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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Feb 04 2010 - 14:51:27 EST
The new American imperialism in Africa
Michael Schmidt
2010-02-04, Issue 468 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/468>
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62008
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62008>
Michael 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 <http://www.africom.mil/> 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 ‘War on
Terror’: ‘piggybacking’ off already strong French military presence,
creating an unofficial ‘School of the Africas’ in the guise of the African
Centre for Strategic Studies, and with its Africa Contingency Operations
Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme ‘aimed at integrating African armed
forces into US strategic (imperialist) objectives’. Schmidt goes places
blame beyond the US, however, and uncovers the role that African countries,
particularly South Africa, are playing in strengthening US military presence
through ‘secret pacts’. In light of all this, Schmidt concludes with a
warning: ‘It would be naïve to think that bourgeois… will protect the
working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.’
AMERICA MUSCLES INTO ‘FRENCH TERRITORY’
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 ‘mutual
defence’ 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.
When the civil war erupted in Ivory Coast in September 2002, France added a
‘stabilisation force’, now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne,
which was augmented in 2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) ‘peacekeepers’ drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and
Nigeria. In January 2006, the United Nations extended the mandate of
Operation Licorne until December 2006.
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 ‘Monroe
Doctrine’ for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of US
interventions in what it saw as its Latin American ‘back yard’).
Under the George W. Bush regime’s War on Terror doctrine, the US has
designated a swathe of territory – curving across the globe from Colombia
and Venezuela in South America, through Africa’s Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel
regions, and into the Middle East and Central Asia – as the ‘arc of
instability’, where both real and supposed terrorists may find refuge and
training.
In Africa, which falls under the US military’s 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
‘counter-terrorism’ operations in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and
East Africa, as well as for controlling the Red Sea shipping lanes.
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.
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 ‘African peace-keepers’ to ‘preserve justice and
order in Africa’, over the following five years. The US Embassy in Pretoria
said, at the time, that the US had already trained 20,000 ‘peace-keepers’ in
12 African countries in the use of ‘non-lethal equipment’.
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 ‘combat terrorism’ and ‘protect oil
resources’.
In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, and
São Tomé & Príncipe. These ‘jumping-off points’ 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 ‘covers’ East Africa and the Great Lakes region. In Dakar, Senegal,
the US is busy upgrading an airfield.
SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’
Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts with include
Gabon, Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a
‘second Guantanamo’ 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 ‘second Guantanamo’ 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.
In South Africa’s case, while it is unlikely that there will ever be US
bases established – the strength of South Africa’s own military, SANDF,
makes this unnecessary – in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the US’s
Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme, which
is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (imperialist)
objectives.
South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as the 13th African member, effectively
joined the American War on Terror. ACOTA started life as a ‘humanitarian’
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.
Today, ACOTA’s makeup is more obviously aggressive than defensive. According
to journalist Pierre Abromovici – 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 – ‘ACOTA includes offensive training,
particularly for regular infantry units and small units modelled on special
forces… In Washington, the talk is no longer of non-lethal weapons… the
emphasis is on “offensive” co-operation’.
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,
‘a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of
Pigs… 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’ to prop up pro-Washington right-wing dictatorships.
Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent ‘anti-communist’ – 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 ‘regime-change’
there.
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’s
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’s online biography, she
‘worked on African security issues with the State Department’s international
military education training programmes’.
IS THERE A MURDEROUS ‘SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS’?
The programmes that Fraser mentions include the ‘Next Generation of African
Military Leaders’ course run by the shady African Centre for Strategic
Studies based in Washington, which has ‘chapters’ in various African
countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of ‘School
of the Africas’ similar to the infamous ‘School of the Americas’ based at
Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
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.
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 ‘El Mozote’ 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
‘anti-terrorism’ watch-list.
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’ve all heard of the ‘Standby Force’
being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa’s
authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the
patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe –
which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia – the African
Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism.
The Centre is based in Algiers in Algeria, at the heart of a murderous
regime that has itself ‘made disappear’ 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’s director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a
think-tank and trainer of ‘anti-terrorism’ judges, but that it would also
have teeth and would provide training in ‘specific armed intervention’ to
support the continent’s regimes.
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 ‘focused’. She
warned that a major cause of African terrorism was ‘a growing void between
government and security forces on the one hand, and local communities on the
other’. 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.
The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU’s ‘Algiers Convention on
Terrorism’, 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 naïve to think that bourgeois
democracy – which passed South Africa’s equally vaguely-defined Protection
of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act
into law last year – will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from
state terrorism.
* Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based journalist and political activist.
* This article was first published in three years ago in
<http://www.zabalaza.net/index02.htm> '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 Châines.