United States war in Africa

This video is called Africom: The New American Empire in Africa.

By Bill van Auken in the USA:

US troops to Niger: A new stage in the scramble for Africa

26 February 2013

President Barack Obama’s terse notification to Congress last week that American troops are being deployed to the northwest African nation of Niger confirms that a whole new stage in the imperialist recolonization of Africa is now in progress.

The dispatch of the first 100 troops—with hundreds more reportedly to follow—is bound up with a deal signed last month between Washington and the Niger government allowing the US military to set up a drone base on the country’s territory, creating the conditions for spreading the Obama administration’s remote-control killing spree throughout the region.

The buildup of US forces in Niger comes in the immediate wake of last month’s French intervention in neighboring Mali, carried out with critical US logistical and intelligence support, and aimed, in the words of French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, at the “total reconquest” of the former colony.

Both Paris and Washington have justified their military incursions into the African continent in the name of defeating Al Qaeda and associated organizations in Africa. British Prime Minister David Cameron chimed in last month, warning that the prosecution of this war in Africa could span “decades.”

The glaring contradiction between this pretext for war in Africa’s Sahel region and the line-up of these imperialist powers behind Al Qaeda-linked militias in the sectarian-based war to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria is passed over in silence by the media and the political establishments in all three countries.

No one in the US press, for example, bothered noting that Obama’s announcement of the deployment of US troops in a supposed war against Al Qaeda in Africa came on the same day that Washington blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning an Al Qaeda terror bombing that massacred scores of civilians in Damascus.

Behind the incoherence of the pretexts for imperialist intervention, the real forces driving it are clear. Washington finds itself being economically eclipsed in Africa by China, which has emerged as the continent’s leading trade partner. Increasingly in competition over strategic resources—West Africa is soon expected to account for 25 percent of US petroleum imports—US imperialism is relying on its residual military superiority to combat this economic challenge.

In the prosecution of this predatory strategy, Al Qaeda serves a dual purpose—providing shock troops for the toppling of regimes seen as obstacles to US hegemony, and serving as a pretext for other interventions carried out in the name of combating “terrorism” and “extremism.”

Setting up the new base in Niger places US drones just across the border from Nigeria, which until recently has supplied 10 percent of US foreign oil imports and where the Pentagon has grown increasingly involved in an internal conflict involving Boko Haram, an indigenous Islamic sect that appears to have no ties to Al Qaeda nor any ambitions outside of Nigeria.

In light of these developments, the significance of the US-NATO intervention to bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 emerges with ever greater clarity. Claiming the lives of some 80,000 Libyans and leaving an entire society in rubble, this was the first war to be commanded by AFRICOM, the regional command set up under the Bush administration in 2007. It was waged to pave the way for new and more far-reaching military interventions.

The Gaddafi regime served as the linchpin of security and economic relations that maintained a semblance of stability in the Sahel region, providing economic aid, for example, that served to cushion the longstanding conflicts between the Tuareg people and the regimes in Mali and Niger.

The toppling and murder of Gaddafi had the altogether foreseeable consequence of destabilizing the region, sending Tuaregs fleeing Libya into Mali, followed by the very Islamist elements that Washington had backed in the war for regime-change in Libya, and thus providing the pretext for both US and French imperialism to intervene again, putting troops on the ground in the region.

Plans for these interventions were well advanced before the first bomb was dropped on Tripoli. The region has been a focus of US strategic calculations for the past decade, beginning with Washington’s Pan Sahel Initiative in 2003, followed by its Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership in 2005.

In this context, the role played by a whole layer of pseudo-lefts internationally in justifying and promoting the war against Libya, touting it as a humanitarian intervention, a crusade for democracy, and even a “revolution,” also becomes clearer than ever.

The academic scoundrel Juan Cole of the University of Michigan used his inflated reputation as a critic of the Iraq war to sell the war in Libya. Gilbert Achcar, a member of the international Pabloite United Secretariat and a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, condemned NATO for not dropping more bombs on the country.

Related articles

• War in Mali and German militarism (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• New Drone Base in Niger Builds U.S. Presence in Africa (3quarksdaily.com)
• The West’s War Against African Development Continues (counterpunch.org)
• Obama Spreads U.S. Troops To Niger, Africa To “Support Tax Payer Predator Drone Base” ~ From Libya To Niger The Killing Goes On. (politicalvelcraft.org)
• Imperial Jockeying in Africa: U.S. Intervention Sets to Deepen (globalresearch.ca)

Sudanese dictator welcomed by Libya, Chad regimes

This is a video about racist lynching of Libyans under the new regime because of the colour of their skins.

In the ‘new’ post-NATO war Libya, Libyans, African migrant workers and almost everybody else, including United States ambassadors, have to fear for their lives. The new rulers of Libya are allies of the NATO governments.

So is the dictator of Chad, Idriss Deby. He is a long time favourite of French governments, already under Sarkozy, predecessor of the present president Hollande.

From the Sudan Tribune:

Sudan: Bashir to Visit Chad, Libya Despite ICC Warrant

11 February 2013

Khartoum — The Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir will travel to Chad and Libya this weekend to attend two events, a government sponsored website reported today.

The state-linked Sudanese Media Center (SMC) quoting press sources said that Chadian president Idriss Deby invited Bashir to the Community of Sahel-Saharan (CEN-SAD) summit during his stop in Khartoum last week.

Chad is a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has issued two arrest warrants for Bashir on ten counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide allegedly committed in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

The ten-year Darfur conflict in western Sudan, on the border with Chad, has claimed 300,000 lives according to the United Nations. The Khartoum government puts the toll at 10,000.

…

Bashir’s previous visits to Chad in 2010 and 2011 were strongly criticized by the European Union and human rights groups in light of Ndjamena’s refusal to arrest Bashir.

During Chad’s thorny relations with Sudan, president Deby vowed to execute the arrest warrant against Bashir and rejected AU resolutions granting him immunity. However, as relations improved Deby reversed his position.

The AU summit that took place in Addis Ababa last month omitted the usual mention of urging its members to ignore ICC warrant against Bashir. A source told Sudan Tribune that African diplomats did not believe this was a pressing issue warranting discussion this time around.

SMC said that Bashir may head to Libya afterwards to attend the celebrations commemorating the outbreak of the revolution that toppled the regime of late leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The website noted that Bashir was invited by the Libyan leadership to attend but said that tensions in the North African country may not allow for the celebration to take place.

Ironically, Bashir was one of the very few leaders in 2009 who attended Gaddafi’s celebration of the coup which brought him to power forty years ago.

Following Gaddafi’s fall and demise in 2011 Bashir lashed out at Libya’s strongman saying that he was causing harm to Sudan through the years and revealed that Sudan provided support to rebels who launched a military campaign to unseat him.

Libya is not a member of the ICC and therefore has no obligation to detain Bashir. But it was the National Transitional Council (NTC), which took control of the country, that asked the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2011 to refer the situation in Libya to the Hague tribunal in order to investigate possible crimes committed following the uprising against Gaddafi.

This would mark Bashir’s second visit to Libya since Gaddafi’s removal.

Munich conference promotes war

This is a video from 2011 in Munich, Germany about a demonstration against the “Security” Conference.

By Christoph Dreier in Germany:

Munich Security Conference endorses US call for expansion of neo-colonial wars

4 February 2013

This year’s Munich Security Conference, held over the weekend, took place against the background of the re-colonization of the Middle East and Africa by the US and its European allies. It was an unabashed affirmation of the type of naked imperialist domination of these regions that characterized the first half of the 20th century.

Even as the meeting was underway, French President François Hollande was making a celebratory visit to France’s former colony Mali while French troops and war planes continued to attack insurgent-held territory, and British Prime Minister David Cameron was holding talks with UK-backed leaders in Algeria and Libya.

For three days, leading political, military and defense industry representatives of the major powers, along with invited officials from other nations, met to discuss current and future military operations and geo-strategic issues. The conference demonstrated the consensus among the major imperialist powers, led by the United States, for an expanded political and military drive to install puppet governments and seize control of critical natural resources across the Middle East, Central Asia and the African continent.

The tone was set by US Vice President Joseph Biden, who delivered a bellicose speech singling out as targets of US and NATO aggression nations ranging from Syria, Iran and Yemen to Somalia, Mali and the rest of North Africa.

Some 400 participants from nearly 90 countries were invited to the privately organized conference, which has been held for the past 49 years at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. Among those taking part were Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi and, for the first time, representatives of the Western-backed Syrian opposition. …

Biden described the brutal wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as great successes and models for future enterprises.

Meanwhile, there are much better plans for Africa.

From BirdLife:

Large grants available to protect critical ecosystems in Libya and Algeria

Mon, Feb 4, 2013

In its role as the Regional Implementation Team (RIT) for the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) in the Mediterranean Basin Biodiversity Hotspot, BirdLife International invites Letters of Inquiry from NGOs, community groups, private enterprises, universities and other civil society organisations for large grants to conserve biodiversity in Algeria and Libya.

This is a special call for large grants (between US $20,000 and US $150,000) that will be awarded by CEPF for biodiversity conservation projects in Algeria and Libya only, with a focus on those that help build the capacity of conservation NGOs in these countries.

…

Projects that help build capacity for conservation in Algeria and Libya, for example by providing training for local civil society organisations and by raising public awareness of conservation issues there, will be well supported.

Much better plans indeed.

But plans much endangered by the war plans of the militarists at the Munich conference.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, war, more war

This music video from the USA in the time of the Vietnam war is called Grand Funk Railroad – People Let’s Stop The War. Lyrics are here.

By Felicity Arbuthnot:

The grim legacy of destruction

Thursday 31 January 2013

The usual suspects have embarked on another mass butchery – sorry, “training exercise” – in mega-resource-rich Mali, and are meddling with lethality in Algeria.

Britain, ever keen to kill, has gone from the Prime Minister’s “no boots on the ground” assurances to “operation creep” in barely over a week.

The US, says a spokesman, assesses that “intervention” may “last for years.”

He was talking Mali. Think Africa.

A planned US drone base on the Mali-Niger border – as John Glaser has written – is one of “a constellation of secret drone bases” in east Africa and the Arabian peninsula, in Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Seychelles and beyond.

These bases have been used to bomb Yemen and Somalia and most likely perform surveillance missions in east Africa and the Persian Gulf.

The disaster of a recent African foray – the ruins of Libya, with estimated lives lost ranging from 30,000 to 100,000, the brutal death of the country’s leader, the murder of the US ambassador, the torching of his Benghazi residence and deaths of three US government employees – are seemingly forgotten. No lessons learned.

The British embassy in Tripoli has received “credible threats,” with the Foreign Office advising against travel to the country. Westerners are facing a “high threat from terrorism.”

This week’s gift of “democracy” to Afghanistan – where US soldiers are being killed with relentless regularity by their Afghan “colleagues” who, of course, they have “trained” – has brought such poverty and desperation that the BBC, usually loyal to a fault to any colonial invasion, is reporting that some families resort to selling one child, in order to gain enough money to feed the others.

In the country’s horrific prisons, the UN reports this month that torture is on the rise and that, as in Iraq, the unspeakable continues.

In Iraq the occupation’s abuses continue to haunt the invaders and the Iraqis.

The tireless Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers has presented another case on behalf of 180 Iraqis at the High Court, alleging they had been systematically abused and tortured by British troops using methods chillingly reminiscent of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The claim is of a “systematic” policy between 2003 and 2008 of lawless torture and killing.

“We’ve got the training materials, we’ve got the policy documents,” said Shiner.

“Violence was endemic to the [British] state practices and part of the state practices.”

As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion approaches it is surely time for the invading countries to attempt to amend for the enormity of the illegality of the invasion and for individual sufferings.

Details of the alleged abuses by Britain’s “heroes” defy depravity, bestiality, sadism and sub-humanity’s worst.

Just a few of those who suffered have their days in court. Others have made pleas that should also shame.

It is impossible not to ponder whether the core of Western proclaimed values are not hypocritical cant.

They simply annihilate or condone annihilating those who pose no threat whatsoever.

They ignore year after year, pleas for justice, pleas for human lives in line with their hollow, meaningless, hypocritical prayers.

Of the torture cases now before the High Court, law Professor Andrew Williams of Warwick University says: “This is our last chance to get to the truth of what happened.

“This is what we demand of others, but we do not demand it of ourselves. What kind of message does that give the world about who we are?”

Indeed. Our governments have become the regimes they warned us about. Ones that illegally invade, rape, torture, incarcerate without oversight or review, either without trial, or via a proxy kangaroo court.

Last September Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for George W Bush and Tony Blair to be brought to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on war crimes charges. They had, he said, “fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies.

“They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.”

Blair: Mali war like fight against communism: here.

Mali‘s army has committed serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law while fighting armed groups in the country, Amnesty International said today: here.

Speaking of Mali and Syria: NYT reporters and editors can hardly show us connections between stories which they don’t see themselves: here.

Britain: A new government strategy aiming to increase military ties with Libya, Somalia and Burma must include “comprehensive safeguards” against human rights abuses, Amnesty warned today: here.

Libya arms fueling conflicts in Syria, Mali and beyond: here.

Related articles

• British soldiers to Mali war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Africa invaded, terrorism or profits? (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Illegal Invasions, Rogue States, Forgotten Victims and a Shaming Plea (dissidentvoice.org)
• Mali: the fastest blowback yet in this disastrous war on terror | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
• Munich conference promotes war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Will Mali Become France’s Afghanistan? (usnews.com)
• French, British neocolonialism in Mali (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• The grim legacy of destruction (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• THE RECOLONIZATION OF AFRICA: Condemnation of Mali war (lunaticoutpost.com)
• Mali refugees flee French neo-colonial war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)

Africa invaded, terrorism or profits?

This video from the USA is called STOP AFRICOM!

By John Pilger:

The real invasion of Africa is not news and a licence to lie is Hollywood’s gift

31 January 2013

A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.

The invasion has almost nothing to do with “Islamism“, and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a “menacing arc” of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus “red menace” of a worldwide communist conspiracy.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Last year, Africom staged Operation African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose “historic mission”, warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.

A striking example is the eastern Congo, a treasure trove of strategic minerals, controlled by an atrocious rebel group known as the M23, which in turn is run by Uganda and Rwanda, the proxies of Washington.

Long planned as a “mission” for Nato, not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011 when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. Nato bombers were dispatched not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi ruled over Africa’s largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to rubble, the British SAS directed the “rebel” militias in what has since been exposed as a racist bloodbath.

The indigenous people of the Sahara, the Tuareg, whose Berber fighters Gaddafi had protected, fled home across Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state since the 1960s. As the ever watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is this local dispute, not al-Qaida, that the West fears most in northwest Africa… “poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals”.

Almost certainly the consequence of a French/US attack on Mali on 13 January, a siege at a gas complex in Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The former Carlton TV PR man raged about a “global threat” requiring “decades” of western violence. He meant implantation of the west’s business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria and the conquest of independent Iran.

Cameron has now ordered British troops to Mali, and sent an RAF drone, while his verbose military chief, General Sir David Richards, has addressed “a very clear message to jihadists worldwide: don’t dangle and tangle with us. We will deal with it robustly” – exactly what jihadists want to hear. The trail of blood of British army terror victims, all Muslims, their “systemic” torture cases currently heading to court, add necessary irony to the general’s words. I once experienced Sir David’s “robust” ways when I asked him if he had read the courageous Afghan feminist Malalai Joya‘s description of the barbaric behaviour of westerners and their clients in her country. “You are an apologist for the Taliban” was his reply. (He later apologised).

These bleak comedians are straight out of Evelyn Waugh and allow us to feel the bracing breeze of history and hypocrisy. The “Islamic terrorism” that is their excuse for the enduring theft of Africa’s riches was all but invented by them. There is no longer any excuse to swallow the BBC/CNN line and not know the truth. Read Mark Curtis’s Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (Serpent’s Tail) or John Cooley’s Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press) or The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski (HarperCollins) who was midwife to the birth of modern fundamentalist terror. In effect, the mujahedin of al-Qaida and the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Britain’s MI6.

Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in 1979 that began what became the current “war on terror”. For 17 years, the US deliberately cultivated, bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed jihadi extremists that “steeped a generation in violence”. Code-named Operation Cyclone, this was the “great game” to bring down the Soviet Union but brought down the Twin Towers.

Since then, the news that intelligent, educated people both dispense and ingest has become a kind of Disney journalism, fortified, as ever, by Hollywood’s licence to lie, and lie. There is the coming Dreamworks movie on WikiLeaks, a fabrication inspired by a book of perfidious title-tattle by two enriched Guardian journalists; and there is Zero Dark Thirty, which promotes torture and murder, directed by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, the Leni Riefenstahl of our time, promoting her master’s voice as did the Fuhrer’s pet film-maker. Such is the one-way mirror through which we barely glimpse what power does in our name.

Related articles

• America Invades Africa: The Resource War and the Conquest of Mali (globalresearch.ca)
• Gilbert Mercier on Progressive Radio Network: Mali May Become Africa’s Afghanistan (newsjunkiepost.com)
• EU prepares support to border management in Libya (appablog.wordpress.com)
• US Plans Base for Drones Near Mali (news.antiwar.com)

British soldiers to Mali war

This photo of a French Foreign Legion soldier, part of the invasion of Mali, shows the real face of that war.

That war is not “against Al Qaeda terrorism” (supported by the French government in Libya, and still in Syria). It is not for women’s rights, human rights or secularism.

It is in support of a military dictatorship.

It brings death, mainly to Malian civilians.

This war is a neo-colonial war.

Britain: David Cameron must be getting a taste for war. Little over a year after the bombs stopped falling on Libyan civilians and with thousands of British troops still bogged in the Afghan quagmire, our Prime Minister is all too eager to set out on another military adventure: here.

As Britain eagerly joins in the Mali crisis, uncomfortable parallels are seen with the wars in Vietnam and Malaya: here.

From daily News Line in Britain:

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

UK TROOPS GO INTO MALI! – FO tells Brits to quit Lebanon, Tripoli, Palestine & Somalia

BRITAIN is to send 350 troops to Mali to be deployed as ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’, Defence Secretary Hammond told an anxious House of Commons in an Emergency Statement yesterday.

Tory MP John Baron, who raised the ‘Urgent Question’, said that he opposed intervention and warned of ‘a host of grey areas,’ asking: ‘what is the exit strategy? . . what if things go wrong? . . . what are the contingency plans when and if things don’t go well?’

Barron warned of ‘mission creep’ and ‘a real danger of being drawn into a much larger deployment’.

Hammond replied: ‘The UK has a clear interest in the stability of Mali. It cannot be allowed to devolve into an ungovernable state.

‘We see our involvement here as a continuation of our military co-operation with France which has developed from joint action in Libya.’

He went on to claim: ‘The British role is not a combat role and will not extend to forced protection role.

‘It is not our intention to deploy combat troops, we have defined very clearly the levels of support we are willing to provide.’

Labour shadow defence secretary Murphy said that there is ‘already mission creep – from the deployment of two aircraft to several hundred troops’, adding that the public ‘are wary and weary after Iraq and Afghanistan’ and are saying ‘Oh no, not again’.

Tory MP Peter Tapsell warned that the intervention is likely to contribute to the ‘spread of Jihadism’ and will increase the ‘terror threat in the UK’.

Labour MP Bob Ainsworth asked: ‘How long and how many?’

Frank Dobson MP said: ‘Will the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister bear in mind, whatever the merits of what’s presently proposed, that the American catastrophe in Vietnam started off with the deployment of American troops in a training and advisory capacity.’

Dennis Skinner said: ‘When the intervention took place in Libya, at a very low level we were told by the government at the beginning, the truth is that when those Benghazi rebels were provided with large numbers of weapons, we found that Al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Mali and north Africa were using the same weapons that Britain and other countries had supplied, and that is mission creep and if it’s not careful it will get even worse.’

Meanwhile, Britains living in Somalia have been urged to get out now.

The Foreign Office said there was a ‘specific threat’ identified to Westerners in the territory and they should depart immediately.

Last week, a similar threat was issued for Britons living in the Libyan city of Benghazi after the Foreign Office became aware of a ‘specific and imminent threat’.

On Tuesday travel warnings were further extended throughout North Africa and the Middle East with the Foreign Office releasing this statement: ‘We advise against all travel to the city of Tripoli and Palestinian refugee camps and against all but essential travel to the Bekaa valley, to within 5km of the Syrian border, to the southern city of Saida, and to areas south of the Litani river.’

North Africa and the Middle East is becoming a no-go zone for UK nationals.

Labour MP Paul Flynn urged Prime Minister David Cameron today to stop ignoring Parliament when he plays dangerous war games: here.

Bahrain dictatorship supports Mali war: here.

Washington has secured an agreement with the government of Niger to establish a US military [drone] base in the Northwest African country, which borders Mali. The agreement comes in the midst of the French intervention in Mali, employing ground troops and warplanes: here.

Related articles

• French war in Mali war crimes (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• G4S mercenaries’ Mali war profits (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Gulf Oil Leaders Behind North Africa Becoming New Afghanistan? (chainsoff.wordpress.com)
• British soldiers will be in west Africa ‘in weeks’: Cameron sends 200 troops in major escalation of UK’s involvement (dailymail.co.uk)
• Britain to send in troops to Mali (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• Mali: Britain ‘risks being drawn into Afghan-style conflict’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• French, British neocolonialism in Mali (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)

G4S mercenaries’ Mali war profits

This is a music video by British punk band Crass, of their song Securicor (another name for G4S corporation). Lyrics are here.

By Ramzy Baroud in Britain:

Cashing in on Mali‘s conflict

Monday 28 January 2013

Bungling security firm G4S is set to rake in massive profits thanks to crises in Mali, Libya and Algeria.

Recognised as the world’s biggest security firm, the group’s reputation took a battering after its failure to meet the conditions of the government’s Olympic security contract last year.

But with growing unrest in north and west Africa, it is expected to make a speedy recovery.

The hostage crisis at Algeria’s Ain Amenas gas plant, during which 38 hostages were killed, saw the return of al-Qaida – only this time not as extremists on the run but as well-prepared militants with the ability to strike deeply into enemy territories and cause serious damage.

For G4S and other security firms, this translates into lucre.

“The British group … is seeing a rise in work ranging from electronic surveillance to protecting travellers,” said G4S regional president for Africa Andy Baker.

“Demand has been very high across Africa. The nature of our business is such that in high-risk environments the need for our services increases.”

If Algeria is a relative newcomer to the private security companies’ emerging African market, Libya must be a private security firm paradise.

Since Nato toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi’s regime last year numerous militias have sprung up throughout the country, some armed with heavy weapons courtesy of the West.

Disturbing scenes of armed militias setting up checkpoints at every corner were initially dismissed as an inevitable post-revolution reality.

However, when Westerners became targets themselves, “security” in Libya finally became high on the agenda.

Many private security firms already operate in Libya – some were even present in the country before the former Libyan government was officially overthrown.

Some of these firms were virtually unknown before the war, including a small private British firm, Blue Mountain Group.

It was responsible for guarding the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, which was torched on September 11 last year, resulting in the death of four US citizens including ambassador J Christopher Stevens.

It later emerged that the attack on the embassy was pre-planned and well co-ordinated, though it remains unclear why the State Department opted to hire Blue Mountain Group, as opposed to a larger security firm as is usually the case with Western embassies.

Large companies are now vying to reconstruct the very country that their governments conspired to destroy.

The lucrative business of destroying, rebuilding and securing has been witnessed in other wars and conflicts spurred on by Western interventions.

Private security firms are the middlemen that keep local irritants from getting in the way of post-war “diplomacy” and the work of business giants.

When a country eventually collapses under the pressure of bunker-busters and other advanced weapons, security firms move in as Western diplomats start their bargaining with emerging local elites over the future of the country’s wealth.

In Libya, those who contributed the biggest guns were the ones that received the largest contracts.

And while the destroyed country is being robbed blind, it is the locals who suffer the consequences of having brutish foreigners with guns watching their neighbourhoods in the name of security.

It must be said that the new Libyan government has specifically rejected Blackwater-style armed contractors, fearing provocations similar to those that occurred in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 and similar killings throughout Afghanistan.

The aim in Libya is to allow smooth business transactions without protests provoked by trigger-happy foreigners.

The systematic destruction of central government and its entire military apparatus means that security is continuing to deteriorate, and finding a solution remains a major source of debate.

Private security firms are essentially mercenaries who offer services to spare Western governments the political cost of incurring too many casualties.

While these companies are often based in Western cities, many of their employees come from so-called Third World countries.

It’s much safer this way because when Asian, African or Arab security personnel are wounded or killed on duty it seldom registers as anything more than a a mere news item, with little political consequence.

Mali, a west African country that is suffering multiple crises – military coups, civil war, famine and an all-out French-led war – is the likely next victim, or opportunity, for the deadly trio of Western governments, large corporations and private security firms.

In fact, Mali is the perfect ground for such opportunists, who will spare no effort to exploit its massive economic potential and strategic location.

For years the country has fallen under political and military Western influences.

This year saw a textbook scenario that ultimately and predictably led to Western intervention that finally took place on January 11, when France launched a military operation supposedly aimed at ousting armed Islamic extremists.

The military operations will last “as long as necessary,” declared President Francois Hollande, echoing the logic of the Bush administration when it first declared its “war on terror.”

But as inviting as the Malian setting may seem, it is highly intricate and unpredictable.

No simple timeline can possibly describe how the current crisis came about.

However, a number of arrows point to large caches of weapons that made their way from Libya to Mali following the Nato war.

A new balance of power took hold, empowering the oppressed Tuareg people and flooding the country with desert-hardened militants belonging to various Islamic groups.

Two upheavals developed at the same time in northern and southern parts of the country early last year.

Tuareg’s National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) declared independence in the north and was quickly joined by the Ansar Dine Islamists, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA).

Meanwhile US-trained army captain Amadou Sanogo made his move in the southern part of the country in March, overthrowing president Amadou Toumani Toure.

Events developed rapidly, giving the impression that confrontation between the south and the north was imminent and inevitable.

Mali’s old colonial master France was quick to wave the military card and worked diligently to enlist west African countries in its war efforts.

The plan was for the intervention to appear as if it was purely an African effort, with mere logistical support and political backing from their Western benefactors.

On December 21 the UN security council approved the sending in of an African-led force of 3,000 soldiers from the Economic Community of West African States to chase after northern militants in the vast Malian desert.

However, this deployment was not scheduled until September 2013 to allow France to form a united western front and to train fragmented Malian forces.

But when the militants captured the strategic town of Konna from government forces, France’s hand was apparently forced and it then intervened in Mali without UN consent.

The war which was waged in the name of human rights and Mali’s territorial integrity has already sparked outcry from major human rights organisations over crimes committed by foreign forces and their Malian army partners.

The French conquest has left other Western powers licking their chops over the potential of having access to Mali, which is unlikely to have a strong central government any time soon.

As France, the US and EU countries determine Mali’s future through military efforts and political roadmaps, the country itself is so weakened and politically disfigured beyond any possibility of confronting outside designs.

For G4S and other security firms, Mali now tops the list in Africa’s emerging security market. Nigeria and Kenya follow closely, with possibilities emerging elsewhere.

When private security firms speak of an emerging market in Africa, it is safe to assume that the continent is once more falling prey to growing military ambitions and unfair business conduct.

While G4S is likely to polish its tarnished brand, hundreds of thousands of African refugees – 800,000 in Mali alone – be forced to the borders and unforgiving deserts. Their security matters to no-one. Private security firms have no concern for penniless refugees.

Related articles

• ‘New’ Libya, run for your lives! (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• British merchants of death in Libya (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Before he was overthrown and killed, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi warned jihadists would conquer northern Africa (news.nationalpost.com)
• Tunisia reinforces deployment in desert region against spillover of Mali conflicts (nzweek.com)
• War in Mali: France Can Bomb Militants, but Not Arms Routes (world.time.com)
• Fears grow that Libya is incubator of turmoil (timesofisrael.com)
• France and Libya, Mali violence (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Libya Faces A Growing Islamist Threat (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
• The Libyan Afterparty Comes Back to Libya (blogs.the-american-interest.com)
• Whac-a-Mole in Africa As Extremists Return From Mali To Plague Libya (notthesingularity.com)

British merchants of death in Libya

This video from Britain is called Why Campaign against the Arms Trade?

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Britain’s arms dealers flogging guns in Libya

Sunday 27 January 2013

Britain’s arms dealers were hawking their wares in Libya the day before threats emerged of a terrorist attack with Western weapons, the Morning Star can reveal.

Ex-pats were streaming out of Benghazi on Friday after the Foreign Office warned of an “imminent threat to Westerners” in the wake of Britain’s planned drone strikes in Mali.

The strikes are part of a French-led campaign on behalf of Mali’s government to destroy Tuareg separatist militias and Islamists in the country’s north.

Both the US and Britain have acknowledged the fighters likely obtained their weapons from the stockpiles of deposed Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, prompting criticisms of Western arms sales in the region.

But a government trade official confirmed to the Morning Star on Friday that British firms were back lobbying Libyan brass at an arms expo in the capital of Tripoli just 24 hours before the warning went out.

The First Libyan Technologies Military Science Exhibition hosted 65 companies from 16 countries – including Cardiff’s BCB International, selling weapon accessories, projectile launchers and reconnaissance drones.

A Libyan liaison for UK Trade and Investment‘s defence and security organisation told the Star there had been “a fair amount” of British exhibitors at the Tripoli air base, although no major events had taken place.

But Campaign Against Arms Trade‘s Kaye Stearman said the news was “deeply worrying.”

“Libya is a deeply unstable country,” she said.

Britain’s Middle East Association, which is planning a trade mission in March to discuss “civil security” contracts, did not return requests for comment.

BCB International was removed from the DSEi arms fair in 2007 for promoting torture gear: leg irons: here.

Libya: Threats and Violence Against Journalists Reach Alarming Level: here.

Related articles

• ‘New’ Libya, run for your lives! (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Al Qaeda’s British weapons (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Fears grow that Libya is incubator of turmoil (sfgate.com)
• Al-Qaeda targets Germans, Britons in Libya: Spiegel (dailystar.com.lb)
• Terrorists ‘may have carried’ British arms (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• Britons, Westerners told to leave Benghazi after ‘imminent’ terror threat… (telegraph.co.uk)
• Britons should leave Benghazi immediately, says Foreign Office (guardian.co.uk)
• British soldiers to Mali war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Lufthansa halts Libya flights due to security worries (timesofmalta.com)

‘New’ Libya, run for your lives!

This video says about itself:

March 11, 2012

When the Libyan uprising began, many women enthusiastically took part, marching alongside men and aspiring to greater freedoms. But now they may have to pay for that liberation by losing their rights.

The Dutch government, like other NATO governments, in 2011 waged war against Libya.

After that bloody war, Libya, according to NATO logic, was “safe”. The Dutch government decided that refugees from Libya would be forced to go back to Libya. In practice, contrary to NATO theory, that might mean returning the refugees to their death.

So, safe in theory for refugees.

However, yesterday the Dutch government told Dutch nationals in the Libyan city Benghazi and the area east of Benghazi to run away immediately, because of threats of violence against them.

I myself was in Benghazi in 2006, for archaeological and birdwatching reasons.

I fondly remember the kind people.

I fondly remember, when walking along the harbour, five little terns flying.

Now, for the umpteenth time, the lies of the NATO merchants of “humanitarian” war, are exposed by bloody reality.

From News Line daily in Britain:

Friday, 25 January 2013

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! – Foreign Office tells UK nationals in Benghazi

THE UK Foreign Office yesterday urged British nationals to leave Benghazi at once in response to ‘a specific and imminent threat’ to Westerners from Al Qaeda and its supporters.

A notice on the Foreign Office website said: ‘Since September 2012, the Foreign Office has clearly advised against all travel to Benghazi and all areas of Libya, with the exception of Tripoli, Zuwara, Az Zawiya, al Khums, Zlitan and Misrata, and the coastal towns from Ras Lanuf to the Egyptian Border.

‘We are now aware of a specific and imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi, and urge any British nationals who remained there against our advice to leave immediately.

‘We have updated our Travel Advice to reflect this. The British Embassy in Tripoli has been in contact with British Nationals for whom we have contact details to alert them to the Advice.’

This ‘advice’ constitutes a huge slap in the face for the British government who spent hundreds of millions supporting the ‘Benghazi revolutionaries’, including the use of massive air power in a campaign that culminated with the murder of Colonel Gadaffi.

Now UK citizens are running for their lives from the same ‘revolutionaries’.

It has also emerged that the terrorists who laid siege to the Amenas gas plant in Algeria also took part in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador to Libya.

An Algerian security official has told the New York Times that three of the surviving terrorists said they were aided by Egyptian extremists who were involved in the September 11 attack on the US consulate in eastern Libya.

The Egyptians were reportedly all killed during the special forces raid on the gas plant and Hillary Clinton, the outgoing Secretary of State, said on Wednesday the US was still investigating the link.

Clinton said that there was ‘no doubt’ that the Algerian terrorists had been armed with weapons obtained from Libya.

While testifying in Washington on the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, she said: ‘There is no doubt that the Algerian terrorists had weapons from Libya.

‘There is no doubt that the Malian remnants of AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) have weapons from Libya,’ Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Algeria’s prime minister has said that 37 hostages and 29 assailants were killed in the operation. Three US citizens were reportedly also killed in the attack.

The Islamist ‘Mulathameen Brigade’ claimed responsibility for the hostage crisis, warning it would carry out similar attacks until Western powers end what it called an attack on Muslims in Mali.

Russia, which backed a UN Security Council resolution on intervention in Mali, also backed the UN Security Council resolution that was used to organise the NATO attack on Libya.

However, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on Wednesday: ‘Those whom the French and Africans are fighting now in Mali are the same people who overthrew the Gadaffi regime, those that our Western partners armed so that they would overthrow the Gadaffi regime.’

Saying that terrorist attacks had almost become a daily occurrence in the region, Lavrov reiterated: ‘The situation in Mali seems to be the consequence of events in Libya.’

Libya Protects Oil Fields, Foreigners Exit: here.

Related articles

• Britons, Westerners told to leave Benghazi after ‘imminent’ terror threat… (telegraph.co.uk)
• Britons urged to evacuate Benghazi (scotsman.com)
• France joins Benghazi Western exodus, Libya says not informed (dailystar.com.lb)
• Australia issues warning on Benghazi (bigpondnews.com)
• Clinton: ‘Algerian militants had weapons from Libya’ (itv.com)

French invasion of Mali, its real deathly face

This photo of a French Foreign Legion soldier, part of the invasion of Mali, shows the real face of that war.

That war is not “against Al Qaeda terrorism” (supported by the French government in Libya, and still in Syria). It is not for women’s rights, human rights or secularism.

It is in support of a military dictatorship.

It brings death, mainly to Malian civilians.

This war is a neo-colonial war.

The French top brass did not like the deathly honesty of the Foreign Legion soldier’s mask. It undermined war propaganda.

Related articles

• Panetta: US Pledges to Aid French Invasion of Mali (news.antiwar.com)
• France Formally Requests US Military Aid for Mali Invasion (economicpolicyjournal.com)
• France imposes media blackout on Mali war (aworldchaos.wordpress.com)
• RUSI: France in Mali: What Risk for the (foreignpolicyreview.org)
• Is Mali The Next Afghanistan? (infiniteunknown.net)
• Mali: UAE giving material, financial aid, Hollande says (alhittin.com)