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AFRICOM Plot Thickens
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
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Darfur is reported to
have the fourth largest copper and third
largest uranium deposits in the world.
Darfur produces two-thirds of the
world’s best quality gum Arabic—a major
ingredient in Coke and Pepsi. Contiguous
petroleum reserves are driving warfare
from the Red Sea, through Darfur, to the
Great Lakes of Central Africa. Private
military companies operate alongside
petroleum contractors and “humanitarian”
agencies. Sudan is China’s fourth
biggest supplier of imported oil, and
U.S. companies controlling the pipelines
in Chad and Uganda seek to displace
China through the US military alliance
with “frontline” states hostile to
Sudan: Uganda, Chad and Ethiopia. Israel
reportedly provides military training to
Darfur rebels from bases in Eritrea, and
has strengthened ties with the regime in
Chad, from which more weapons and troops
penetrate Darfur. The refugee camps have
become increasingly militarized. There
are reports that Israeli military
intelligence operates from within the
camps, as does U.S intelligence. Eritrea
is about to explode into yet another war
with Ethiopia. The
US’s War In Darfur By Keith Harmon Snow CounterCurrents |
The role of US imperialism in
Africa is becoming more widely known now as the
multi-headed hydra of globalism, militarism,
neo-colonialism and racism attempts to increasingly
wreck havoc on the continent. Things are moving so
rapidly they can no longer do it quietly under the
radar. I have been saying for many years now, the US
has Africa in its cross-hairs and is itching to pull
the trigger to initiate an even wider grab for
Africa’s resources. They plan to bum rush the whole
continent so they can seize, control and expropriate
Africa’s rich natural resources, raw materials and
use Africa’s geo-strategic location to their
advantage.
The corporate mind control
apparatus suppresses news about Africa and the
rapacious programs of exploitation, predation,
depopulation and genocide the West is conducting in
our motherland. The Europeans play their divide and
rule trump card and rig the games so our brothers
and sistahs there are discombobulated and thwarted
in their efforts to be self-determined
self-actualized beings in their own land. Using the
bogus War on Terror and the totally disingenuous
notion of humanitarianism as pretexts, the Bu$h
administration is attempting to establish a
permanent military presence on the continent called
AFRICOM so they can have a launching and staging
base of operations from whence to gain access and
control over the goodies they covet.
But the good news is so far the
Africans (even some bought and paid for by the CIA)
are baulking at this program. It remains to be seen
how successful they will be in keeping the wolves at
arm’s length.
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The Bush
administration's new obsession with
AFRICOM and its militaristic approach
has many malign consequences. It
increases U.S. interference in the
affairs of Africa. It brings more
military hardware to a continent that
already has too much. By helping to
build machineries of repression, these
policies reinforce undemocratic
practices and reward leaders responsive
not to the interests or needs of their
people but to the demands and dictates
of U.S. military agents. Making military
force a higher priority than development
and diplomacy creates an imbalance that
can encourage irresponsible regimes to
use U.S. sourced military might to
oppress their own people, now or
potentially in the future. These fatally
flawed policies create instability,
foment tensions, and lead to a less
secure world. What Africa needs least is
U.S. military expansion on the continent
(and elsewhere in the world). What
Africa needs most is its own mechanism
to respond to peacemaking priorities.
Fifty years ago, Kwame Nkrumah sounded
the clarion call for a ‘United States of
Africa.’ One central feature of his call
was for an Africa Military High Command.
Today, as the African Union deliberates
continental governance, there couldn't
be a better time to reject U.S. military
expansion and push forward African
responses to Africa's priorities. Long
suffering the effects of militaristic
‘assistance’ from the United States,
Liberia would be the worst possible base
for AFRICOM. But there are no good
locations for such a poorly conceived
project. Africa does not need AFRICOM.
AFRICOM: Wrong for
Liberia, Disastrous for Africa. Ezekiel
Pajibo and Emira Woods (July 26, 2007 )
Africa Resource |
AFRICOM will be the tactical
assault arm the US imperialists put in place to work
in conjunction with and augment the covert ops and
destabilizing economic policies of the IMF, World
Bank and US-AID presently employed throughout the
continent. In the US a cunning media propaganda
campaign to justify military intervention in Sudan
has been underway for several years now, while news
of covert resource wars in Chad, Congo and elsewhere
in the region have been deliberately suppressed. The
media’s focus in Sudan is on the killing and
displacement going on in Darfur.
However we must always keep in
mind, the corporate media is doing the bidding of
the ruling elites who own it. Their role is to
obfuscate the issues, disguise the real objectives
which are to secure, control and expropriate the
wealth throughout that region of Africa.
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The Darfur region of western Sudan has
been a hotbed of clandestine activities,
gunrunning and indiscriminate violence
for decades. The Cold War era saw
countless insurgencies launched from the
remote deserts of Darfur. Throughout
the 1990s, factions allied with or
against Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo,
Libya, Eritrea and the Central African
Republic operated from bases in Darfur,
and it was a regular landing strip for
foreign military transport planes of
mysterious origin. In 1990, Chad’s
Idriss Deby launched a military
blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrew
President Hissan Habre; Deby then allied
with his own ethnic group against the
Sudan government. Sudanese rebels today
have bases in Chad, and Chadian rebels
have bases in Darfur, with Khartoum’s
backing. When the regime of Ange-Félix
Patassé collapsed in the Central African
Republic in March 2003, soldiers fled to
Darfur with their military equipment.
Khartoum supported the West Nile Bank
Front, a rebel army operating against
Uganda from Eastern Congo, commanded by
Taban Amin, the son of the infamous
Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who heads
Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security
Organization. Darfur is the epicenter of
a modern-day international geopolitical
scramble for Africa’s resources.
The US’s War In
Darfur. Keith Harmon Snow CounterCurrents |
The West’s
long range plan is to totally destabilize the
whole region, balkanize it and bring it under
the sway of the US, Britain, Israel and sordid
Western powers. They want it all for themselves
and most importantly they wish to minimize
China’s influence in the region. But China is
not to be denied.
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As for Sudan, as far back as the
1970s, before Sudan's civil war
first started, American oil giant
Chevron spent $1.2 billion dollars
prospecting for new oil in Sudan.
However after being kicked out of
Sudan it was only a matter of time
before America helped engineer and
partly finance Sudan's civil war by
backing the Christian rebels. Today
what complicates this ugly situation
is keen interest from China in
Africa. With China's growing energy
hungry economy and an increasingly
unstable and arguably less
predictable Middle East, China wants
to dominate and take the largest
resource slice out of Africa.
Powerful states such as China are
anxiously looking to diversify and
find new alternative energy sources.
China sources an estimated 30% of
its oil needs from Africa. In Sudan
it has invested more than $5 billion
dollars as it uses up to 80% of
Sudan's daily domestic production
estimated anywhere between
500,000-750,000 barrels of oil per
day. It is estimated that Sudan
holds at least 5 billion barrels of
oil, mostly located in the South.”
Darfur: The Colonial Struggle over
Sudan
Khilafah |
For
AmeriKKKan oil companies to get its hooks
and pipelines into Darfur and Africa as a
whole, they'll need a military presence to
protect their investments. The bogus Global
War on Terrorism provides the pretext for
AFRICOM. AFRICOM will be the official US
military presence on the continent, a rapid
deployment force able to go anywhere to put
their foots on the necks of uncooperative or
recalcitrant natives the corporate media
will brand as “terrorists” simply for having
the temerity to demand the right of
self-determination and who are willing to
fight for their own country! Make no mistake
about it, the multi-national corporations
already have their private mercenaries on
set as protection, but to make sure they can
extract and exploit Africa’s resources at
will, they will need the protection and
might of Uncle Sam’s killers. Resources are
at the heart of the conflicts throughout
Africa.
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Resource wars in the Congo (over
diamonds and coltran) and in
West Africa (over oil) have set
the continent on fire. The U.S.
has thus far engaged with these
conflicts through Africa's
national armies, who have
increasingly become the
praetorian guards of large
corporations. None of this can
be justified directly as a
protection of the extraction of
resources, so it has
increasingly been couched in the
language of the war on
terrorism. The Pan-Sahel
Initiative (created in 2002)
draws U.S. Special Operations
Forces to Chad, Mali,
Mauritania, and Niger. In 2004,
the U.S. extended this to the
major oil producing countries of
Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and
Tunisia and renamed it the
Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism
Initiative.
After 9/11, the U.S. moved a
Special Operations Force into a
former French Foreign Legion
base, Camp Le Monier, in
Djibouti. In July 2003, the U.S.
earned the right to deploy P-3
Orion aerial surveillance
aircraft in Tamanrasset,
Algeria. Under the guise of the
War on Terrorism, the U.S.
government has moved forces into
various parts of Africa, where
they were able to train African
armies and to intervene in the
increasingly dangerous resource
wars. If the U. S. government is
quieter in its approach,
right-wing think tanks in the U.
S. feel no such compunction. The
Heritage Foundation has lobbied
for the creation of AFRICOM for
several years, and it is
arguable that its work moved
Donald Rumsfeld to consider an
African Command.
In a 2003 study entitled ‘U. S.
Military Assistance for Africa:
A Better Solution,’ the Heritage
Foundation argued, ‘Creating an
African Command would go a long
way toward turning the Bush
Administration's well-aimed
strategic priorities for Africa
into a reality.’ Rather than
engage Africa diplomatically, it
is better to be diplomatic
through the barrel of a gun.
‘America must not be afraid to
employ its forces decisively
when vital national interests
are threatened.’ Nevertheless,
the U.S. will not need to always
send its own soldiers. ‘A
sub-unified command for Africa
would give the U.S. military an
instrument with which to engage
effectively in the continent and
reduce the potential that
America might have to intervene
directly.’
The AFRICOM would analyze
intelligence, work ‘closely with
civil-military leaders’ and
coordinate training and conduct
joint-exercises. In other words,
the U.S. would make the friendly
African military forces
‘inter-operatable’ not only with
U.S. hardware but also with U.S.
interests. When AFRICOM became
reality Heritage's Brett
Schaefer welcomed the ‘long
overdue’ move...”
Alex Constantine |
Keep in
mind that large reserves of oil were only
confirmed in the Darfur region within the last
few years. The US media push for humanitarian
intervention in Darfur is really about gaining
access to the oil! As more and more of the
natural resources that fuel Western lifestyles
and technology are discovered in Africa, Western
corporations will move to secure control over
the land and resources by using their government
flunkies/cohorts to instigate more discord and
foment more wars to expropriate and exploit
them.
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In Uganda, oil
production is expected to start in
2009 from a field on the shores of
Lake Albert, on the border with the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Two
independent oil producers, Heritage
Oil of Canada and Tullow Oil of
Britain, will produce about 6,000
barrels a day of light, sweet crude
that will be used locally to produce
kerosene and other fuels and to
supply a small power plant, said
Chris Perry, investor relations
officer at Tullow. Perry said that
Tullow was also evaluating a series
of recent oil discoveries to
determine whether enough crude could
be produced to justify construction
of a $2 billion, 1,300-kilometer, or
800-mile, export pipeline to Mombasa,
the Kenyan port which serves
land-locked Uganda.In the past two
years, Tanzania has leased large
swaths of its offshore area to
exploration and production companies
that include Petrobras of Brazil,
Statoil of Norway, and Aminex, an
Anglo-Irish company. Tanzania has
sizeable reserves of natural gas,
and a French exploration company,
Maurel and Prom, announced a gas
find there in January. But offshore
exploration plans by oil majors,
including Royal Dutch Shell, have
been held up for years around the
semi-autonomous islands of Zanzibar,
until an agreement is reached on
resource management with the
mainland Tanzanian government.”
East Africa
attracts hunters for oil and gas.
Sarah J Wachter
IHT |
Stay tuned, the plot thickens.
Source: From The Ramparts
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posted 15 December
2007 |
