court cases. Back in 2009, Shell agreed to pay $15.5 million to the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, who was one of the Ogoni Nine. In doing so, the company walked away from the case denying liability. Before settling, Shell had made repeated attempts to get the case thrown out.


The Shell Centre headquarters in London, 2019. (Reading Tom, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Other court cases have been brought against Shell over the deaths of the Ogoni Nine — so far without success. But another group of activists won an unrelated battle with the company in the Netherlands in May 2021, in which Shell was found liable for causing dangerous climate change worldwide and ordered by District Court of the Hague to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45 percent within 10 years.

The historic verdict, which could pave the way for more prosecutions of Shell and other big international polluters, was brought by Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie, in Dutch) and six other organisations and 17,000 co-plaintiffs.

Milieudefensie sent a letter to Shell’s board of directors in April 2022, calling for urgent action to comply with the 2021 verdict. The NGO warned about personal liability risks resulting from a failure to act. In July of that year, Shell appealed the decision.

Shell’s Nigerian operations have also been the subject of lawsuits in the U.K.

The company agreed to pay £55 million to settle a case brought by 15,600 members of the Bodo community after a massive oil spill in the area in 2014. Leigh Day, the British law firm that represented the community, told openDemocracy that Shell had admitted some fault, but disputed the amount of oil spilt.


View of the Niger Delta from space; land is north, at top of frame. (NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

And last November, London’s High Court ruled that 13,000 farmers and fishers from the Ogale and Bille communities can sue Shell over chronic pollution of their water sources and destruction of their way of life. A report in The Guardian at the time said Shell denied directly owing the claimants, though it said its Nigerian subsidiary, the SPDC, had accepted responsibility for the spills it caused and compensated affected parties where required.

Leigh Day, which is also representing the Ogale and Bille communities, issued a statement after Shell announced the SPDC’s sale to Renaissance, saying its “clients are concerned about how the proposed sale could affect their claim.” The law firm has since told openDemocracy that the details of the sale still remain unclear.

In its statement, Leigh Day added:

“It would be unconscionable for Shell to pack up its onshore operations in Nigeria without cleaning up its mess and paying compensation…

“We consider that Shell, having made billions of pounds over decades from extracting oil resources from Nigeria, should fulfil its legal responsibilities and not leave behind an environmental catastrophe as it seeks to exit the Niger Delta.”

Renaissance, which is based in Nigeria, will likely be immune from lawsuits in the Netherlands or the U.K. — one reason why activists and civil society organisations have called on the Nigerian government to stop the sale.

Last month, international and Nigerian NGOs, including Amnesty International and Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, wrote to the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, urging it “to refuse regulatory approval” for the sale.

The letter added:

“Shell should not be permitted to use legal gymnastics to escape its responsibilities for cleaning up its widespread legacy of pollution.

“The sale… should not be permitted unless local communities have been fully consulted; the environmental pollution caused to date by SPDC has been fully assessed; and funds have been placed by SPDC in escrow sufficient to guarantee that clean-up costs will be covered.”

Shell did not answer openDemocracy’s questions, with a spokesperson instead directing us to a press release and FAQ section about the sale on its website.

Cindy Baxter, who has campaigned against the oil industry for decades, told openDemocracy:

“Nearly 30 years after Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were hung for protesting Shell’s pollution, the Ogoni people are still fighting it in the courts. Before this corporation leaves the country, it must clean up — and pay for its environmental crimes.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/17/s ... m-nigeria/

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Quelle Surprise: NYT Piece on Nigeria’s “Worst Economic Crisis in Decades” Completely Ignores Its Disastrous CBDC Experiment
Posted on June 18, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

The world’s largest live central bank digital currency (CBDC) program has so far been a destructive flop. And that is probably the last thing the editors of the New York Times want its readers to know.

Two years ago, Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy and before the COVID-19 pandemic was hotly tipped to become Africa’s first trillion-dollar economy. By the end of this year, it is (according to a recent IMF forecast) expected to have dropped to fourth place in the continental rankings, behind South Africa, Egypt and Algeria. This follows years of slow growth, currency crises, poor governance, fuel shortages (in Africa’s largest oil producing country) and double-digit inflation. In recent months, citizens have resorted to looting food warehouses as almost half the population of Africa’s most populous nation suffer from hunger.

A new piece in the New York Times, titled “Nigeria Faces Its Worst Economic Crisis in Decades”, paints a vivid picture:

People in Africa’s most populous nation are suffering as the price of food, fuel and medicine has skyrocketed out of reach for many…

The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies…

A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted.

But right now, their resourcefulness is being stretched to the limit…

More than 87 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, live below the poverty line — the world’s second-largest poor population after India, a country seven times its size. And punishing inflation means poverty rates are expected to rise still further this year and next, according to the World Bank.

So, what are the root causes of Nigeria’s constantly worsening crisis? According to the “Gray Lady”, there are two main drivers, both of which can be blamed on the country’s relatively new President Bola Tinubu: his government’s partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of Nigeria’s already weak naira currency, which together have caused major price rises, particularly for basics such as food. From the Times‘ article:

Until recently, the government subsidized [largely imported] petroleum, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a neglectful and predatory government. Successive presidents have pledged to remove the subsidy, which drains a hefty chunk of government revenue — and later backtracked fearing mass unrest.

Bola Tinubu, who was elected Nigeria’s president last year, initially followed through.

“It was a necessary action for my country not to go bankrupt,” Mr. Tinubu said in April, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.

Instead, many Nigerians are going bankrupt — or working multiple jobs to stay afloat…

The government has twice devalued the naira in the past year, trying to enable it to float more freely and attract foreign investment. The upshot: It’s lost nearly 70 percent of its value against the dollar.

Nigeria cannot produce enough food for its growing population; food imports rise 11 percent annually. The currency devaluation caused those imports — already expensive because of high tariffs — to explode in price.

“A Dead Economy”

On the one hand, this is a pretty accurate depiction of recent developments in Nigeria. But it ignores everything that happened before Tinubu came to office 15 months ago. As a government spokesman said in response to the Times article, Tinubu inherited a “dead economy,” which is also largely true. Inflation was already above 20% and economic growth was stalling. One reason for that is the central bank’s disastrous flirtation with central bank digital currency (CBDC), which culminated in a demonetisation program that upended economic activity for almost the entire first quarter of 2023.

In mid-December 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria began calling in old 200-, 500- and 1,000-naira notes in a bid to mop up excess cash, rein in inflation, combat rising insecurity, curb vote buying and further “entrench” a cashless economy. But the central bank failed to print nearly enough new high-denomination notes to replace the old ones, leading to an acute shortage of cash in a still heavily cash-based economy. In the space of just two months (Dec 2022–Feb 2023), cash in circulation declined by almost 70%, per official data from the CBN.

As in India’s 2016 demonetisation program, businesses went bust. Lives were ruined. But as we noted at the time, the resulting economic pain was seen by the central bank as a necessary evil, a wee psychological nudge to push Nigerians into finally abandoning cash and embracing digital payment options:

Demonetisation may well break some public resistance toward the CNB’s eNaira but it will be at huge social and economic cost. As in India, that cost will be borne disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable. As even the Associated Press reports, analysts worry the initiative will “hurt” daily transactions that people and businesses make, particularly given that Nigeria’s digital payment systems, including the eNaira, are often unreliable:

“The policy is intended to cause discomfort, to move you from cash to cashless because they (the central bank) have said they want to make it uncomfortable and expensive for you to hold cash,” economic analyst Kalu Aja said. “That is a positive for the CBN (because) the more discomforting they are able to achieve, the more people can move.”

The CBN’s prime objective in culling cash was to leave people with little choice but to use digital payment methods — ideally the CBN’s floundering digital currency, the eNaira. Among its list of reasons for pursuing demonetisation, published in October 2022, the CBN said the redesign of the currency will “help deepen our drive to entrench a cashless economy as it will be complemented by increased minting of our eNaira.” Also in October, the central bank’s governor, Godwin Emefiele, said: “The destination, as far as I am concerned, is to achieve a 100% cashless economy in Nigeria”.

That didn’t happen, for a number of reasons: first, tens of millions of Nigerians cannot even use digital payments since they do not own a smart phone or have access to the Internet. Roughly half of the country is unbanked. In other words, many, if not most, Nigerians had no possible means of using digital payment methods even if they had wanted to. They were given an impossible choice from day-one. Many of them took to the streets to protest the restrictions and cash shortages. Banks were vandalised; some were even burnt to the ground.

Those that could switch to digital payments ended up swamping the limited digital payment networks available. Put simply, the infrastructure, including the eNaira itself, was not ready to take up the slack. Many digital payments failed, fuelling even more chaos, frustration and resentment. In February, Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled the demonetisation program unconstitutional, calling for it to be postponed due to the amount of chaos and hardship it was generating. A month later, the CBN finally obeyed the court order and put back into circulation the old high denomination bills.

But the damage had already been done, both at the micro and macro level.

A Policy Without a “Human Face”

“Nigeria’s economic growth slowed to just 2.3% y/y in Q1 as the damaging effects of a botched demonetisation process more than offset an easing of the drag from the oil sector,” noted the UK-based independent economic research firm Capital Economics in May 2023. “With the rise in oil output likely to have run its course and fuel subsidy cuts as well as a likely devaluation of the naira set to hurt activity elsewhere, the economy will continue to struggle over the coming quarters.”

In other words, while the new Tinubu government’s devaluation and fuel subsidy cuts massively exacerbated economic conditions in Nigeria, the role played by the central bank’s demonetisation program in destabilising the already fragile economy should not be ignored.

As in India, the hardest hit were the country’s poorest communities and smallest businesses. Nigeria’s roughly 39 million micro, small and medium-size enterprises, contributing 46% of national GDP, depend on cash from sales. When 70% of the country’s cash flow suddenly dried up, they struggled to stay afloat. Many had no choice but to allow customers to “Buy Now, Pay Later” to maintain their operations. A leading macro indicator, the Stanbic IBTC Bank PMI for Nigeria, fell to its worst level since the pandemic, signalling a sharp deterioration in country-wide business activity in the first quarter of 2023.

The following words by Yakubu Maikyau, the president of Nigeria’s Bar Association, vividly capture the extent of the damage:

The manner in which the CBN proceeded with the implementation almost without regard for the apparent sufferings of the people as could be seen across the country began to raise questions as to the true motive of the cash redesign policy. Nigerians did not have to die and neither should there be any loss of properties on account of the implementation of a Naira redesign policy if properly undertaken.

Unfortunately, and sadly so, that was our experience. Nigerians died. Properties were destroyed and lost. There is hunger in many homes as people are unable to use their hard-earned funds which they deposited in the banks because of the apparent high handedness of the policy. The rural economy was stifled. Economic activities have dwindled, many farmers engaged in dry season farming have not been able to cultivate their farmlands – only about one out of every ten hectares of rice fields have been cultivated in most parts of North-western States. Food security has come under threat as the cash crunch has affected the ability of rural farmers to engage in farming activities. Simply put, the implementation of the policy appears not to have a human face.

Another legacy of the Nigerian central bank’s demonetisation program is increased distrust in both the banking system and the central bank itself. Which is ironic given that lack of trust was one of the biggest obstacles to take-up of the eNaira in the first place. Indeed, in early January this year — nine full months after the demonetisation program was suspended — Bloomberg reported that Nigerians were once again hoarding cash “amid memories of the failed official campaign around this time last year to demonetize high-value naira notes.”

Another largely ignored legacy of this saga was the sacking, arrest and imprisonment of the man behind both the eNaira and the demonetisation program, the CBN’s governor, Godwin Emefiele. Although he was eventually released on bail after spending roughly half a year in a real-life Nigerian jail, Emefiele faces a host of charges including misuse of authority, receiving bribes, accepting gifts via intermediaries, engaging in corrupt practices, obtaining property fraudulently, and providing improper benefits to his associate.

Not a single shred of this story gets a mention in the New York Times article. Neither the acronym “CBDC” nor the word “demonetisation” make an appearance. It is almost as if all of the problems now affecting Nigeria’s economy began the moment the new government took over. While Tinubu’s reckless energy and currency reforms are probably the two main catalysts for Nigeria’s latest economic woes, there are other factors that certainly deserve a mention — and none more so than the central bank’s adoption of the eNaira and its decision just over a year later to remove 70% of the cash from the economy.

Imagine an alternative article title:

“First Large Country to Fully Adopt a CBDC Is Now Suffering Its Worst Economic Crisis in Decades.”

That is not a headline you are likely to see in the New York Times, The Economist or The Financial Times, or any other major Western media. But it is true. Nigeria was the first large country to fully adopt a CBDC at the national level. And its economy is now suffering its worst crisis in decades. The spectacular rise and fall of the eNaira and the damage inflicted by the CBN’s demonetisation program have been studiously ignored by the mainstream press in the West, while other central banks are presumably watching and learning.

As in India, the broad economic results of demonetisation were disastrous — though in both cases use of digital payments did surge afterwards, albeit much more so in India. And that was probably the main underlying goal behind both programs anyway. Witness the Reserve Bank of India’s casual advice to the more than a billion people caught up in the chaos after it had nullified 86% of the country’s currency from one day to the next (emphasis my own):

While these efforts are afoot, [the] public are encouraged to switch over to alternative modes of payment, such as pre-paid cards, Rupay/Credit/Debit cards, mobile banking, internet banking. All those for whom banking accounts under Jan Dhan Yojana are opened and cards are issued are urged to put them to use. Such usage will alleviate the pressure on the physical currency and also enhance the experience of living in the digital world.

This prompted a seething rebuke from Indian economist Jayati Ghosh:

Statements like this make one wonder whether the RBI is living only in the digital world. Surely the worthies in that institution have some idea of the conditions under which banking and money exchange occur for most Indians?… The facile assumption that moving to e-banking is just a matter of personal choice, which appears to underlie some of these arguments, is completely mistaken.

Central bankers may not inhabit an exclusively digital world just yet, but it does seem to be the general direction of travel they have us moving in. CDBCs are being developed and piloted in dozens of countries around the world with the help and support of global banks, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, payment card companies, BlackRock and even the SWIFT payment system. As we have noted a number of times and as a new op-ed in Forbes by the Cato Institute’s Norbert Michel echoes, CBDCs are ultimately intended as instruments of centralised control:

As my colleague Nick Anthony points out, 10 countries and the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union have already launched their own CBDC. Hong Kong and 39 other countries have official CBDC pilot programs, and at least 65 other countries are now researching CBDCs.

CBDCs are very real, and very dangerous.

No think tank has done more than the Cato Institute to explain the risks and supposed benefits of CBDCs, and nobody at Cato has done more than Nick. In fact, he just returned from the Oslo Freedom Forum, where he demonstrated the new Human Rights Foundation CBDC tracker.

Nick also has a new CBDC book that will be released this Tuesday, titled Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money.
…
CBDC advocates love to talk about putting money directly into people’s wallets, but few like to talk about the flip side, where central bankers stop people from spending money. If you don’t believe me, here’s a clip of an assistant governor of the Malaysian central bank trying like crazy to avoid answering whether the central bank would “frustrate” individuals’ payments. (For the record, some government officials boast about having this power.)

In Nigeria, the eNaira, now in its third year of existence, is still floundering. “Slow” is the word the IMF — which helped roll out the eNaira — recently used to describe the CBDC’s adoption rate to date. “Since the eNaira’s launch, the volume of executed transactions has reached 854,512 transactions, mostly from consumers to merchants, with a total value of N29.3 billion,” the Washington-based fund said in its 2024 country report for Nigeria. That works out as a paltry $61 million.

In May 2023, the IMF disclosed that 98.5% of the 13 million eNaira so far downloaded wallets are inactive and the average value of transactions was 923 million naira per week. That’s around $622,000. The world’s largest live CBDC program (to date) has so far been a complete dud despite the harmful efforts of the central bank and former Buhari government to impose it on the populace. Even after all that has happened, most Nigerians still either cannot or do not want to use the eNaira. And that is probably the last thing the editors (and board) of the New York Times want its readers to know.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... iment.html

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"White Anger"
June 18, 14:39



Recolonization of Africa by CIA methods

In November 1959, the CIA created a special African section. According to British researcher Susan Williams, the CIA's mission in Africa was to ensure the sustainability of American hegemony on the continent by any means available.

Career CIA officers and agents have operated on the continent since the founding of this key US political intelligence agency in 1947.

In his book White Malice: The CIA and the Secret Recolonization of Africa, Williams, through the prism of a detailed study of the tactics and methods of CIA intervention in the situation in Ghana and the Congo, describes Washington's neocolonial policy of recolonization throughout Africa.

White Malevolence is written expansively, filled with fascinating factual information, original research, and conclusions that were quite bold for its time. Which is not typical for British authors of that time.

However, this was largely determined by the fact that the inspiration for this work was the first Prime Minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, a true Pan-Africanist, sociologist and philosopher, who believed that “the unity of Africa is the key basis for ensuring real autonomy (from the West) of individual African nations.”

According to Williams, the CIA undermined not only pan-African unity, but also the stability of many governments on the continent.

The main goal is control over natural resources - primarily uranium at the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo (where, by the way, uranium ore was mined for the Manhattan Project).

The book's actual narrative centers on Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic leader whom CIA Director Allen Dulles perceived as "worse than Castro."

Interestingly, Williams uses declassified archival documents, including meeting transcripts, State Department memos, executive orders and more, which directly point to CIA work against Lumumba since his political rise.

For example, during Lumumba's first state visit to Washington, President Eisenhower disrupted their meeting by sending an adviser to tell the Congolese delegation that he "would rather go play golf than meet Lumumba."

It was in the Congo that the methodology of color revolutions was tested and refined: the local CIA station fueled protest activity, cultivated agents of influence, and promoted discreditable information campaigns against Lumumba.

US intelligence financed opposition figures, including Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a member of the military elite who later became US-controlled dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Ultimately, this subversive activity led to the formation of militant groups of Congolese separatists and the elimination of the Congolese leader, who was undesirable to the American administration.

As a result, this recolonization policy led to destabilization of the situation in the country, and in the region as a whole, and millions of civilian casualties during a series of civil wars unleashed with the direct participation of the CIA.

https://t.me/theobservereffect21/11705 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9214475.html

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The War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Will End: The Twenty-Seventh Newsletter (2024)

In order to allow for a deeper understanding of the ongoing conflict in the Congo today, this newsletter presents an analysis of the resource theft and processes of imperialism and colonialism that have long plagued this part of Africa, including the fight over raw materials that are key for the electronic age.
4 JULY 2024


Jardy Ndombasi (DRC), Soulèvement populaire et souveraineté (‘Popular Uprising and Sovereignty’), 2024.

Dear friends,

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

On 20 June, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) condemned the attacks on civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ‘in the strongest terms’. In its press statement, the UNSC wrote that these attacks – by both the DRC’s armed forces and various rebel groups supported by neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda – ‘are worsening the volatile security and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the region and further exacerbating the current humanitarian situation’. Five days later, on 25 June, the United Nations peacekeeping force in eastern DRC withdrew, in accordance with a December 2023 UNSC resolution that pledged both to provide security for the DRC’s general elections on 20 December and to begin to gradually withdraw the peacekeeping force from the country.

Meanwhile, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels continue to push steadily into the eastern provinces of the DRC, where there has been an active conflict since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Over the course of three decades, there has rarely been lasting peace despite several peace accords (most notably the 1999 Lusaka Agreement, the 2002 Pretoria Agreement, the 2002 Luanda Agreement, and the 2003 Sun City Agreement). The total death toll is very poorly recorded, but by all indications, over six million people have been killed. The intractability of the violence in the eastern DRC has led to a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of permanently ending the carnage. This is accompanied by an ignorance of the politics of this conflict and its deep roots both in the colonial history of the Great Lakes region and the fight over raw materials that are key for the electronic age.


Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), L’Aube de la résistance Congolaise (‘Dawn of the Congolese Resistance’), 2024.

To make sense of this conflict, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with the Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, the Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa (CERECK), and Likambo Ya Mabele (‘Land Sovereignty Movement’) to produce a powerful new dossier, The Congolese Fight For Their Own Wealth. Eight years ago, we assembled a team to study the ongoing war, with a particular emphasis on imperialism and the resource theft that has plagued this part of Africa for the past century. The colonisation of the Congo came alongside the theft of the region’s labour, rubber, ivory, and minerals in the 1800s under the rule of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Multinational corporations continue this criminal legacy today by stealing minerals and metals that are essential to the growing digital and ‘green’ economy. This resource wealth is what draws the war into the country. As we show in the dossier, the DRC is one of the richest countries in the world, its untapped mineral reserves alone worth $24 trillion. Yet, at the same time, 74.6% of the population lives on less than $2.15 a day, with one in six Congolese people living in extreme poverty. What accounts for this poverty in a country with so much wealth?

Drawing from archival research and interviews with miners, the dossier shows that the core problem is that the Congolese people do not control their wealth. They have been fighting against rampant theft not only since the 1958 formation of the Mouvement National Congolais (‘Congolese National Movement’), which sought freedom from Belgium and control over the Congo’s extensive natural resources, but even earlier, through working-class resistance between the 1930s and 1950s. This fight has not been easy, nor has it succeeded: the DRC continues to be dominated by exploitation and oppression at the hands of a powerful Congolese oligarchy and multinational corporations that operate with the permission of the former. Furthermore, the country suffers, on the one hand, from wars of aggression by its neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, aided by proxy militia groups, and, on the other, from interference by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that enforce neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans.

Just days before the DRC’s elections in December 2023, the IMF provided a $202.1 million disbursement because it felt confident that whoever won the election would preserve ‘programme objectives, including limiting macroeconomic slippages and continuing implementing the economic reform agenda’. In other words, the IMF believed that it could continue to privatise electricity and draft mining codes that have been overly ‘generous’ to multinational corporations – irrespective of the election results (the word ‘generous’ is from the IMF’s own mission chief for the DRC, Norbert Toé). A pittance from the IMF is able to muffle the call for sovereignty over the DRC’s considerable resources.


M Kadima (DRC), Congo Is Not for Sale, 2024. Reference photograph by John Behets.

The Great Lakes region of Africa has been prevented, on several fronts, from solving the problems that plague it: entrenched neocolonial structures have prevented the construction of well-funded social infrastructure; the extraordinary power of mining companies, until recently largely Australian, European, and North American in origin, have derailed efforts to achieve resource sovereignty; imperial powers have used their money and military power to subordinate the local ruling classes to foreign interests; the weakness of these local ruling classes and their inability to forge a strong patriotic project, such as those attempted by Louis Rwagasore of Burundi and Patrice Lumumba of the DRC (both assassinated by imperial powers in 1961), has hindered regional progress; there is an urgent desire for the creation of such a project that would bring people together around the shared interests of the majority instead of falling prey to ethnic divisions (there are four hundred different ethnic groups in the DRC alone) and tribalism that tear communities apart and weaken their ability to fight for their destiny.

Such a project thrived following the independence of DRC in 1960. In 1966, the government passed a law that allowed it to control all unoccupied land and its attendant minerals. Then in 1973, the DRC’s General Property Law allowed government officials to expropriate land at will. Establishing a project that uses material resources for the betterment of all peoples, rather than stoking ethnic divisions, must again become the central focus. Yet the idea of citizenship in the region remains entangled with ideas of ethnicity that have provoked conflicts along ethnic lines. It was these ideas that led to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The absence of a common project has allowed the enemies of the masses to creep through the cracks and exploit the weaknesses of the people.


Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), Aurore Africaine (‘African Aurora’), 2024.

An alphabet soup of political and military fronts – such as the ADFL, FDLR, RCD, and MLC – catapulted the region into resource wars. Reserves of coltan, copper, and gold as well as control over the border roads between the DRC and Uganda that link the eastern DRC to the Kenyan port of Mombasa made these armed groups and a few powerful people very rich. The war was no longer only about the post-colonial consensus, but also about the wealth that could be siphoned off to benefit an international capitalist class that lives far away from Africa’s Great Lakes.

Fascinatingly, it was only when Chinese capital began to contest the companies domiciled in Australia, Europe, and North America that the question of labour rights in the DRC became a great concern for the ‘international community’. Human rights organisations that formerly turned a blind eye to exploitation began to take a great interest in these matters, coining new phrases such as ‘blood coltan’ and ‘blood gold’ to refer to the primary commodities mined by the Chinese and Russian companies that have set up shop in several African countries. Yet, as our dossier – as well as the Wenhua Zongheng issue ‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’ – show, Chinese policy and interests stand in stark contrast to the IMF-driven agenda for the DRC as China seeks to ‘kee[p] mineral and metal processing within the DRC and buil[d] an industrial base for the country’. Furthermore, Chinese firms produce goods that are often made for Global North consumers, an irony that is conveniently ignored in the Western narrative. The international community purports to be concerned with human rights violations but has no interest in the African people’s hopes and dreams; it is driven instead by the interests of the Global North and by the US-led New Cold War.



Young, talented artists spent weeks in the studio coming up with the illustrations featured in the dossier and in this newsletter, the result of a collaboration between our art department and the artists’ collective of the Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin in Kinshasa. Please read our fourth Tricontinental Art Bulletin to learn more about their creative process and watch the video on Artists for Congolese Sovereignty, made by André Ndambi, which introduces the artists’ work.


Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), Le peuple a gagné (‘The People Have Won’), 2024.
Reference photograph: Congopresse via Wikimedia.

Our dossier ends with the words of Congolese youth who yearn for land, for a patriotic culture, for critical thinking. These young people were born in war, they were raised in war, and they live in war. And yet, they know that the DRC has enough wealth to let them imagine a world without war, a world of peace and social development that surpasses narrow divisions and unending bloodshed.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... o-dossier/

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When the empire strikes back, will the African world be ready?
Originally published: Hood Communist on June 28, 2024 by Mark P Fancher (more by Hood Communist) | (Posted Jul 04, 2024)

These are dark days for the empire. The Zionist pogrom against the Palestinians in Gaza that has evolved into full-scale genocide has opened the eyes of the world, and everyone sees that the imperialists have no clothes. In a panic, and with knowledge that they cannot erase the mental images of their greedy, amoral, violent nakedness, imperialists are striking out wildly and recklessly against any living thing that makes even a gesture of opposition to Zionist murder. Even students who are generally treasured as the promise of society’s future are not exempt from brutal retaliation.

Though the events in Palestine have left the empire dazed and reeling, it continues to stagger, throwing punch-drunk blows at anyone it can reach. However, the recent events in the Sahel region of Africa not only stripped the empire of its oppressive, exploitative, and manipulative raiment exposing its filthy, disgusting buttocks, but it also forced it to scramble out of Africa in shame.

It all started in Niger when that country’s military seized control of the government from a neo-colonial lackey last year and established the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland. This event triggered the crafting of a new reality for the relationship between Niger and France, its paternalistic colonizer. With respect to events in Niger in 2023, Aljazeera reported:

France withdrew 1,500 soldiers stationed in Niger five months after the military seized power in Niamey, with one of its major demands being the withdrawal of the French force. On December 22, the Nigerien army took control of French military bases in the country, as the last of France’s forces took their leave. The move sealed previous withdrawals from Mali in 2022 as well as from Burkina Faso early this year and dealt further blows to France’s marred military reputation. That same week, the French embassy in Niamey shut down, claiming that it could no longer continue its services unhindered after a blockade. In August, France at first refused to pull out its ambassador despite a 48-hour ultimatum from the government. The military rulers then proceeded to block the entrance to the embassy. Ambassador Sylvain Itte eventually left in September. On December 25, Nigerien authorities also announced they were suspending all cooperation with the Paris-based International Organization of Francophone Nations, which seeks to promote the French language. The organization had already restricted relations with Niamey following the July coup.

For its part, the U.S. stood by, pathetically impotent and powerless to stop the anti-imperial momentum in the region, even after the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) served as a U.S./French proxy and issued toothless threats to use military means to put the Nigerien upstarts in their place. Not only did ECOWAS make the prudent decision to refrain from military aggression, but in February, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso left ECOWAS to establish their own confederation called the Alliance of Sahel States.

Finally, the crowning achievement was the decision by Niger’s government in March to sever its military ties with the U.S. The move was described by commentator Catherine Nzuki as:

… a blow to the ability of the United States to project power in the region. In the past decade, Niger had emerged as a U.S. foothold for military operations in the Sahel region, with two major U.S. bases and roughly 1,000 military personnel in the country. In central Niger, a drone base referred to as ‘Nigerien Air Base 201’ cost $100 million to install and only completed construction in November 2019, a sign of how quickly U.S.-Niger relations have deteriorated in the past year.

All these developments would have made Kwame Nkrumah smile broadly. The tendency toward African unity and the expulsion of imperialists from Africa were fundamental to his Pan-African vision. But having watched how ruthless and cunning imperialists can be, Nkrumah would have cautioned against premature celebration. A retreat by France and the U.S. today is no guarantee they will not return tomorrow—angry and better prepared. The question for the African World is will it be ready?

Perhaps the most effective strategy is to throw a monkey wrench into the imperialists’ machine before they can crank it up. A good first step is to ensure that when Africa moves against its enemies, any actions taken will be justifiable under international law. In this regard, South Africa’s effort to have the International Court of Justice rule that Israel’s mass murders are genocide is instructive. A ruling of that kind impacts how resistance to Zionism is regarded by the world. If the ICJ determines that Israeli violence is genocide, it makes it far more difficult for Zionists to brand Palestinians who fight back as “terrorists.” Likewise, if Africa preemptively, by United Nations resolutions or otherwise establishes that the past and anticipated actions of the U.S. and France in the Sahel amount to violations of international law, then it becomes more difficult for imperialists to credibly discourage or challenge resistance.

Yet another tactic is inspired by the collaboration between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Those three countries have begun the movement toward mutual defense, and other African countries can be encouraged to also sign on to a Pan-African defense pact. Visits by activists throughout the African Diaspora to the embassies of African countries to urge a united front against imperialist incursion can create a climate conducive to collaboration. Embassy personnel can be asked to remind their respective government officials that France and the U.S. might have their eye on the Sahel today, but their aim may shift to other regions of Africa tomorrow, and it is in Africa’s interest to not delay a decision to stand united.

A plea can also be made during these embassy visits for African governments to reevaluate and rescind their agreements to work with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). Continuing association with AFRICOM even as Africa prepares to defend against U.S. military intervention is a stark contradiction that only African countries can address. For its part, Chad has already taken effective steps to part ways with the U.S. military.

Those concerned about intervention are also able to make a formal collective pledge of resistance to imperialist aggression against Africa. That resistance can take many forms, ranging from civil disobedience to boycotts and strikes to other actions that threaten to destabilize business as usual in the U.S., France and other countries that might sign on to their imperialist adventures. Essentially, the empire must know that its war against Africa will have to be fought on multiple fronts, including the home front.

Finally, as the imperialist drums begin to rumble, there may be value in organizing a steady stream of delegations of U.S. and French nationals into countries that appear to be in the crosshairs of imperialist gunsights. There are many who believe that this practice may have significantly contributed to a reluctance by Ronald Reagan to launch a full-scale military invasion of Nicaragua in the 1980s to attack that country’s Sandinista government. The prospect of U.S. and French civilians caught in the crossfire and returning in body bags is not appealing even to western politicians hellbent on dominating Africa.

This year, the global commemoration of African Liberation Day on May 25th will occur during an electric, exciting moment in the history of Africa’s long struggle for redemption. The recent victories are even sweeter because of how they have come about. Deborah Melom Ndjerareou, an analyst from Chad, noted:

The political shifts and diplomatic ruptures that have sapped the French presence and influence in the Sahel region are partially due to the youth’s bold activism. In Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso, youth took to the streets with signs and chants asking France to leave. Sahelian youth pushed forward the desire for a change in international cooperation, specifically French foreign policy in the Sahel. With these regime changes, and the growing ‘anti—French’ discourse, the youth are likely to cause even more change in the relationship between France and the Sahelian nations.

This militant engagement by the young offers potential for sustained continuity of the struggle—something that is not always present in movements for change.

Africans have every right to celebrate recent successes, but because of the potential for imperialist retaliation, it is equally important for the African World to take Kwame Ture’s cue and remain “ready for the revolution."

https://mronline.org/2024/07/04/153611/

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AES 1st Summit: Burkina Faso President Captain Ibrahim Traoré Delivers Historic Speech
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 7, 2024



On 6th July 2024, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger officially created the Alliance of Sahel States Confederation.

In this historic address, Captain Ibrahim Traoré delivers a powerful and inspiring speech at the 1st Summit of Heads of State of AES (African Economic and Security) Member Countries With a focus on unity, economic cooperation, and regional security, Captain Traoré emphasizes the importance of collaboration among member states to foster sustainable development and stability across the continent. His speech highlights key initiatives and strategies to enhance economic growth, strengthen security measures, and promote peace and prosperity within the AES region.

The African Economic and Security (AES) organization, including Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, is dedicated to enhancing economic cooperation and security measures among African nations. Through strategic partnerships and collaborative efforts, AES aims to create a more prosperous and stable Africa for all its member states.

Consolidation of the AES: Heads of State reaffirm their determination
The President of Faso, Captain Ibrahim TRAORE, took part in the first summit of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) alongside his peers from Mali, Colonel Assimi GOÏTA, and Niger, General Abdourahamane TIANI.

In their respective speeches at the opening ceremony, the three Heads of State expressed their determination to pursue the course set by the Alliance of Sahel States.

Denouncing the “pretence of independence granted to African states in the 60s”, followed by the plundering of natural resources and terrorism, the President of Faso, Captain TRAORE, explained the profound meaning of their revolt, which aims only to offer their respective states true independence and their populations real fulfillment.

Despite all kinds of manipulation and misinformation perpetuated by the enemies of the peoples, Captain Ibrahim TRAORE insisted: “We are not going to tremble; we are going to face up to it”, while expressing his delight at the solidarity achieved within the common space.

The President of Faso also indicated that the commitment that prevailed at the creation of the ESA on September 16, 2023 would never waver. Finally, he invited the peoples of the Alliance to always put the best interests of member countries and the Alliance first.

In the same vein, the President of the Republic of Mali, Colonel Assimi GOÏTA, recalled that the signing of the Liptako-Gourma Charter sealed the collective decision taken by the Heads of State to combat terrorism.

He highlighted the synergy of action between the armies of the three countries in the hunt for armed terrorist groups, which is producing tangible results. The Malian President announced the implementation of innovative and effective actions in the transport, economy, communication, culture and mining sectors, for the benefit of the “AES people”.

Welcoming the values of fraternity and solidarity that now govern the Alliance of Sahel States, Colonel Assimi GOÏTA reaffirmed the firm determination of the Heads of State to make the AES a model of cooperation in all fields.

In his opening speech, the President of Niger, General Abdourahamane TIANI, spoke of the “fierce determination” of the Heads of State to regain the sovereignty of their countries, with “this solid coalition” that is the ESA.
According to General TIANI, the future architecture of the Alliance will go beyond the fight against terrorism, to include the fight against rebellions, armed banditry and all forms of external aggression.

To support the realization of the Alliance’s ambitions and missions, particular emphasis will be placed on food security and economic and monetary independence. These actions will be supported by the promotion of interconnectivity (roads, airlines, extractive industries among others) within the ESA.

With the holding of this summit, which marks the determination to consolidate the ESA, the direction is set for strong actions that should lead to a better well-being for the peoples of the Sahel.

Office of Communication of the Presidency of Faso

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/07/ ... ic-speech/

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On the departure of the uranium company GoviEx from Niger
July 7, 2024
Rybar



Following the lead of France's Orano , Niamey authorities have also demanded that Canada's GoviEx withdraw from the Madaoula mine . The firm has owned the mine near Arlit since 2007 and has seen increasing investment in recent years.

GoviEx management stated that the decision allegedly did not comply with the revocation procedure provided for by the applicable mining code and therefore they will try to regain the rights to extract the resources.

And here it is worth considering the difference between the Canadians and the French leaving uranium deposits:

Orano was prepared to leave Niger, which was largely due to increased financial costs.

The precondition was 2011, when demand for nuclear raw materials in most of Europe began to fall, as EU governments began to bet on “green” energy. France, however , was unable to abandon nuclear power plants, which make up 85% of the energy industry. However, selling raw materials to third countries was no longer so profitable.

Therefore, the question of the project’s profitability soon arose, since the huge costs of exploring uranium deposits may not pay off due to the lack of a buyer .

And when these trends are combined with the anti-colonialist upsurge in the Sahel that began in the late last decade, such investments also carry enormous risks. After the coup last July, these fears became reality, with the new government making clear its intention to nationalize mining projects.

Therefore, in Paris, having assessed the objective economic difficulties together with the political agenda, they did not fight for the right to return the uranium deposits, limiting themselves to accusations against Russia.

With GoviEx, everything is simpler - Canadian companies ( controlled by the largest Western TNCs and investment funds ) are still successfully operating in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso. Therefore, the steps taken by the leadership of Niger turned out to be a surprise for them.

The economic prospects, unlike those in France, were broader. Canada has established the export of nuclear raw materials to the United States, where they clearly have no intention of abandoning nuclear power plants. Just look at the Americans' active purchase of uranium from Russia.

That's why the Canadians are still ready to fight for the right to extract oil from the deposit. However, their prospects are dubious.

Following these actions by Niamey's leadership, domestic companies should, at a minimum, keep an eye on abandoned mines and assess the profitability of projects.

Probably, some concerns about possible costs did not allow Rosatom management to promptly declare its desire to work at the deposits. But against the background of the trend of rising uranium prices, the economic benefit with the presence of promising buyers in Asia can be several times greater than the investment.

https://rybar.ru/ob-uhode-uranovoj-komp ... iz-nigera/

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Alex Anfruns: We Are Witnessing the Collapse of Neocolonial Architecture in France
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 17, 2024
Pascual Serrano


Representatives of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger at the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States. Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Mali

An interview with journalist Alex Anfruns Millán on the “Pan-African revolution” in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

In recent years, three West African countries, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, have experienced coups d’état with a common denominator: a national and sovereign uprising against France, its former metropolis, still dominant in the economy, defense and international relations. Military leaders have overthrown puppet rulers of France and established provisional governments, at the same time provoking indignation, sanctions and threats of military intervention from Western powers.

It is not easy to obtain rigorous information in the West that is free from the interests of the European powers in these events. Hence the value of Alex Anfruns Millán in writing the book “Niger: another coup d’état… or the pan-African revolution?”

Although born in Catalonia, Anfruns has been living between France and French-speaking Africa. For four years he published the monthly Journal de l’Afrique and has translated and written about the wars and coup attempts in Mali, Syria, Venezuela and Nicaragua, specializing in Africa and Latin America. He is currently a professor in Casablanca and researches the right to development from a pan-African historical perspective.

Below is an excerpt from an interview conducted by author Pascual Serrano with Alex Anfruns about his book and the events in the region during his time in Barcelona:

Pascual Serrano: Last July, a group of soldiers overthrew the Government of Niger and established a transitional government. What do you think this blow means for the country and the region?

Alex Anfruns: On July 26, 2023, a group of well-known military personnel who are part of the Niger Presidential Guard take power. That date is the culmination of a regional sovereignty process that already began in 2020 in a coup d’état in Mali, which then had another coup in 2021, and in 2022 in Burkina Faso as well.

That is, in the space of about 3 years, we have a series of military coups d’état that contradict the dominant vision that states that the place where the Army should be is in the barracks, and that it does not have to get involved in political life. In the case of these African countries in the Sahel, in West Africa, what happens is that they react to a progressive awareness among the people. Many African people, millions of people, have been mobilizing for a number of reasons.

In recent years, there has been a rebirth of a feeling of dignity and struggle for sovereignty among the population, particularly in Mali. When the rejection of the presence of French troops in the territory began, they managed to expel them and then progressively also in Burkina Faso and Niger. It is an entire regional process in which the military intervenes in Niger for several reasons.

Mali has what is known as the triple border, the region of Liptako-Gourma, where all terrorist groups circulate from one territory to another. It so happens that there has been foreign military dominance for more than ten years in those countries, especially France. One of the pretexts for that presence was the fight against terrorism. The people have begun to wonder how it could be that a presence of more than a decade on the ground of thousands of foreign troops, with the most advanced technology of Western armies and with an impressive defense budget, fails to counteract or neutralize those terrorist groups that multiply over the years.

So two countries, which reject the foreign military presence and which have their own military forces, rebel and are later joined by Niger.

I consider the Niger coup to be a culmination of this process. They observe that there was connivance, or at least acceptance, on the part of France of these Islamist terrorist groups, because they could not eradicate them. The people think that terrorism was an alibi or an excuse simply to justify the foreign military presence, but then they did not eradicate these terrorist groups. This is part of the discourse of African people. If we listen to the leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso and now Niger, the discourse is that the source of terrorism is Western.

For example, the Chief of Staff of the French Army, who was in charge of the French troops in Mali, said that his presence in the country should be for at least 30 years. Nobody can believe that the French army needs three decades to eliminate African terrorist groups.

On the other hand, those in charge of the French army have given legitimacy to the Tuareg groups as political actors that demand an independence that implies a territorial partition of Mali, even the French media collect the statements of their spokespersons. But everyone in the Sahel knows the close relationship between those Tuaregs and terrorist groups.

PS: Numerous analyzes of the region address the role of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States. Can you explain it?

AA: ECOWAS is a regional group of fifteen West African countries, founded in 1975, whose mission was to promote the economic integration of the region. It was an economic development project, but the problem is that, in recent years, it has become a tool of interference in the hands of France. France uses the allies it has in the region such as Ouattara [Alassane Ouattara, president of the Ivory Coast], or president Macky Sall, who has recently left through the back door in Senegal. These actors are joined by Bola Tinubu, who is in Nigeria. They are actors who have put themselves at the service of French interests, and ECOWAS has revealed itself in the cases of Mali, as well as Burkina Faso and Niger, as a tool to exercise a policy of sanctions. These sanctions have caused suffering in populations with incredible extreme poverty, and it is then that it is clearly seen that ECOWAS does not care about the suffering of the population.

They are subjected to a blockade of all kinds, so that the population lacks access to electricity, medicines, and food. It is seen that this association no longer fulfills the function for which it had been created and these three countries make the historic decision at the end of January of a definitive irreversible departure from ECOWAS. So the neocolonial architecture of France is being dismantled a little.

In the case of ECOWAS, it has been an actor whose weight is now in decline.

PS: I would like you to explain a little more about how NATO’s intervention in Libya has affected the region.

AA: The war in Mali already has as its origin the destabilization in Libya. In fact, it has been a lesson that the African people and leaders have learned, because they have realized their historical error in not opposing in a clear and frontal manner, and in not protecting Gaddafi, who also had a pan-African vision. Whether European politicians and Western public opinion in the hegemonic media like it or not, Gaddafi’s Libya is perceived, including his legacy, as a historic contribution to Pan-Africanism.

His legacy has been so influential that, despite Libya being located in North Africa, at two points in Niger’s recent history there have been two coups d’état related to Libya. One was shortly after the president of Niger established relations with Gaddafi’s Libya, in the case of Hamani Diori, who suffered a coup in 1974. A few months earlier he had made a defense agreement with Libya. And in the case of Mamadou Tandja [president of Niger overthrown in 2010 by a coup d’état], one of the reasons why he was deposed was because he clearly opposed the interests of France and established relations with China, with Iran, with Venezuela, and also welcomed Gaddafi.

That same France that also occupied a large part of the territory of Mali and that did not allow the Malian Army to solve its terrorism problems, because it prevented its own National Army from accessing its territory, because it was under French military control.

In the case of Niger, the French imperialist strategy is stopped and that has historical significance. In my opinion this has a very strong symbolic load, something like the battle of Dien Bien Phu in the war between Indochina and France. That is to say, there is an awareness that the moment when Vietnam defeated the French Army in 1954 is being repeated.

Then, the awareness was created within the African people that the defeat of the European man, the white man, was possible and from there an anti-colonial movement began that was greatly reinforced. That is to say, on a symbolic level, Niger is important because of the hope it also gives to the African people to see that it is possible to defeat these threats of war and these sanctions policies.

PS: Isn’t there the possibility that these new governments and movements, moving away from France, could approach the United States and end up falling under another imperialism?

AA: That is one of the hypotheses. In fact, the United States, when the Niger coup d’état took place, had a pragmatic position and accepted it. It is not as clumsy an imperialism as that of France and it tries a bit to, let’s say, not oppose it too much. They clearly defend the overthrown regime, but they do so with a low profile.

I point out in my book on Niger the possibility that the United States will try to recover this dynamic, but events are showing that in Niger there is a clear vision of defending sovereignty. And the key is popular support and mobilization.

So I think the facts are showing that in Niger there is a very clear vision of considering foreign military troops as an occupation, as neocolonialism. And the demand that the US military bases that exist in the capital, and also in the north, with a multi-million dollar investment, with a drone base, leave and abandon Nigerien territory as quickly as possible. It is showing that the people are not going to stop at a single measure, there is a truly entire plan of sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Not only at the level of the defense of each nation, but there is what I consider a bit the hypothesis of the book, that is, that we are moving towards a Pan-African revolution from the moment in which this is no longer a question of defending simply their own nation, but to create cooperation and put resources in favor of the rights of the peoples of the region.

PS: What is the role of Russia, China or the BRICS in the Sahel region?

AA: I believe that we are at a crossroads and that, whether we like it or not, we are in a situation of a new cold war.

That is why it is important to focus on the facts. For example, observing that France has first a colonial and then a neocolonial policy in the region, with a series of mechanisms such as the CFA franc currency, the legal tender of Western and Central African countries. It means African Financial Community Franc, although at the time of its creation it meant “French African Community”, this is undoubtedly a limitation of the economic sovereignty of those countries because the currency was first linked to the French franc and now to the euro.

We all know that States have interests, it is not a question of friendship, but there are relations between States that are respectful and that look to mutual benefit. And in that sense, relations with Russia are very good, but not only with Russia, but also with China, Iran and Turkey.

These are relationships in which these countries are allowed perspectives other than economic subjugation and, above all, development is not prevented. When we talk about development we have to know what the living conditions of the Nigerien people are. Niger is among the world’s leading uranium producers and, on the other hand, has the lowest human development figures. At the time of the coup d’état, extreme poverty was 42%, with a huge lack of access to electricity and with a large part of the population living in subsistence agriculture, depending on rain.

In Niger the military is considering and in fact is advancing a series of projects that will allow more income for the State, and I believe that they will achieve greater development and social benefit.

PS: What would be the development and sovereignty measures of Niger and in general of the Sahel countries that are developing in response to Western sanctions?

AA: First of all, when the sanctions occur, we have the sending of humanitarian convoys from Burkina Faso to Niger, with which we see that, although all the borders of the ECOWAS countries are blocked, the fact that these three countries are united, it allows them, even if they do not have access to the sea, a certain solidarity and inter-African cooperation.

In the case of Niger, after these months of resistance, what it has achieved is good. They have completed the construction of a photovoltaic plant and are now working on oil production, which is going to increase greatly. This has made it possible to sell fuel to neighboring countries. With the development capacity of the oil industry, they will be able to reduce their dependence on energy.

Also regarding its gold extraction industry, it is planned to create gold refineries. Not only that, but there are actually a series of industrialization initiatives, and food sovereignty is being proposed, which is something that can be achieved, it is not a utopia.

Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are countries where there is still food insecurity. There are enormous resources and now, by expelling the neocolonial actors, very positive perspectives for change are opening up.

PS: Comparing these three countries that are experiencing these changes, their three governments do not necessarily have a similar ideology, beyond a common position of recovering their sovereignty and nationalism in the face of French colonialism. Do you see ideological differences between them, or do you think that is irrelevant?

AA: It is an issue that is now being debated, since these governments are considered military transitional governments and at some point or another should give way to civilian governments.

However, the current situation is that in Mali the activity of political parties is prohibited, because it is proposed that it is first necessary to truly and totally recover national sovereignty.

In that sense, I believe that the priority is placed on addressing the problem of terrorism in these three countries, but, at the same time, laying the foundations to defend their strategic resources, decide on them and not depend so much on imports.

Ibrahim Traoré, in the month of October, had a meeting with the employers of Burkina Faso, with the country’s capitalists. He told them, until now the products, the food that the Burkinabe people are consuming, are largely imported, national production is not being supported. And he added, from now on, you are going to dedicate 10% of your capital to national production. What Traoré was doing, who, in a certain way, is the heir to the ideas of Thomas Sankara.

I would like to see how many presidents there are who sit down with the capitalists and give them orders, because normally it is the opposite, it is the economic powers that command the political power.

Here we have a concrete manifestation that it is these leaders who are giving orders, they are forcing there to be a transformation of the economic structure. But this is going to take time and I believe that it is the next few years that will allow us to see if it will be transformed. For example, let the masses of the people enter the scene, who are people who mostly live off agriculture, and who have historically been excluded from society, from the destiny of the nation.

So all of this is still developing, but I think for now, the Pan-African revolution is good news.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/07/ ... in-france/

******

How the Anglo American Network Took Power in Rwanda and DRC Using Tutsi Supremacists and Minority Rights
By PD Lawton - July 18, 2024 1


0905 President Bush meets with President Jospeh Kabila, Democratic Republic of Congo (far right) President Thabo Mbeki, South Africa; and President Paul Kagame, Rwanda (far left). Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. New York City.

“Rwanda is not defined by a geographical space; it is a state of mind.”
– Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) Brigadier General Frank Rusagara.[1]

The eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been in a state of permanent war, depopulation and plunder since 1996 when the DRC (then Zaire) was invaded.

During the “First Congo War,” 1996-1998, proxy armies backed by the United States (and allies) invaded and occupied Zaire, removed long-time U.S. operative President Mobutu Sese Seko and installed Laurent-Désiré Kabila as president. Since 1996, well in excess of 12 million Congolese have died violent deaths and the entire population of eastern Congo has been terrorized, traumatized and dislocated.

Keith Harmon Snow, a journalist who reported for many years from Central Africa, noted:

“In 1996, the proxy armies invaded from Rwanda and Uganda, under the direction of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan president Paul Kagame, but they also included Eritrean and Ethiopian troops, and they were backed by a phalanx of powerful corporate interests, mercenaries, military intelligence operatives, and other war profiteers. Barely behind the scenes, they had the full support of the U.S. Pentagon.”

“Now 28 years later, the destabilization of the Congo—the mass murder and plunder facilitated by global supply chains and rogue capitalism—continues. The most recent attacks in early June 2024 culminated in at least 50 innocent Congolese civilians in a massacre committed by one of the more than 200 militias occupying eastern Congo.”

Snow continued:

“The civilians were tortured, their arms tied behind their backs at the elbows—a torture technique called Akandoya—and thrown in the Luholu River in the province of North Kivu. The bodies were also mutilated. Akandoya is a torture technique first used by Museveni’s National Resistance Army during the Luwero Triangle terror in Uganda (1980-1985), adopted by Museveni’s protégé and Director of Military Intelligence Paul Kagame, routinely used by Kagame’s RPA during the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994), and it is a signature reminder of the unrelenting atrocities committed by the Rwandan and Ugandan militias in Congo. Many of these Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers have been ‘trained’ by U.S. military experts, training in the euphemistically named ‘counter-insurgency’ guerrilla warfare tactics perfected by the legendary U.S. military School of the Americas known for training death squad commandos and dictators.”


[Source: rwanda.bz]

Eastern Congo is comprised of three provinces; Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu. All three provinces are extremely beautiful, fertile and blessed with water, in addition to mineral wealth which is an unparalleled global phenomenon. The ultimate goal of Paul Kagame`s Rwanda is annexation of North Kivu. Constant low-intensity war over the last 30 years has resulted in depopulation, a gradual genocide.

The rural communities in North Kivu and Ituri are routinely subjected to extreme coercion, forced under terrorizing tactics into working with the Rwandan-backed militias, M23, and the Ugandan-backed militia, ADF. Village and community leaders who refuse to collaborate are routinely murdered; women are subjected to extreme sexual violence before being murdered. Terrorism is an insufficient word to describe what is happening in North Kivu. The names of towns like Beni in Lubero Territory are synonymous with massacres.


[Source: io.wp.com]

Violence escalated dramatically around October 2023. This is because the president of DRC, Felix Tshisekedi, is achieving a measure of success in getting the international community to respond to his calls for Rwanda to be recognized as the force behind M23. As Paul Kagame is now facing the end of his tenure, his tyranny is having a final killing spree.

The increase in violence escalated after Tshisekedi announced the date of December 2023 for the withdrawal of MONUSCO, the UN stabilization mission that has worked in tandem with Kagame and his fellow Tutsi supremacists in DRC.

MONUSCO is a mercenary operation run by the NATO alliance. As of June 2024 they have yet to depart.

The EU ambassadors were recently summoned in Kinshasa. We can assume Tshisekedi explained to them that Congolese minerals will in the future only be traded through DRC. They will no longer be able to buy cheap, illicit Congolese minerals from Rwanda.


EU ambassadors received by President Tshisekedi. [Source: io.wp.com]

President Tshisekedi is confronting Silicon Valley, as reported in the Financial Times:

“In the letter, France- and US-based lawyers for the DRC say that Apple’s iPhones, Mac computers and other accessories are “‘tainted by the blood of the Congolese people.’”

“M23’ is the acronym for the Movement of March 23 [2009], but it is nothing more or less than another of the hundreds of Rwandan and Ugandan military offshoots comprising the alphabet soup of terrorist forces in the Congo. The M23 militia is merely the most recent incarnation of Rwandan and/or Ugandan troops that have occupied the Congo. The M23 was born the day that war criminal Laurent Nkunda called for ‘peace talks’ and thereafter orchestrated the veritable coup d’etat of having Rwandan troops of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP)—then the most recent incarnation of Rwandan terrorism in Congo—integrated in the Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s former enemy army, the Congolese national army.


M23 troops in eastern Congo. [Source: aljazeera.com]

Wikipedia’s description of the CNDP is a laughable farce that mirrors many international media statements about the CNDP and its commanders:

“The National Congress for the Defence of the People (French: Congrès national pour la défense du peuple, CNDP) is a political armed militia established by Laurent Nkunda in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in December 2006. The CNDP was engaged in the Kivu conflict, an armed conflict against the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In January 2009, the CNDP split and Nkunda was arrested by the Rwanda government. The remaining CNDP splinter faction, led by Bosco Ntaganda, was planned to be integrated into the national army.”

This caricature of reality advances the mythology that Rwandan General Laurent Nkunda was arrested by his “superiors” in Rwanda. In fact, General Laurent Nkunda commands the Rwandan M23 forces in Congo today. The “arrest” of Nkunda and his subsequent disappearance on the world stage is part of the smoke-and-mirror or slight-of-hand games played by Paul Kagame and his Tutsi extremist mafia. Kagame’s magic tricks are welcomed by the “international community,” offering the supposed ruse of plausible denial that international power brokers and governments hide behind.

American networks which are Kagame`s sponsors will attempt to capitalize on the current horrific level of violence against civilians by calling for humanitarian intervention which could result in a “temporary” provisional government being imposed by the UN, ultimately playing into the goal of Rwandan annexation of Congolese territory or at least a semi-autonomous region in eastern Congo, governed behind the scenes by the Anglo-American multi- national corporate network (large corporations that dominate the country and influence its governments to their liking).

The International Committee of the Red Cross produced a report in March 2024 which details the increasing humanitarian disaster in North Kivu. However, the ICRC and the entire Western apparatus, media, academia and non-governmental organizations perpetuate a false narrative that armed rebel militias are vying for control of the mines:

“The increase in the number of parties involved in the fighting is a challenge. Around 100 different groups, of varying size and degree of organization, are competing for control of the land and resources.”

That narrative is a lie. Congolese territory has been invaded and occupied by its aggressive Western-backed neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda, for the last 25 years. Currently, Goma is calm. The fighting between the Congolese Armed Forces, Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) and M23 (Rwandan military) is most active in North Kivu in the vicinity around Goma.

People have been fleeing the countryside to seek shelter as close to Goma as possible. Camps are now extremely overcrowded. Food is being restricted from coming into the city because M23 is blockading roads mainly from the Masisi Territory where most food staples such as potatoes, cassava and maize are grown. Food is now very expensive in Goma. There are currently about 1.7 million internally displaced people in North Kivu. Just under one million are now seeking safety in Goma. Goma had a previous population of 1.5 million.


Tent encampments in Goma refugee camp. [Source: cleantheworldwithcompassion.org]

In the first week of May 2024, Rwanda bombed a temporary refugee camp, Mugunga, a village between Sake and Goma, resulting in more than 25 dead and many injured. This is not an unusual occurrence of violence, just one of thousands of attacks by Rwanda/M23 on unarmed civilians. Countless massacres are done using machetes to save on bullets. For the Congolese there are no ambulances and no paramedics with painkillers: Injured people are transported by motorbike on rough, muddy, unpaved roads to the nearest hospital in this country that has the worst infrastructure deficit in the world.

Footage of this recent attack on social media shows a young woman with most of her leg torn apart, being held on the back of a motorbike by the pillion passenger. The noises she makes are of a person barely able to stand the pain. Other footage shows a tent that was a makeshift home for a displaced family hit by a mortar. It is clearly seen on the video that a number of young children were blown to bits. The sheer distress of the people around is heart-rending.

This is nothing new for the Congolese, nothing new at all.

Rwanda controls the telecommunications network over eastern Congo. Everything is monitored by Tutsi technicians. People are afraid to speak because Rwanda has agents everywhere.

(Much more at link.)

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... ty-rights/

******

15 Arab and African countries sound the alarm on the risks of famine in Sudan

Famine looms in Sudan, forcing people to flee to neighboring countries, while talks between warring parties and a UN envoy are still under way in Geneva

July 18, 2024 by Aseel Saleh


Sudanese refugees in Chad. Over 10 million people have been forcibly displaced in over a year of war in Sudan. Photo: Wikimedia commons

The governments of 15 Arab and African countries issued a statement on Tuesday, July 16, expressing their deep concerns regarding the escalating food security crisis in war-torn Sudan. The countries included the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, Mauritania, Chad, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Benin, Seychelles, Senegal, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mozambique and Nigeria.

The statement came as a reaction to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, which was published on June 27, 2024. “Fourteen months into the conflict, Sudan is facing the worst levels of acute food insecurity ever recorded by the IPC in the country,” the report said, pointing out that more than half of the population in Sudan have experienced severe hunger, which makes Sudan the world’s largest hunger crisis.

The number of starving people is estimated at 25.6 million people, with 14 areas at the risk of famine including greater Darfur, Greater Kordofan, Al Jazirah and some hotspots in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. Many starving Sudanese people have been reportedly fleeing Sudan to seek asylum in neighboring countries due to hunger and looming famine.

The countries who issued the statement expressed their concern about what was set out in the IPC report as a “stark and rapid deterioration” in food security, and its dire impact on the safety and well-being of civilians, including thousands of children, who have suffered from severe acute malnutrition.

According to a Save the Children report published on July 7, due to the war in Sudan 30% of children are acutely malnourished and 20% of the overall population is facing extreme food shortages.

Since the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, the destruction caused by the fighting resulted in a sharp decrease in the agricultural production, and therefore a hike in food prices and food scarcity. The hunger crisis in Sudan has been further deepened by the severe restriction on the movement of food and aid convoys due to the ongoing conflict.

Reiterating the United Nations Security Council’s call from June of 2023, the countries urged all the parties to the conflict to ensure immediate, safe, and unrestricted access to civilian humanitarian aid. They also called on the conflicting parties to adhere to international humanitarian law and to comply with all relevant Security Council resolutions.

The statement also addressed foreign actors requesting them to stop providing armed or material support to the parties involved in the conflict and to refrain from any action which may ignite the conflict. Furthermore, it called on the international community for immediate and coordinated international response to tackle the urgent needs of the affected Sudanese population. The countries encouraged the international community to scale up the humanitarian assistance it provides, and to support the IPC recommendations for increasing nutrition interventions, restoring productive systems and improving data collection.

While the humanitarian situation in Sudan is constantly deteriorating, talks between a United Nations envoy and delegations from both conflicting parties continue in Geneva this week. The talks started last Thursday, focusing on humanitarian aid and the protection of civilians.

There were a few “promising signs” emerging from Monday’s talks in Geneva, the Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Sudan, Shible Sahbani commented. “Let’s wait for the coming hours and days, and we hope that if we don’t get a ceasefire, at least we can get the protection of civilians and the opening of humanitarian corridors,” he added.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/18/ ... -in-sudan/

[blindpig]

THE BATTLE OF TINZAOUATEN — THE BUCCANEER STOPS HERE



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Ignore the Anglo-American propaganda now circulating from Kiev that Russia’s military has suffered a grave military defeat in the Sahara desert, when Tuareg (Touareg) forces destroyed a Russian Wagner unit and Malian government forces in five days of battle at Tinzaouaten, on the desert border between Algeria and Mali.

“Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant battleground losses in Mali,” the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned propaganda agency in London, claimed in reporting from Kiev and Lagos (Nigeria). “Graphic videos posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a sandy landscape strewn with dozens of bodies, some wearing Russian Orthodox crosses, and multiple burnt-out vehicles…Some pro-Kremlin military commentators have blamed the failure of the Mali operation on the clean-up imposed on Wagner after Prigozhin led an uprising against the Russian defence ministry last year. He died with several other Wagner leaders in a plane crash believed to be a Kremlin-directed assassination.”

The Guardian reported the source for a similar story to be an official of the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR) in Kiev. Videoclips of the battle published on the internet carry advertisements for the Ukraine regime and appeals for donations.

This is what the US, French and British propaganda agencies and intelligence services want readers, especially African and Arab readers, to think.

What has really happened is a different story. This is already surfacing in the Moscow press because the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and intelligence services want it understood that the Wagner men lost their lives at Tinzaouaten last week following a series of military mistakes driven by a strategic miscalculation which flies in the face of years of Russian diplomatic effort in the region. In a word, don’t fight the Tuaregs on their ground – negotiate with them instead.

“We are against any unilateral steps,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s last official statement on armed conflicts in the Sahara had declared in 2021. At the same time, the Ministry made the distinction between Islamic terrorism and anti-colonial national liberation movements. “We are assisting the G5 Sahel [Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger]…We are supplying these countries with the necessary armaments enabling them to strengthen their potential to eradicate the terrorist threat. We regularly train servicemen from those countries in the Russian Federation; we train peacekeepers and law enforcement officers at our Defence Ministry’s educational establishments…According to the available facts, our Western colleagues are not too enthusiastic about this.”

Tipping in favour of the Malian government like this has meant a negative Russian attitude towards the Tuaregs. Nonetheless, “the Tuaregs have lived there forever,” a Moscow reporter close to military intelligence reported this week. “Previous advances of the Wagner units in the liberation of Kidal and other areas of northern Mali do not cancel the fact that the Tuaregs are there in their thousands, and this is their desert.”

Marc Eichinger, a French expert on the region who has been based for seven years in neighbouring Niger, comments similarly: “You have Tuaregs from the same families on both sides and they hate the foreigners no matter who they are. They have a perfect knowledge of the landscape and it’s a big mistake to chase them in the desert. The French are happy not to be involved any more. You need much bigger means to fight them and if they feel at risk they just wait until the foreign army goes away.”


Map of operations of the Malian armed forces (FAMA) and Wagner group fighting Tuareg forces in the Mali-Algeria border zone, July 25-27. Click on source to enlarge view. In the battlefield video frame which is the right lead image, one of the Wagner soldiers had feigned dead, and after he was kicked by one of the Tuareg fighter, the film records that he got up and started to run with a stone in his hand. He was then shot by one of the fighters. According to Marc Eichinger, “you can find the Tuareg representatives in Bamako [Mali] and in Niamey [Niger]. If you surrender, they don’t shoot you because alive, you have a market value. The Tuaregs and the Tubu tribesmen are good fighters in the desert. The desert is huge and very hostile, so if you start chasing them at home, you are dead. You can only go from one water supply source to another one. Having armoured vehicles doesn’t help, it’s too heavy, the same with body armour.”

The Russian reports of what happened at the battle of Tinzaouaten include press releases by the Mali armed forces (FAMa) and by the Wagner group, aka Africa Corps, as well as leaks from Russian military intelligence and the Defense Ministry in Moscow. The Anglo-American press reports have ignored Malian, Russian, and Tuareg sources.

The Russian dead have been counted between 20 and 80; those taken prisoner number between 15 and 20, some or all of whom have been returned for ransom.

The senior leader of the Wagner group, Anton Yelizarov, has been reported captured alive and returned; he was reported to be the successor in command of Wagner’s African formation after Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, the overall Wagner leaders, were killed on August 23, 2023.

Sergei Shevchenko, the commander of the combat unit known as the 13th assault detachment, was killed, along with another well-known Wagner fighter Nikita Fedyanin, who directed the Grey Zone, the Wagner group’s Telegram publication.


Left: publication of the Wagner combat unit with their Typhoon troop carrier, before the battle in the Grey Zone Telegram channel. Right: Screen shot of one of the Wagner unit vehicles after the battle.


Left to right: Anton Yelizarov; Nikita Fedyanin.

Some of the Russian reports claim the Tuaregs were assisted by the French, by Ukrainian mercenaries, and by a decision of the Algerian government to close the border and block the movement of a thousand-man force of the Tuaregs into safe haven, forcing them to turn and fight the advance of the Russians and Malians. None of these claims can be corroborated.

The Ukrainian claims are dismissed in the Moscow military reports. “Ukraine allegedly supplies weapons to the Tuaregs, including UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles, drones],” comments Yevgeny Krutikov. “However, the Tuaregs do not have drones at all. They also do not have guns from Ukraine. But about the intelligence information that the Ukraine allegedly supplied to the Tuaregs, it’s more difficult to say. Such assistance is theoretically possible. In particular, the Ukrainians in Africa have worked under the wing of British intelligence MI6 as information couriers. But in that case, it was not Ukrainian data, but British. The only likelihood in which Ukrainian citizens can be involved is to have listened in on the radio communications of Wagner [men] speaking in Russian…It is possible that in the African zone there are some singles or small groups [of Ukrainians] affiliated mainly with MI6. But it is necessary to distinguish between the real situation on the ground and the information war.”

On July 30, a Telegram channel reportedly speaking for the Tuareg forces announced in French: “CSP-DPA [coalition of Tuaregs and Arabic-speaking rebels known as the Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development] does not have a Ukrainian partner, and we are alone against Wagner and AES [Alliance des États du Sahel, Alliance of Sahel States] countries.”

For a neutral backgrounder on the evolution of the 60-year Tuareg fight for the homeland in northern Mali they call Azawad, read this from Le Monde Diplomatique.


Source: https://mondediplo.com/

To begin to understand the Tuaregs and Libyan Berbers like the former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, start here.

In the accounts of the Forces Armées Malienne (FAMa) – the Malian Armed Forces – and in the Wagner bulletins republished by Boris Rozhin of Colonel Cassad, Mikhail Zvinchuk of Rybar, The Militarist, and other military blogs, the battle of Tinzaouaten was the culmination of operations which began on July 22. Their objective moving northeastward from the Malian towns of Kidal and I-n-Afarak was to attack concentrations of Tuareg forces and drive them out of Tinzaouaten, closing the Mali-Algerian border against their return.

In the first clash, Wagner says it struck at about 100 Tuaregs equipped with large-calibre machineguns mounted on 10 pickup trucks. Wagner claims to have killed 50, and begun pursuit of the remainder eastward towards Tinzaouaten.


A severe sandstorm then struck, cutting off the Wagner unit and the Malians from their air support, and allowing the Tuaregs to position themselves on high ground for a counter-attack they launched in daylight. They shot down one of the Russian helicopters and damaged the second, forcing it to retreat to base. There was no retreat, however, for the Wagner unit on the ground, and they were overwhelmed by the larger Tuareg force. The battle ended late in the afternoon of July 27 when the last radio message was received from Shevchenko to say: “The three of us remain, we continue to fight.”

In Moscow this week, the military intelligence assessment is that it had been “assumed that the occupation of Tinzaouaten would be a spectacular point for the end of the war with the Tuaregs and would symbolize the strength of the government of Mali… The Malian command apparently imagined a raid on Tinzaouaten would be a copy of the recent triumphal procession in I-n-Afarak. Therefore, there was no heavy equipment in the column, but there were bloggers. There were no sappers, there was no advanced guard, it was not supported by aviation, and the weather forecast a sandstorm. From the beginning, the idea of this march was ill-conceived.”



“The Wagner group management did not participate in the planning of the operation. The Russian African Corps [AK], whose responsible officers are not even in Mali, but in Burkina Faso, Niger, and the Central African Republic, were in general accord, but not on the particulars, although it was the AK officers who arrived at the battlefield on the evening of July 27 and participated in the ransom of prisoners. A large group of Russian military doctors also arrived.”

According to Mikhail Zvinchuk, editor in chief of Rybar: “In narrow circles, they are already trying to justify the defeat of the columns by the fact that the Americans, the French, the British, the aliens [Ukrainians] joined in planning of the operation. In fact, we see another example of serious underestimation of the enemy…Despite the initial successes and damage to the separatists at the beginning of the offensive, to consolidate the success was impossible because of the limited strength [of the Wagner unit]…Most likely, the commander on the ground [Shevchenko] decided that he was at war with dumb monkeys and would be able to clean them up. The fact that the Tuaregs have waged successful combat operations in their native desert for twelve years already was probably ignored. Alas, it is for such mistakes that the reputation has been lost, not only of the African Corps, but also of the power of Russian weapons. We hope the adventure at Tinzaouaten will be a lesson for the military leadership on the ground.”

“Underestimating the enemy in the face of the Tuaregs and inventing excuses only complicates the task of preparing and planning the battles to come. And it would be better for the Russian side to train the Malians for this as soon as possible. In the end, we have gone through it ourselves.” https://t.me/s/rybar

The Tsargrad internet video and news platform in Moscow has romanticized the military prowess and exploits of the Wagner group in the past. It now claims that “usually, the Tuaregs have withdrawn o Algeria during the Malian operations, and then returned. But this time the Algerians blocked their passage, and the militants had to fight. The [Russian] aircraft could not work properly due to a sandstorm, and the Tuaregs managed to cut off one of the columns. Thus, Wagner fell into a trap.”

Tsargrad has also promoted Ukrainian source claims that the Tuaregs had outside, foreign help. “In principle, I doubt that the sheep herders themselves would be able to defeat a platoon of our elite “musicians” [Wagner forces], and even bring down two helicopters.”
Tsargrad continues to defend Wagner but blames Yelizarov for lacking the military skills of the former commanders, Prigozhin and Utkin.

Other Moscow reporters blame Fedyanin for impulsiveness. On July 21, he had been critical of the “mentality” of the Malian forces for their reluctance to engage the Tuaregs in combat. “Anyone who has been on foreign business trips knows how difficult it is sometimes to organize the advance of a column with allies, because of, let’s say, their mentality. In the Middle East and Africa, local life goes slowly.”

The scapegoating now under way in the military blogs signals the likelihood of a fresh purge by the Defense Ministry of the Wagner leftovers in the Africa Corps. “The traditionally difficult relationship between the Wagner group and the structures of the Ministry of Defense has not been overcome,” reports the National New Service (NSN). “At the same time, it is obvious that the scale of the conflict is growing, and the Wagner group, even with all its experience and organization, may not have enough resources to win. The overall success of Russia on the African continent depends on the coherence of various groups of Russian security forces in the region.”

Ignorance of the politics of the Sahel region and of its racial and tribal politics has long marked Russian thinking since the Soviet period. Prejudice was also displayed by the Kremlin towards Qaddafi, the Berbers, the Tuaregs, and also the Polisario movement in the western Saharan war with Morocco. This contributed to President Dmitry Medvedev’s and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s agreement not to oppose the US, French and British operation to kill Qaddafi and take over Libya in 2011. For more details, read the Soviet-Libya story in Chapter 7 of the book.

The shift towards Israel by the Kremlin over the past twenty-five years followed the collapse of Russia’s gas and aluminium interests in Libya: that story has been documented here and here. Resistance to the pro-Israel shift by the Russian Foreign Ministry has proved a failure.


Left: Libya’s President Muammar Qaddafi on his first visit to Moscow, April 27, 1981, with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to his left; behind and to Qaddafi’s right, Abdelati al-Ubaidi, then Libya’s Foreign Minister, later Prime Minister. Right: The Jackals’ Wedding, published in February 2022.

There are just four references to the Tuaregs in the Foreign Ministry archive over the past quarter century. In 2012, asked what his response was to the Tuareg claims against the Malian government, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took the side of Mali against the Tuaregs. “We consider this as a real threat of dissolution of sovereign UN member state. Most analysts see here one of the real manifestations of continuing crisis over Libya, which resulted in greatly complicated efforts to ensure the unity of the Libyan state. Now the negative consequences flow over its borders and pop up directly in Mali. We have already said that in principle Russia did not see anything unnatural in coming to power of Islamist politicians in various states. It is important that this was a constitutional manner to be the means of general election based on the will of people. When the attempts to seize power by force, to undermine constitutional order and to dismember the state are taken, we cannot interpret such action otherwise, as undermining the foundations of modern international law… We shall provide political support for efforts to restore the territorial integrity of Mali and transfer of the situation in political and constitutional channels. Hopefully, it will be another lesson for all of us, particularly in relation to other situations in the Middle East [Syria war] and North Africa [Libya war].”

The last reference to the Tuaregs was in a foreign ministry press briefing by Maria Zakharova in 2015. “The situation in the country as a whole remains tense, with persistent confrontation between Mali’s government and the Tuareg-led opposition. The situation is further complicated by interference from radical Islamist groups who continue to perpetrate terrorist attacks against the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), Malian servicemen, and civilians. We agree with the assessments cited by Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General Mongi Hamdi in a briefing at the UN Security Council on October 6 concerning the need to improve the efficiency of MINUSMA and increase the impact of its activities.”

The lack of sympathy for the national aspirations of the Tuaregs contrasts with the Foreign Ministry’s explicit balancing of Russian support between the sides in the Western Sahara war, the Polisario Front and Morocco. Lavrov declared in 2021 “Everywhere there are resolutions approved by consensus, which are laying the international legal foundations for solving this or that problem. In Western Sahara’s case, the resolutions imply a direct dialogue between Morocco and the Polisario Front. This dialogue should be resumed as soon as possible. These talks should start and facilitate the elaboration of compromise solutions meeting the interests of both sides. Instability in North Africa and the Sahara-Sahel zone is affecting the general situation and is behind the lack of progress with a Western Sahara settlement. This does not add anything positive. We believe that the developments in the Sahara-Sahel region must on the contrary induce the sides – Morocco and the Polisario Front – to make more active efforts to generate hope in this sector.”

“If the situation is left as is, the terrorists may try to exploit the desperate plight of the Western Saharan population to spread their tentacles there. We know that various extremists, including militants from Al-Qaeda, Islamic Maghreb, and ISIS are thinking that way. Their plans are quite extensive. We have become alarmed: Morocco and the Polisario Front are not only unable to resume direct talks but in November 2020, both withdrew from the ceasefire arrangement that had lasted for nearly 30 years…A year ago, the United States recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the whole of Western Sahara. This is not helping anything. On the contrary, this directly contradicts and undermines the generally recognized principles of the Western Saharan settlement, under which the final status of this territory can only be determined by a referendum. We hope that no sudden moves of this sort will be forthcoming in the future and that everyone will use their capabilities to induce the sides to sit down at the negotiating table rather than to support one side against another.”

The doctrine of “no sudden moves” was repeatedly flouted by the Wagner group under Prigozhin, not only in Africa but also at home, and led to his demise last year. The subsequent Defense Ministry reorganization of the Africa Corps has brought the two lines of Russian military and foreign policy thinking closer in line together. At the same time, the escalation of the US and NATO war against Russia’s international trade, especially in the gas and oil sector, and the rising value of Russian arms exports to the Sahel and sub-Saharan African states, have reinforced the balancing act between governments but tipped it against national liberation forces like the Polisario and the Tuaregs.


King Mohammed VI of Morocco meets President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov in the Kremlin on March 15, 2016.


Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune at the Kremlin with Putin, June 15, 2023.

In his only direct statement on Mali on February 8, 2022, President Putin claimed there were commercial Russian interests in Mali but not strategic ones. “Regarding Mali, President Macron raised this issue many times, we discussed it with him, and President Macron is aware of our position on this matter. The Russian government, the Russian state have nothing to do with the companies that are working in Mali. As far as we know, the Malian leadership has no complaints about the commercial activities of these companies. Following the logic that may be applied to NATO, the current member states and potential members, if Mali has opted to work with our companies, it has the right to do so. However, I would like to point out – I will talk about this with President Macron after this news conference – I would like to point out that the Russian state has nothing to do with this. It concerns the commercial interests of our companies, which coordinate their activities with the local authorities.”

Russian bauxite, iron ore and goldmining groups, Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal and Alexei Mordashov’s Severstal Resources and Nordgold, are substantial investors in Guinea, Liberia, and Burkina Faso. The principal goldminers in Mali are Canadian — Barrick Gold and B2 of Canada. For the time being, they have employed the Wagner group for mine security. There is no sign of a Russian oligarch lobbying the Kremlin, the foreign or defense ministries for support to oust the Canadians from their mine licenses, despite the Canadian government’s warmaking against Russia in the Ukraine.

In an attempt to clarify the military mistakes which the Wagner unit made and identify the strategic Russian objectives which continue in the region, the semi-official Vzglyad platform in Moscow published Yevgeny Krutikov’s essay on Monday evening. Between the lines Krutikov’s military intelligence sources intimate there was more advance planning for the move on Tinzaouaten than has been acknowledged to date; and thus more possibility of early warning to the Tuaregs through foreign intelligence listening posts.

“The Wagner group and the Africa Corps had been able to achieve what the French had promised but failed. “The new government of Mali, relying on the Russian PMC [private military company], was able to dislodge the Tuaregs from the majority of the territory it occupied in a short time. The city of Kidal, which the Tuaregs had held for ten years and called their capital, was liberated by the Wagner PMC in three months. Relying on Kidal, the government army and Wagner marched north into the desert, occupying large oases almost without a fight. The advance took two roads, since the rest of the territory, which was formally occupied by the Tuaregs, was an uninhabited desert. On July 22, government troops and Wagner triumphantly entered the oasis of I-n-Afarak on the Algerian border. This event was staged by the Malian authorities with some theatricality, as it foreshadowed an imminent victory over the Tuaregs. Indeed, by this point, only a narrow strip of desert along the Algerian border with the Tinzaouaten oasis remained under separatist control.”

“Simultaneously with the raid on I-n-Afarak, another group of government troops, with the support of the Wagners, moved on July 23 from the FAMa base in Tessalit towards Tinzaouaten. It was assumed that the occupation of Tinzaouaten would be a spectacular end point of the war with the Tuaregs and would symbolize the strength of the Government of Mali. Unexpectedly, the Tuaregs put up fierce resistance…Algeria itself is fighting both the same Tuaregs and the same jihadists, and does not want to allow them to enter its territory from Mali. Algeria began to deploy its troops closer to the border, but to get there means crossing the entire Sahara from north to south. On July 27, the Malian aviation was still able to attack the Tuareg positions, but by the end of the third day of the battle it became clear that Tinzaouaten could not be taken by surprise. The Malian army and Wagner began to retreat along another road towards Kidal through the wadi, the dry bed of the ancient Tamassahart River. As a result, the column was first blown up by a large improvised explosive device, and then was trapped in the lowlands of the wadi between a Tuareg detachment and an unexpected jihadist detachment.”

“Usually, Tuaregs do not cooperate with jihadists – they are different peoples, different ideologies, and they have fundamentally different goals. Moreover, they had previously attacked each other regularly. But in this case, they rallied against a common enemy, which the Malian intelligence could not reveal in time.”

“The incident has once again raised the question of the form in which military-political cooperation between Russia and the Sahel countries, which recently announced the creation of a confederation, is necessary and possible. First of all, it is worth remembering that at the heart of all the problems of the Sahel countries lies the long-term war against international Islamic terrorism, and in some places with various separatist movements (national, tribal, religious) …The status of the Africa Corps is also still not completely clear. Russian embassies in some Sahel countries have only recently resumed their work. There are also no attached Russian advisers in the armies of the countries of the Sahel Confederation, as it was in Soviet times. And it is not clear how the Russian presence will be integrated into the emerging general military command of the Sahel Confederation. The lack of official status of the Russian military presence with the local authorities creates risks that the Tinzaouaten story may repeat itself.”

Krutikov reports the lessons of the Wagner defeat at Tinzaouaten which are being learned in Moscow right now.

“It is highly desirable that the Sahel Confederation officially introduces a counter-terrorism operations regime. This, in turn, would make it possible to formalize Russian military assistance, as it was effectively done earlier in the Central African Republic. And then there will be fewer losses on the region’s external borders. As a matter of fact, it was precisely with this ideological trend that the attempt to put an end to the Tuareg separatists in two columns in three days was connected. If a Russian military specialist had been next to the Malian comrades at the time of making such a decision, there would almost certainly have been the decision – no raid on Tinzaouaten. And so Wagner turned out to be a hostage to the political ambitions of the local authorities. The main problem of the Sahel countries today is the war against jihadism and separatism. Russian law enforcement agencies are able to help solve this problem.”

As for the Tuaregs, it is Eichinger’s view that “Wagner/Afrika Corps have absolutely no chance to win — it’s just a matter of time.”

https://johnhelmer.net/the-battle-of-ti ... more-90216