{"id":305848,"date":"2010-02-11T00:48:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T05:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16711557.post-5350903887085424750"},"modified":"2010-02-11T00:48:48","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T05:48:48","slug":"the-new-american-imperialism-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/305848","title":{"rendered":"The New American Imperialism in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Abayomi Azikiwe (right), editor of the Pan-African News Wire, along with (right to left) David Sole of MECAWI, Mike Kelly of Finding Alternatives to Military Enlistment (FAME) and Derrick Grigsby of MECAWI. (Photo: Cheryl LaBash, WW).<\/a>
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

The new American imperialism in Africa<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt
2010-02-04, Issue 468
http:\/\/pambazuka.org\/en\/category\/features\/62008<\/p>\n

cc US ArmyMichael Schmidt reveals the alarming extent of American military expansion in Africa. This article was written four years ago, but still holds strong relevance today in the context of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). Schmidt describes three avenues that the US is taking to increase its military foothold in Africa in pursuit of its \u2018War on Terror\u2019: \u2018piggybacking\u2019 off already strong French military presence, creating an unofficial \u2018School of the Africas\u2019 in the guise of the African Centre for Strategic Studies, and with its Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme \u2018aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (imperialist) objectives\u2019. Schmidt places blame beyond the US, however, and uncovers the role that African countries, particularly South Africa, are playing in strengthening US military presence through \u2018secret pacts\u2019. In light of all this, Schmidt concludes with a warning: \u2018It would be na\u00efve to think that bourgeois democracy\u2026 will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.\u2019<\/p>\n

AMERICA MUSCLES INTO \u2018FRENCH TERRITORY\u2019<\/p>\n

Former colonial power, France, has maintained the largest foreign military presence in Africa since most countries attained sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s. While France reduced its armed presence on the continent by two thirds at the end of the last century, it continues to intervene in a muscular and controversial fashion. For example, under a 1961 \u2018mutual defence\u2019 pact, French forces were allowed to be permanently stationed in Ivory Coast and the 500-strong 43rd Marine Infantry Battalion is still based at Port Bouet next to the Abidjan airport.<\/p>\n

When the civil war erupted in Ivory Coast in September 2002, France added a \u2018stabilisation force\u2019, now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne, which was augmented in 2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) \u2018peacekeepers\u2019 drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. In January 2006, the United Nations extended the mandate of Operation Licorne until December 2006.<\/p>\n

Piggybacking off the French military presence in Africa, however, are a series of new foreign military and policing initiatives by the United States and the European Union. It appears that the US has devised a new \u2018Monroe Doctrine\u2019 for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of US interventions in what it saw as its Latin American \u2018back yard\u2019).<\/p>\n

Under the George W. Bush regime\u2019s War on Terror doctrine, the US has designated a swathe of territory \u2013 curving across the globe from Colombia and Venezuela in South America, through Africa\u2019s Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel regions, and into the Middle East and Central Asia \u2013 as the \u2018arc of instability\u2019, where both real and supposed terrorists may find refuge and training.<\/p>\n

In Africa, which falls under the US military\u2019s European Command (EUCOM), the US has struck agreements with France to share its military bases. For example, there is now a US marine corps base in Djibouti at the French base of Camp Lemonier. More than 1,800 marines are stationed there, allegedly for \u2018counter-terrorism\u2019 operations in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and East Africa, as well as for controlling the Red Sea shipping lanes.<\/p>\n

But the US presence involves more than piggybacking off French bases. In 2003, US intelligence operatives began training spies for four unnamed North African countries. These are believed to be Morocco and Egypt and perhaps also Algeria and Tunisia.<\/p>\n

It is also conducting training of the armed forces of countries such as Chad. In September 2005, Bush told the United Nations Security Council that the US would train 40,000 \u2018African peace-keepers\u2019 to \u2018preserve justice and order in Africa\u2019, over the following five years. The US Embassy in Pretoria said, at the time, that the US had already trained 20,000 \u2018peace-keepers\u2019 in 12 African countries in the use of \u2018non-lethal equipment\u2019.<\/p>\n

And now, while the US is downscaling and dismantling military bases in Germany and South Korea, it is relocating these military resources to Africa and the Middle East in order to \u2018combat terrorism\u2019 and \u2018protect oil resources\u2019.<\/p>\n

In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, and S\u00e3o Tom\u00e9 & Pr\u00edncipe. These \u2018jumping-off points\u2019 will station small, permanent forces, but with the ability to launch major regional military adventures, according to the US-based Associated Press. An existing US base at Entebbe in Uganda, under the one-party regime of US ally Yoweri Museveni, already \u2018covers\u2019 East Africa and the Great Lakes region. In Dakar, Senegal, the US is busy upgrading an airfield.<\/p>\n

SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE \u2018WAR ON TERROR\u2019<\/p>\n

Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts with include Gabon, Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a \u2018second Guantanamo\u2019 in the Indian Ocean, where alleged terror suspects who are kidnapped in Africa, the Middle East or Asia can be detained and interrogated without trial. This \u2018second Guantanamo\u2019 comprises of a detention camp, refuelling point and bomber base situated on the British-colonised Chagos Archipelago island of Diego Garcia, an island from which the indigenous inhabitants were forcibly removed to Mauritius.<\/p>\n

In South Africa\u2019s case, while it is unlikely that there will ever be US bases established \u2013 the strength of South Africa\u2019s own military, SANDF, makes this unnecessary \u2013 in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the US\u2019s Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme, which is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (imperialist) objectives.<\/p>\n

South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as the 13th African member, effectively joined the American War on Terror. ACOTA started life as a \u2018humanitarian\u2019 programme run by EUCOM out of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1996. After the 9\/11 attacks, however, the Pentagon reorganised ACOTA and gave it more teeth.<\/p>\n

Today, ACOTA\u2019s makeup is more obviously aggressive than defensive. According to journalist Pierre Abromovici \u2013 writing, in the July 2004 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, about rumours that South Africa was preparing to sign ACOTA a full year before it did so \u2013 \u2018ACOTA includes offensive training, particularly for regular infantry units and small units modelled on special forces\u2026 In Washington, the talk is no longer of non-lethal weapons\u2026 the emphasis is on \u201coffensive\u201d co-operation\u2019.<\/p>\n

The real nature of ACOTA is perhaps indicated by the career of the man heading it up, Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina. He is, according to Abromovici, \u2018a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs\u2026 He is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defence Board, and, in the 1960s, he took part in clandestine operations against the Sandanistas. He was accused of involvement in drug-trafficking to fund arms sent to Central America\u2019 to prop up pro-Washington right-wing dictatorships.<\/p>\n

Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent \u2018anti-communist\u2019 \u2013 whether that means opposing rebellious states or popular insurrections. He also sits on the executive of a strange outfit within the US military called the Cuban-American Military council, which aims at installing itself as the government of Cuba should the US ever achieve a forcible \u2018regime-change\u2019 there.<\/p>\n

The career of the US ambassador, Jendayi Fraser, who concluded the ACOTA pact with South Africa is also an indicator of US intentions. Fraser, Bush\u2019s senior advisor on Africa, had no diplomatic experience. Instead, she once served as a politico-military planner with the joint chiefs of staff in the Department of Defence and as senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. According to Fraser\u2019s online biography, she \u2018worked on African security issues with the State Department\u2019s international military education training programmes\u2019.<\/p>\n

IS THERE A MURDEROUS \u2018SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS\u2019?<\/p>\n

The programmes that Fraser mentions include the \u2018Next Generation of African Military Leaders\u2019 course run by the shady African Centre for Strategic Studies based in Washington, which has \u2018chapters\u2019 in various African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of \u2018School of the Africas\u2019 similar to the infamous \u2018School of the Americas\u2019 based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).<\/p>\n

Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous death-squad killers, and Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002.<\/p>\n

Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of Nicaragua, in 1980, and the \u2018El Mozote\u2019 massacre of 767 villagers in El Salvador, in 1981, were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC down, is on an FBI \u2018anti-terrorism\u2019 watch-list.<\/p>\n

So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch cannot confirm these fears? There is more: we\u2019ve all heard of the \u2018Standby Force\u2019 being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa\u2019s authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe \u2013 which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia \u2013 the African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism.<\/p>\n

The Centre is based in Algiers in Algeria, at the heart of a murderous regime that has itself \u2018made disappear\u2019 some 3,000 people between 1992 and 2003 (according to Amnesty International this is equivalent to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, but it is a fact ignored by the African left). The Centre\u2019s director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a think-tank and trainer of \u2018anti-terrorism\u2019 judges, but that it would also have teeth and would provide training in \u2018specific armed intervention\u2019 to support the continent\u2019s regimes.<\/p>\n

Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said though, that only ten per cent of terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only six per cent were on state figures and institutions, though the latter were \u2018focused\u2019. She warned that a major cause of African terrorism was \u2018a growing void between government and security forces on the one hand, and local communities on the other\u2019. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are recruited into rebel armies even though few of these offer any sort of real solution.<\/p>\n

The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU\u2019s \u2018Algiers Convention on Terrorism\u2019, which is notoriously vague on the definition of terrorism. This opens the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the new counter-terrorism forces. It would be na\u00efve to think that bourgeois democracy \u2013 which passed South Africa\u2019s equally vaguely-defined Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act into law last year \u2013 will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.<\/p>\n

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS<\/p>\n

* Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based journalist and political activist.
* This article was first published in three years ago in ‘Zabalaza: a Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism’, No. 8, November 2006. Zabalaza is the English-language sister journal of the French-language Afrique Sans Ch\u00e2ines.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
<\/p>\n

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Abayomi Azikiwe (right), editor of the Pan-African News Wire, along with (right to left) David Sole of MECAWI, Mike Kelly of Finding Alternatives to Military Enlistment (FAME) and Derrick Grigsby of MECAWI. (Photo: Cheryl LaBash, WW).Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos The new American imperialism in Africa Michael Schmidt2010-02-04, Issue 468http:\/\/pambazuka.org\/en\/category\/features\/62008 cc US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}