Africa in Crisis- The Merged Superthread

[a_majoor]

This is the unintended (?) consequence of the R2P idea; penny packets of troops sent on a potentially hopeless mission for no obvious reason involving the nationa interest:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/why-is-obama-sending-troops-against-the-lords-resistance-army/246748/

Why Is Obama Sending Troops Against the Lord's Resistance Army?
OCT 14 2011, 5:23 PM ET 134
The pseudo-Christian terror cult has enslaved 66,000 children in its 20-year campaign across several countries in Central Africa, but it poses no threat to the U.S. or its interests

When the Lord's Resistance Army showed up in the Central African Republican village of Obo in 2008, everyone who refused to join them was killed. One of the men they scooped up, Daba Emmanuel, would spend the next year as one of the LRA's slave-soldiers. Indoctrinated, abused, and eventually forced to perform raids like the one against Obo, he survived to tell journalist Graeme Wood his story. "We killed the old immediately, and kept the young for work," Emmanuel said.

Recalling one raid on a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he told Wood that his small LRA faction began by gathering all the villagers together. "We put them into the church and closed the doors," Emmanuel remembered. They'd been ordered to steal supplies and find new children to make into slaves. "We entered only to choose some small girls and boys. The rest we burnt." They killed anyone who tried to escape with machetes, logs, or stones -- new recruits like Emmanuel were not trusted with rifles. As with similar groups, it's children who make the most loyal soldiers -- once their home has been destroyed, their language forgotten, and their religion replaced with a cult-like worship of LRA leader Joseph Kony, betrayal or escape is much less likely.

Part insurgency and part cult, the Lord's Resistance Army has waged a 20-year campaign of terror across Uganda, where it originally formed in opposition to the government there, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Sudan. It raids villages, massacres for no other purpose than bloodlust, enslaves child soldiers and child sex slaves, drugs its captives to make them more violent, all in an apparently endless mission that has destroyed countless villages and killed thousands of civilians, transforming one of the world's least governed spaces into one of its most dangerous.

A 2009 U.S. law authorizing financial support to Uganda against the LRA cites studies finding the LRA had abducted 66,000 children and displaced two million civilians. Last year, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth -- no hawk -- called on Obama to use U.S. military force against the Lord's Resistance Army. Roth cited the group's overwhelming humanitarian toll, its small size, and (unlike, for example, the Taliban) its extreme unpopularity among the populations it terrorizes.

The U.S. already supplies intelligence and a few million dollars to the Ugandan government in its totally failed quest to stop the LRA and to capture Joseph Kony, who is under indictment for war crimes from the International Criminal Court. On Friday, President Obama announced he would be sending approximately 100 U.S. combat troops to "act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA. Our forces will provide information, advice, and assistance to select partner nation forces." Special forces will be among them. The troops will not fire unless fired upon, but they will be able to provide much-need intelligence and organizational support to the Ugandan forces; they will also provide an important check on Uganda's troops, who might be tempted toward less-than-legal behavior as they crash around Central Africa.

Kony may be barking mad -- he performs bizarre rituals and claims to fight for "the Ten Commandments" -- but he has survived for two decades, outnumbered and outmatched by every metric, on little more than his ideology and his wits. "Kony is a brilliant tactician & knows the terrain better than anybody. He surrounds himself with scouts who have what amounts to an early warning system, which is how he's eluded capture for so long," Morehouse College assistant professor and Central Africa expert Laura Seay warned on twitter. "Kony also operates in some of the least-governed areas of the world's weakest states. Many of these places have no roads, infrastructure. All of this adds up for a potential mess for US troops, who don't know the terrain & can't count on host government troops to be helpful or even to fight. This will not be easy for only 100 US forces to carry out, especially given language barriers." Seay also points out that Kony uses children as human shield -- and as much of his fighting force -- making any direct action ethically and morally difficult.

Obama's decision to send 100 troops is a microscopically small deployment compared to the broader U.S. military diaspora: hundreds of thousands of troops in dozens of countries. The list of countries with around 100 or more U.S. troops might surprise you: Colombia, Thailand, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and Djibouti, to name a few. That list would probably be a lot longer if it included special forces deployment. Last year, Marc Ambinder reported that Obama had approved special forces bases and operations across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. But those operations, large and small, target terrorist groups and rogue states that threaten the U.S. -- something the Lord's Resistance Army could not possibly do.

If this if the humanitarian mission that the Obama administration says it is, and if it achieves the humanitarian goals it is setting out to achieve, it would be harder to find a more suitable target than the Lord's Resistance Army. Since World War Two, the U.S. has often presented its military, overwhelmingly the most powerful on Earth, as a force for good and global stability. In execution, it has been a force for furthering U.S., not global, interests -- just like every other national military. Some U.S. military actions, such as the intervention in Libya or the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, were sold as efforts for global peace, and that was probably part of the motivation, but they were also designed to promote American interests: to remove threats and replace them with friendly faces.

It's difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord's Resistance Army's campaign of violence. The group could go on killing and enslaving for decades -- as they well might -- and the American way of life would continue chugging along. It's possible that there's some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can't obviously see. Maybe, for example, Uganda is offering the U.S. more help with peacekeeping and counterterrorism in East Africa, where the U.S. does have concrete interests, in exchange for the troops. But it certainly looks like a primarily or purely humanitarian military mission, if a very small one. The Obama administration is hoping that these 100 troops will succeed where past U.S. assistance against the LRA -- intelligence, satellite images, fuel, and millions of dollars -- has failed. Maybe they will and maybe they won't. But this seems to suggest a small but important shift in how, where, and why the U.S. uses applies military force.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Just an FYI - if you want to keep track of the LRA in Uganda, there appears to be a web page devoted to sharing that kind of information:
http://www.lracrisistracker.com/#updates

 

[The Bread Guy]

More on Operation Crocodile (Canada's contribution to the U.N.'s Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or MONUSCO in French) here

The senior Canadian soldier serving in the restive Democratic Republic of Congo says it's unclear whether the worst of the post-election violence in the country has passed.

But Col. Rick Fawcett said it is clear that Canada has a role to play in helping the Central Africa country develop.

Fawcett, 51, is head of a contingent of nine Canadian soldiers serving with a decade-old, United Nations peacekeeping force in the Central African country.

UN troops were instrumental in readying the country for its second-ever presidential and legislative elections in November.

But Fawcett, who led the preparations, said the country itself wasn't logistically prepared for the challenge.

The Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, with few roads, railways or other infrastructure available to move election materials from town to town.

"The panic we went through through the whole month of November just was unbelievable, what we had to do to make this happen," Fawcett said in a telephone interview from Kinshasa.

"History will determine if it happened good enough." ....

The Canadian Press, 3 Jan 12

 

[The Bread Guy]

With all the push from ceasefire.ca and Steve Staples for Canada to become a "peacekeeper" and not as offensive a forces, we now see this:

Earlier this month, civil conflict in South Sudan between the Murle and Nuer tribes resulted in the deaths of hundreds or possibly thousands of Murle people. A UN source said the number might be as high as 1,000, while a local Murle official estimated the number of deaths to be as high as 3,000 (Jeffrey Gettleman, “Born in Unity, South Sudan Is Torn Again,” New York Times, 12 January 2012).

A UN peacekeeping mission, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), is present to assist the government of the country, which achieved independence from Sudan in July 2011, in establishing peace and stability. However, as the New York Times reported, the peacekeepers seem to have been of little benefit to the civilians targeted in the recent violence ....

Gee, maybe if the forces in question were able to and allowed to shoot back if the bad guys aren't following the rules, the civilians may have had better protection?  Oh, wait, would that be in line with being a "peacekeeper"? 

:

 

[The Bread Guy]

Longish, but worthwhile read, especially by those keen on "blue helmetting" Canada into Africa in largish numbers - this summary from an eclectic reading aggregator site is good:

Why so many small wars in Africa? Because barriers to insurrection have fallen very low. No more colonial powers or superpowers to intervene. Anyone with a satphone can get publicity. If you need troops, just drug some children

 

[a_majoor]

This video has gone viral (I drove across Ontario today and every radio station from London to Pet had something to say about it), but as the article shows, this is another example of "feel good" activism, and probably a way to make lots of money to boot ($30 for a "kit"?). Back in the 1920's and 30's, people would actually go out and fight for their causes, like the International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War, or Normane Bethune, who went to China to support the Chinese Communist movement. I doubt these people will dirty their hands by going to Africa to do something themselves (but if they can whip enough people into a frenzy to push governments to send people like *us* over there...):

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/solving-war-crimes-with-wristbands-the-arrogance-of-kony-2012/254193/

Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of 'Kony 2012'
By Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub

Mar 8 2012, 11:38 AM ET 106
A viral video by a controversial group claims to fix Central African violence with awareness, but such misguided campaigns can do more harm than good.
taubcronin p.jpg

Members of Invisible Children pose with soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army near the Congo-Sudan border in 2008 / Courtesy Glenna Gordon

Have you heard? Joseph Kony, brutal warlord and International Criminal Court indictee, is going to be famous like George Clooney. The reason is Kony 2012, a 30 minute film by the advocacy organization Invisible Children, which has gone viral in the 72 hours since its release, garnering over 38.6 million views on Youtube and Vimeo. It has been retweeted by everyone from Justin Bieber to Oprah, and shared on Facebook by seemingly everyone under the age of 25.

The video opens with a perplexing sequence of home movies. A happy couple film their baby's delivery by Caesarean, and he grows into a healthy, smiling toddler. Then the scene cuts to Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony in Central Africa, violently preying upon poor villagers. Now we discover the reason for the five minutes we just spent with this bubbly blond child in Los Angeles. He serves as a contrast for the crying children of northern Uganda, who have been victimized by Kony. (Never mind the fact that the LRA left Uganda years ago.)
MORE ON THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY
LRA1.jpg The Bizarre and Horrifying Story of the LRA
LRA2b.jpg The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012
LRA3.jpg A Mission That Requires More Than Guns
LRA4.jpg Obama's War on the LRA

The movie swirls us through a quickie history of the LRA, a rebel group that terrorized vulnerable civilian populations in northern Uganda for nearly twenty years before moving into the borderlands of South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic. It's (justifiably) heavy on the vilification of Kony, but light on any account of the complex political dynamics that sparked the conflict or have contributed to the LRA's longevity. Instead, we are given a facile explanation for Kony's decades-long reign of terror: Not enough Americans care.

Invisible Children has turned the myopic worldview of the adolescent -- "if I don't know about it, then it doesn't exist, but if I care about it, then it is the most important thing in the world" -- into a foreign policy prescription. The "invisible children" of the group's name were the children of northern Uganda forcibly recruited by the LRA. In the group's narrative, these children were "invisible" until American students took notice of them.

Awareness of their plight achieved, child soldiers are now visible to the naked American eye. And in fact, several months ago, President Obama sent 100 military advisors to Uganda to assist in the effort to track down Kony. But according to Invisible Children, these troops may be recalled unless the college students of America raise yet more awareness. The new video instructs its audience to put up posters, slap on stickers, and court celebrities' favor until Kony is "as famous as George Clooney." At that moment, sufficient awareness will have been achieved, and Kony will be magically shipped off to the International Criminal Court to await trial.

This awareness-based approach to atrocity strikes many people as worthwhile. As Samantha Power laid out in brutal detail in her book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the United States has repeatedly failed to intervene to stop genocide and crimes against humanity because of our leaders' belief that public opinion would not support such a decision. In theory, awareness campaigns should remedy that problem. In reality, they have not -and may have even exacerbated it.

The problem is that these campaigns mobilize generalized concern -- a demand to do something. That isn't enough to counterbalance the costs of interventions, because Americans' heartlessness or apathy was never the biggest problem. Taking tough action against groups, like the LRA, that are willing to commit mass atrocities will inevitably turn messy. Soldiers will be killed, sometimes horribly. (Think Somalia.) Military advice and training to the local forces attempting to suppress atrocities can have terrible unforeseen consequences. Consider the hundreds of victims of the LRA's 2008 "Christmas Massacre," their murderous response to a failed, U.S.-supported attack by Ugandan and Congolese government forces. International Criminal Court investigations often prompt their targets to step up attacks on civilians and aid workers, in an attempt to gain leverage with the court. (Both Kony and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir have tried that method.) 

The t-shirts, posters, and wristbands of awareness campaigns like Invisible Children's do not mention that death and failure often lie along the road to permanent solutions, nor that the simplest "solutions" are often the worst. (In fairness, you try fitting that on a bracelet.) Instead, they shift the goal from complicated and messy efforts at political resolution to something more palatable and less controversial: ever more awareness.

By making it an end in and of itself, awareness stands in for, and maybe even displaces, specific solutions to these very complicated problems. Campaigns that focus on bracelets and social media absorb resources that could go toward more effective advocacy, and take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more effective advocacy. How do we go from raising awareness about LRA violence to actually stopping it? What's the mechanism of transforming YouTube page views into a mediated political settlement? For all the excitement around awareness as an end in itself, one could be forgiven for forming the impression that there might be a "Stop Atrocity" button blanketed in dust in the basement of the White House, awaiting the moment when the tide of awareness reaches the Oval Office. 

If only there were. Because Americans are, by and large, pretty aware. In addition to the millions who have now watched Kony 2012, organizations like the Enough Project, Amnesty International, and STAND mobilize countless more. A Google News search of 2011 archives produces thousands of articles about child soldiers in Africa, rape in the Eastern DRC, and ongoing violence in Darfur.

Treating awareness as a goal in and of itself risks compassion fatigue -- most people only have so much time and energy to devote to far-away causes -- and ultimately squanders political momentum that could be used to push for effective solutions. Actually stopping atrocities would require sustained effort, as well as significant dedication of time and resources that the U.S. is, at the moment, ill-prepared and unwilling to allocate. It would also require a decision on whether we are willing to risk American lives in places where we have no obvious political or economic interests, and just how much money it is appropriate to spend on humanitarian crises overseas when 3 out of 10 children in our nation's capital live at or below the poverty line. The genuine difficulty of those questions can't be eased by sharing a YouTube video or putting up posters.

Invisible Children has been the target of intense scrutiny from the international development and NGO community for spending less than one third of the funds they raise on actual programs to help LRA-affected populations. (Mia Farrow was unimpressed.) The $1,859,617 that Invisible Children spent in 2011 on travel and filmmaking last year seems high for an organization whose total expenses were $8,894,630 (which includes the cost to make all those bracelets and posters).

However, we're less concerned with the budgetary issues than with the general philosophical approach of this type of advocacy. Perhaps worst of all are the unexplored assumptions underpinning the awareness argument, which reduce people in conflict situations to two broad categories: mass-murderers like Joseph Kony and passive victims so helpless that they must wait around to be saved by a bunch of American college students with stickers. No Ugandans or other Africans are shown offering policy suggestions in the film, and it is implied that local governments were ineffective in combating the LRA simply because they didn't have enough American assistance.

None of us who actually work with populations affected by mass atrocity believe this to be a truthful or helpful representation. Even under horrific circumstances, people are endlessly resourceful, and local actors understand their needs better than outsiders. It's good that Americans want to help, but ignoring the role and authority of local leaders and activists isn't just insulting and arrogant, it neglects the people who are the most likely to come up with a solution to the conflict.

The LRA is a problem worth solving, but how to do so is a complicated question with no easy answers. Americans are right to care but we need to stop kidding ourselves that spending $30 plus shipping and handling for a Kony 2012 action kit makes us part of the solution to anything.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Without comment:

Reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/index.html

 

[57Chevy]

I think that the whole Kony ordeal is one BIG SCAM. (Send no money now)

Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

Kony 2012 flops in Uganda
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/15/kony-2012-flops-in-uganda/

Kony 2012 may have received more than 73 million hits on YouTube since its release on the internet on March 5. But in Uganda it is a flop. Top Ugandan officials denounce the video — created to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the leader of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army operating in central Africa — as false. Kony's LRA, they say, has not operated in Uganda for years.

article continues at link.

 

[The Bread Guy]

More on this ....
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/81276/post-1203204.html#msg1203204
.... from Algeria's PM:

.... Mr. Sellal was more specific about the attackers, telling the news conference that the kidnappers had come from Egypt, Canada, Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Tunisia, although it was unclear how he knew for sure. Algerian have been saying that few if any of the attackers were believed to have been Algerian ....

NY Times, 21 Jan 13

More detail from Reuters news wire (highlights mine):

A Canadian coordinated the Islamist attack on an Algerian gas plant in the Sahara desert, Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said on Monday.

"A Canadian was among the militants. He was coordinating the attack," Sellal told a news conference.

Earlier an Algerian security source told Reuters that documents found on the bodies of two militants had identified them as Canadians ....

Also, splitting off the Mali material into its own thread - stand by ....

 

[Old Sweat]

This appears to be a credible report from the Atlantic electronic edition that Zimbabwe is bankrupt. The report is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.


Zimbabwe Is Down to Its Last $217

Adam Clark Estes Jan 29, 2013


There are cash-strapped governments and there are broke governments. And then there's Zimbabwe, which, after paying last week's government salaries, has just $217 left in the bank. No, we didn't forget any zeroes to the end of that figure. Zimbabwe, the country that's home to some of the world's largest platinum and diamond reserves, literally has the same financial standing as a 14-year-old girl after a really good birthday party. The country's finance minister admitted as much in a press conference on Tuesday. "Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217

in government coffers," Tendai Biti told reporters. "The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment. We are failing to meet our targets."

So it seems. However, Zimbabwe is hardly a stranger to financial hyperbole. The economy started to come apart at the seams in 2000, when President Robert Mugabe seized the land of over 4,000 white-owned farmers, effectively dismantling the country's agriculture industry. Over the course of the next decade, the country spiraled into an extended period of hyperinflation, the likes of which the world almost never sees. It peaked in August 2008, when inflation reached 11,200,000 percent and economists around the world started to say that the country's situation was hopeless. Prices were doubling by the day, and the government had to print Z$100 billion notes. The following year, they went ahead and printed Z$100 trillion notes, just before deciding to chop 12 zeroes off of the currency. A new coalition government formed that year and started on the long process of financial recovery, a process that is clearly going to take a little longer.

It's unclear how the Zimbabwean government is going to get itself out this fiscal mess, but whatever it does, it needs to do it quickly. As Quartz's Tim Fernholz points out, Zimbabwe is looking at a $104 million bill for its upcoming election. Its government is also dealing with brand new allegations that government officials have been running a corruption ring around the country's diamond mines. The country obviously desperately needs a major change. "But action against corruption probably won’t come until the end of Mugabe's reign, and a new constitution coming up for a referendum this spring -- presuming the funds can be found -- might set up the aging autocrat for another term in power," writes Fernholz.

Until then, looking for quarters under the couch isn't going to cut it, so Zimbabwe is doing the only thing it can do. "We will be approaching the international community," Biti said. You'll never guess who's most likely to come to the rescue. Hint: They're big fans of rare minerals.
​

 

[The Bread Guy]

Algerian security forces are thwarting efforts by Canadian police and intelligence agents to confirm whether Canadian citizens were among the Islamic jihadis who attacked a gas plant in a brazen terrorist assault that killed dozens – including Americans and Europeans – at a remote Sahara desert site.

Nearly two weeks after Algerian Prime Minster Abdelmalek Sellal said a Canadian played a key leadership role in the attack, RCMP and CSIS agents sent to Algiers have been denied access to documents, bodies, witnesses and tissue samples, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing, and so far unsuccessful, attempts to help the Algerian investigation.

“A Canadian was among the militants,” Mr. Sellal said after the battle to retake the remote plant near the Libyan border. “He was co-ordinating the attack,” he added, giving the Canadian’s name only as “Chedad.”

And he is a Canadian of Chechen origin, according to a report published Friday by the respected French newspaper Le Monde after one of its journalists toured the gas plant.

Other Algerian officials and freed hostages said a second Canadian was among the al-Qaeda-linked jihadis who held hundreds hostage in what they claimed was retaliation for the French military assault on Islamic militants in northern Mali. Some who survived the four-day siege said a hostage taker had a North American or Canadian accent. And unconfirmed reports said Canadian passports were among documents found on two of the dead jihadis ....

Globe & Mail, 1 Feb 13

Le Monde article referenced above viewable here (Google Docs) in French.

 

[The Bread Guy]

The Honourable Peter MacKay, the Minister of National Defence, announced today that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has concluded its successful training mission in Sierra Leone, in February 2013 .... The mission, known as Operation Sculpture, is Canada’s contribution to the International Military Advisory Training Team, a multinational effort led by Britain to help the government of the Republic of Sierra Leone build effective and democratically accountable armed forces.  The withdrawal of the ten CAF members coincides with the official draw down of the International Military Advisory Training Team.  For the past decade, the CAF provided advisory and training support, technical expertise, and assisted in the development of training programs as part of the International Military Advisory Training Team.  During the course of the mission, the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces continued to grow in professionalism and skill, allowing the international trainers to step back .... The success of the mentoring and training program can be seen in the success of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces, which is now a respected organization attracting global attention. In 2009, the Government of Sierra Leone was able to make its first offer of troops to a peace operation and deployed a sector reconnaissance company to serve with the United Nations-Africa Union Mission in Darfur. In 2011, the Government of Sierra Leone committed to the deployment of a battalion of 850 soldiers to the Africa Union Mission in Somalia. The growing stability of the country was underlined in November 2012, when landmark national elections were held a decade after Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war ....

DND/CF Info-machine, 15 Feb 13

More on Op SCULPTURE here.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Reports that Mokhtar Belmokhtar has been killed by Chadian forces.  Good news if true.  Shared under provisions of Sec. 29 of the Copyright Act.

Al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar 'killed in Mali' as Chadian armed forces destroy terrorist base

    Belmokhtar is believed to be among several rebels killed when Chadian armed forces 'completely destroyed' a terrorist base in northern Mali
    One-eyed terror chief said to be behind the Algeria hostage crisis in January
    A total of 37 workers were killed at an oil facility - including six Britons

By Suzannah Hills

PUBLISHED: 20:25 GMT, 2 March 2013 | UPDATED: 21:57 GMT, 2 March 2013

Al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar has reportedly been killed by Chadian soldiers in Mali.  The veteran Al-Qaeda leader, nicknamed 'Mr Marlboro' for his illicit cigarette empire, is said to have ordered January's attack on an Algerian gas plant where 37 hostages were killed.  He is believed to be one of several extremists killed today when Chadian armed forces in northern Mali 'completely destroyed' a terrorist base around midday.

His death was announced on Chadian state television but has not been confirmed by other sources.  Chadian armed forces spokesman General Zacharia Gobongue said in a statement read on national television: 'Chadian armed forces operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base.

'The toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar.'  Chadian troops are fighting Islamist militants in Mali as part of an international force led by France.  Belmokhtar's death will be a major blow to Islamist rebels in northern Mali who have been pushed into their mountain strongholds by the French and African forces.


The terrorist leader was an influential figurehead for the rebels and is said to have masterminded the attack at a gas plant in Algeria that led to the hostage crisis in January which claimed the lives of six Britons.  A total of 37 foreign workers died at the remote oil facility - part-operated by BP - which was overrun by heavily-armed terrorists on Wednesday January 16.

Some 22 Britons escaped the attack, which took place between January 16 and 19.  Some 29 of the hostage-takers died, while three were captured by Algerian troops during a special forces mission to end the four-day stand-off.  Belmokhtar had been sentenced to death in his absence in his home country of Alergia twice - in 2008 for murder and 2012 for acts of terrorism.

It is believed Belmokhtar first became interested in jihad as a schoolboy before travelling to Afghanistan to support the mujahadeen fighting in the Civil War.  He later joined the Islamist GIA fighting in the Algerian Civil War where he lost his left eye while mishandling explosives.  His reputation as a 'gangster-jihadist' involved in arms and cigarette smuggling earned him the nickname 'Mister Malboro' among locals in the Sahara.

Belmokhtar then became a commander in the Mali-based Islamist Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb before heading his own Islamist organisation, dubbed the Al-Mulathameen or Masked Brigade.  It was this group that claimed responsibility for the Algeria gas plant attack.

In a chilling video message filmed at the height of the crisis, Belmoktar said: 'We in Al Qaeda announce this blessed operation.  'We are ready to negotiate with the West and the Algerian government provided they stop their bombing of Mali's Muslims.'  The latest clash comes just one day after reports that another senior Al-Qaeda member was killed in Northern Mali.

Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, a senior commander in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed among 40 other Islamist fighters four days ago in the foothills of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.  Speaking on Friday, Chadian President Idriss Deby said his forces 'killed two jihadi leaders, including Abou Zeid,' but did not give any further details.

Algerian national Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, whose real name was Mohamed Ghadir, was one of the top three commanders in AQIM.  The former smuggler turned jihadist is believed to be behind the kidnapping of more than 20 Westerners in the area over the last five years, and is thought have executed British national Edwin Dyer in 2009.

French and Chadian troops have been hunting AQIM fighters in the mountains on the border to Algeria after a lightning campaign to dislodge them from northern Mali.  France's Elysee presidential palace has declined to comment on the AQIM leader, but a French army official confirmed that about 40 Islamists had been killed in heavy fighting over the last week in the mountainous Tigargara region.

The official said 1,200 French troops, 800 Chadian soldiers and some elements of the Malian army were still in combat to the south of Tessalit in the Adrar mountain range.  Ten logistics sites and an explosives factory had been destroyed in the operation as well as 16 vehicles, she said.

France launched the assault to retake Mali's vast desert north from AQIM and other Islamist rebels after a plea from Mali's government to halt the militants' drive southward.  The intervention swiftly dislodged rebels from northern Mali's main towns and drove them back into the surrounding desert and mountains, particularly the Adrar des Ifoghas.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287152/Al-Qaeda-leader-Mokhtar-Belmokhtar-killed-Mali-Chadian-armed-forces-destroy-terrorist-base.html#ixzz2MQvNLvnE
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

[tomahawk6]

In other news Chad lost 13 troops including many senior officers when the tango's they captured blew themselves up with suicide belts. Another French soldier Caporal Charenton was killed in action. The tango's are dug into caves and other hard to get at places protected by anti-aircraft MG's.More Tiger attack helos and Caesar 155mm artillery are needed. What the French need are laser guided bombs for those hard to reach places.Maybe some MK-77's on loan from the US ?

 

[Edward Campbell]

This is not about a military crisis but this report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act, explains that some Africans are waking up to the fact that they - or at least their resources - are being exploited by others, for the benefit of others:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/brics-chafe-under-charge-of-new-imperialists-in-africa/article10338663/

BRICS chafe under charge of ‘new imperialists’ in Africa

PASCAL FLETCHER
DURBAN, South Africa — Reuters

Published Tuesday, Mar. 26 2013

“BRICS, Don’t Carve Africa” reads a banner in a church hall in downtown Durban where civil society activists have gathered to cast a critical eye at a summit of five global emerging powers.

The slogan evokes the 19th century conference in Berlin where the predominant European colonial states carved up the African continent in a scramble historians see as epitomizing the brash exploitative capitalism of the time.

Decades after Africans threw off the colonial yoke, it is the turn of the blossoming BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa to find their motives coming under scrutiny as they proclaim an altruistic-sounding “partnership for development, integration and industrialization” with Africa.

Led by that giant of the emerging powers, China, the BRICS are now Africa’s largest trading partners and its biggest new group of investors. BRICS-Africa trade is seen eclipsing $500-billion by 2015, with China taking the lion’s share of 60 per cent of this, according to Standard Bank.

BRICS leaders persist in presenting their group – which represents more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and one fifth of global gross domestic product – in the warm and fuzzy framework of benevolent South-South co-operation, an essential counterweight to the ‘old’ West and a better partner for the poor masses of the developing world.

In his first trip to Africa as head of state, China’s new president Xi Jinping expounded this line in Tanzania on Monday, saying his country wanted “a better life for African people” and was offering a relationship of equals.

“We think there’s too much back-slapping,” said Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s centre for Civil Society, who helped to organize an alternative “BRICS-from-below” meeting in Durban to shadow the BRICS summit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Bond and other critics of the BRICS’ South-South pitch say developing countries that receive investment and assistance from the new emerging powers need to take a hard, close look at the deals they are getting.

Beneath the fraternal veneer, Bond sees “incoherent imperial competition” not unlike the 19th Century scramble, saying that BRICS members are similarly coveting and exploiting African resources without sufficiently boosting industrialization and job creation, all much needed on the continent.

This view has gained some traction in Africa as citizens from Guinea and Nigeria to Zambia and Mozambique increasingly see Brazilian, Russian, Indian, Chinese and South African companies scooping up multibillion-dollar oil and mining deals and big-ticket infrastructure projects.

Many of these deals have come under scrutiny from local and international rights groups. More than a few have faced criticism that they focus heavily on raw material extraction, lack transparency and do not offer enough employment and developmental benefits to the receiving countries – charges often levelled against corporations from the developed West.

Anti-poverty activists say the profit motivation of large BRICS corporations working in Africa is no different from that of Western companies.

“Matters of greed are universal and their actors come from both the North and the South,” said Wahu Kaara, a Kenyan social justice campaigner and co-ordinator of the Kenya Debt Relief Network who attended the “BRICS-from-below” meeting.

This wariness of the new players in Africa has even permeated some government circles on the continent.

Warning Africa was opening itself up to “a new form of imperialism”, Nigerian central bank governor Lamido Sanusi accused China, now the world’s No. 2 economy, of worsening Africa’s deindustrialization and underdevelopment.

“China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism,” Sanusi wrote in a March 11 opinion column in the Financial Times.

“Africa must recognize that China – like the U.S., Russia, Britain, Brazil and the rest – is in Africa not for African interests but its own,” Sanusi added.

Chinese and other BRICS leaders indignantly reject the criticism their group represents a kind of “sub-imperialism” in their growing economic and political engagement with Africa.

Zhong Jianhua, China’s special envoy to Africa, told Reuters that China and Africa’s common history of resisting colonial pressure put their relationship on a different level.

“China was bullied by others in the past, and so was Africa. This shared experience means they have a lot in common. This is China’s advantage and the reason why many Western countries are at a disadvantage,” he said in an interview with Reuters.

Zhong added that China should encourage its companies to train and employ more African workers, responding to complaints that Chinese investors often brought in their own work forces.

Catherine Grant-Makokera of the South African Institute of International Affairs said BRICS governments did noticeably operate differently from the West in the way they offered financing and aid to nations in Africa.

“You’ve seen a greater willingness from the newer players to invest in things like hard infrastructure, either through financing mechanisms, or simply grants or gifts,” said Grant-Makokera, SAIIA’s program head for economic diplomacy.

But she acknowledged the BRICS development aid approach, while offering faster turnaround times for projects, was often less restrained by labour and environmental considerations.

This has opened BRICS companies up to charges that in their haste to develop resource projects in Africa they flaunt local communities’ rights and ride roughshod over the environment.

Brazilian mining giant Vale, named in 2012 by the Swiss non-profit group Public Eye as the corporation with the most “contempt for the environment and human rights” in the world, defends its record in Mozambique, where it is investing billions of dollars to develop coal deposits and infrastructure.

It has faced violent demonstrations from Mozambicans protesting forced relocations and demanding greater benefits.

Vale’s head of Africa operations, Ricardo Saad, said the fact the company had experienced “problems” did not mean it could be accused of “neo-colonial” behaviour in Africa.

He said colonial powers just came and took the continent’s resources, without asking its people, whereas contracts today were closely negotiated with governments and communities.

“From the moment that I seek a licence to operate, where you talk to a community, where anything you do has authorization and previous planning with the government, I can’t say that’s neo-colonialism,” Saad told Reuters.

Development analysts say the BRICS, with their radically different economies, governments and competing priorities, still need to demonstrate that they can change global power structures to the benefit of the world’s poor and underprivileged.

“The fact that they are pressing for a new balance of power in the world has to be stressed as a positive thing...they have new voices,” said Nathalie Beghin of the Brazilian pro-democracy and rights organization INESC.

But she added in a jab at what activists say is the BRICS’ leadership-focused, top-down mode of operating so far: “They say they are the voices of the poor. But where are the poor?”

SAIIA’s Grant-Makokera says the BRICS offer developing states other options for aid and investment as an alternative to the old Western partners.

“At least you’ve got a diversity now, I don’t think that can be underestimated,” she said.

The Chinese may be indignant at these charges but they need to accept they there is some truth in them. To their credit, the Chinese (I don't know enough about what the others are doing to comment) are investing rather than colonizing but they demand, properly, a return on their investment which means that the fruits of Africa's resources and labour will flow to the Chinese, not the Africans.

What should we do about this? Nothing ... it's just Africa.

 

[Humphrey Bogart]

Coup D'Etat in Central African Republic, France sends in forces to secure the airport

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/03/201332317421513356.html

French troops secure CAR capital airport 

Paris also calls for emergency UN Security Council meeting after rebels attacked Central African Republic's Bangui.

Last Modified: 23 Mar 2013 23:39


France has sent soldiers to Central African Republic to secure the airport of the capital Bangui, a diplomatic source said, after rebel forces entered the north of the city.

"A company of troops has been sent to secure the airport. The airport is now secure," said the source on Saturday. "We have asked our citizens to remain at home. For the time being, there is nothing to be worried about. There is no direct threat to our citizens at the moment."

A second diplomatic source said that Paris had requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss a
solution to the crisis in the landlocked former French colony at the heart of Africa.

Nelson Ndjadder, a spokesman for the Seleka rebel coalition, said earlier on Saturday that his fighters entered the capital and were heading to the presidential palace in the centre of town.

He also said they had shot down a government military helicopter which had been attacking their forces since Friday.

The Seleka rebels resumed hostilities this week in the mineral-rich former French colony, vowing to topple
President Francois Bozize whom it accuses of breaking a January peace agreement to integrate its fighters into the army.


 
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Bangui, Central African Republic's Deputy Prime Minister Parfait Mbaye, said the rebel advance "should be condemned by the African union".

"The coup d’etat attempt by Seleka rebels is still ongoing. Fighting is now taking place on the outskirts of Bangui. We can only condemn this attempt to take power by force... We are very sorry to see what is happening in our country."

The rebels are said to have driven back government forces and taken control of the neighbourhood around Bozize's private residence. Officials said Bozize was in the presidential palace in the town centre.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Bangui, Sylvain Groulx of Doctors without Borders, said the fighting has not yet reached to centre of the capital.

"We are about two-to-three kilometres from the centre of Bangui and we cannot hear any shooting but we have heard the same information that a group of rebels has entered the capital," Groulx said.

"There has been some fighting in different places in and around Bangui throughout the day," Groulx added.

"It seems that the rebels have taken control of a town called bouali where there is a hydro-electric dam, the main power source for Bangui. All the power in the capital was cut. The hospitals we are supporting have been provided with fuel for generators."

South African troops

The violence is the latest in a series of rebel incursions, clashes and coups that have plagued the landlocked nation in the heart of Africa since its independence from France in 1960.

Pretoria has sent some 400 soldiers to train Bozize's army, joining hundreds of peacekeepers from the Central African regional bloc.

Regional peacekeeping sources said the South Africans had fought alongside the Central African Republic's army.

"I don't understand why we are making such a big deal about the presence of South African troops," Mbaye told Al Jazeera.

"We have an agreement with South Africa, a member of the African union and they are currently helping Central African forces. We salute South African forces and the South African people."

State radio announced late on Friday that South Africa would boost its troop presence after Bozize met his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma in Pretoria.

Captain Zamo Sithole, senior operations communications officer at South Africa's National Defence Force said: "We are there in the CAR to protect our properties there, and our troops there."

A South African Defence Ministry spokesman declined to comment.

634


Source: Al Jazeera And Agencies 

 

[CougarKing]

Wouldn't China's development of the Y20 transport, a C17 clone, allow Beijing to turn Africa into more of a sphere of influence? Perhaps we will see Y20s transporting Chinese soldiers on more blue-helmet missions similar to the one they recently had in Sudan.

post on Y20 aircraft at China superthread

Excerpts from the AFP article:

(...)

The state-run Global Times hailed the "significant milestone", saying China needed the planes, which can carry a load of 66 tonnes over distances of up to 4,400 kilometers (2,700 miles), to "enhance its global power projection ability."

The aircraft will allow China's military to end its dependence on the Russian-made Il-76, a mainstay of humanitarian and disaster relief around the world, the Global Times quoted a military expert as saying.

more here: link

 

[Edward Campbell]

There is an interesting, and somewhat frightening article on the World Economics website.

Here is the crux of it:

By 2030
    •  Asia Pacific to account for over 56% of world population and 52% of GDP
    •  Americas to account for 14% of world population and 24% of GDP
    •  Europe to account for 10% of world population and 20% of GDP
    •  Africa to account for 20% of world population and 4% of GDP

By 2050
    •  Asia Pacific to account for over 52% of world population and 64% of GDP
    •  Americas to account for 13% of world population and 19% of GDP
    •  Europe to account for 9% of world population and 12% of GDP
    •  Africa to account for 25% of world population and 5% of GDP

This graphic, from the article, shows the projections:

Source: http://www.worldeconomics.com/papers/World%20Markets%20of%20Tomorrow_e461fcda-c623-4f09-8189-c18c94b624ea.paper?PaperID=E461FCDA-C623-4F09-8189-C18C94B624EA

The most important measure - real per capita GDP measured in $(PPP) - is shown here:

Source: http://www.worldeconomics.com/papers/World%20Markets%20of%20Tomorrow_e461fcda-c623-4f09-8189-c18c94b624ea.paper?PaperID=E461FCDA-C623-4F09-8189-C18C94B624EA

As you can see most people in the Americas, Europe and Asia are, by 2050 ~ when most of you will still be alive - clustered around a common per capita GDP of $40,000/year. Africa will be different: the average African will have a GDP of only ¼ of that. That's a recipe for despair and all its attendant dangers. Further, much of Africa is Muslim.

 

[Inquisitor]

To add on to ERC's last post, more cheery news, this from Chris Hedges,  bio herehttp://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges#bio,  reproduced under the fair dealings provision of the copyright act, from Truthdig

Murdering the Wretched of the Earth

Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering. 

The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will not be lifted soon. 

The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.

What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.

In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”


The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo. "

Comment:  I found the first few paragraphs helpful trying to understand the  Radical Mindset. I seem to recall reading that by 20nn this type of situation will be the norm for much of the world, for reasons as above, plus conflict over dwindling resources.  Trying to find something positive  to say.  It seems to me that this not a deniable problem, such as global warming. It's a powder magazine and it seems that the inhabitants in the northern part of the continent have gotten a bit too comfortable smoking in it.

One solution advocated by the like of  P.M. Barnett would be to withdraw into Fortess zones.  A better solution might be a new "Manhatten" type of project to accelerate technologies that might minimize the downsides, just a couple of examples "Frankenmeat", mass water desalinzation, mass indoor farming.  The latter approach seems worthwhile, and perhaps attainable.

I like Chris but a little of his content goes a looong way.  I find even his optimism gloomy. The challenge is to find the  bright side /rambling discourse off

 

[Edward Campbell]

An interesting factoid from Ian Bremmer, of the Eurasia Group, a credible source of insights into why things works, or not:

    The Dallas Cowboys Stadium uses more electricity than the entire grid capacity of Liberia.

Liberia                                    AT&T Stadium (Home of the Dallas Cowboys)
Population: 4.1 Million              Seating capacity: 105,000
GDP per capita: $436.00          Cowboys ticket price: $30 to $24,132