Africa

[Casey]

Europe: Togo Faces African Sanctions as Thousands Protest
44 minutes Ago

[Europe News]: LOME, Togo - Nigeria said Saturday that West African nations would impose sanctions on Togo, despite a pledge of elections from the new president, who was also under pressure at home as thousands took to the streets to demand he step down.

Faure Gnassingbe, who was named president by the army just hours after the death of his father Gnassingbe Eyadema two weeks ago, said Friday he would hold a presidential election within 60 days but indicated he would not step down before then.

Regional officials, who have branded the succession a coup, said the election pledge did not meet their demands that Togo revert to its original constitution, which was amended after Gnassingbe's nomination to legitimise the move.

In Togo's capital Lome, at least 10,000 people marched through the opposition stronghold of Be, waving branches and placards and demanding Gnassingbe step down in the largest protest since the 39-year-old took over.

Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo, current head of the African Union (AU), told a visiting Togolese delegation that he would not endorse the decision to leave Gnassingbe as president until elections, said Obasanjo's spokeswoman Remi Oyo.

She said the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) would impose "full sanctions" on Togo, adding this would include travel sanctions.

Togo's Foreign Affairs Minister Kokou Tozoun said if Gnassingbe resigned it would leave a dangerous vacuum.

"Can we be without a president for 60 days?" he said. "We prefer to have sanctions and be in peace and security rather than descending toward civil war," he told Reuters.

The head of the AU Commission Alpha Oumar Konare said in a statement that Gnassingbe's decision to remain in power was "in violation of the Togolese constitution."

He called on Togo to take the measures expected of it by the AU, ECOWAS and the international community. "Any other step would only complicate the situation in Togo," he said.

Togo's original constitution said the head of the national assembly should take over on Eyadema's death, pending polls.

http://www.keralanext.com/news/indexread.asp?id=122433

[Petronas]

DR Congo plague outbreak spreads
Wednesday, 23 February, 2005, 13:18 GMT

An outbreak of what tests suggest is pneumonic plague has spread to a second town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a medical charity. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says it believes it has found a case in a second area in the north-east. Thousands have fled the remote diamond mining town of Zobia since the disease first emerged at the end of last year. At least 60 people have died so far. The plague affects victims lungs and is fatal if left untreated. "People have been leaving Zobia. They were starting to panic - its contagious," MSF's Meike Steensens told BBC News from the city of Kisangani.

The outbreak began just four days after the diamond mine re-opened near Zobia, in Oriental province, north of the country's biggest city, Kisangani, a major trading centre on the Congo River. Those who have died are all diamond miners. Another 350 miners have been infected. MSF discovered the new case in the town of Buta after sending an emergency team of doctors to the area.

Final confirmation of the plague is expected next week, MSF say, but initial tests indicate that they are dealing with an outbreak of pneumonic plague. An advance team of medical experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) has already visited the area to confirm that people are infected with the plague. Around 7,000 people worked at the mine. The WHO team will focus on trying to trace the 2,000 who have left since the start of the outbreak.

Bubonic plague is endemic in parts of Africa, including the DR Congo, but pneumonic plague, which occurs when bacteria infect the lung, has a very high fatality rate and is "invariably" deadly when left untreated, the WHO said. Humans are generally infected with plague by rodents and fleas, but the pneumonic form of the disease can also be transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4290783.stm

[Petronas]

At Least 8 UN Soldiers Killed in Congo-UN Sources
Feb 25, 2005
By David Lewis

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Militiamen killed at least eight United Nations peacekeepers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday in the worst attack against the U.N. force in the central African country, U.N. sources said. "There are at least eight dead and some still missing," one U.N. source told Reuters. A second U.N. source said the death toll could be nine, adding that two U.N. patrols were involved in the ambush in the Ituri district of the former Zaire. U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno could not confirm the deaths, but said nine Bangladeshi troops were missing and had possibly been killed. The second source said it was not clear how many troops had been on patrol but that the number should have been between 20 and 30. He said 90 peacekeepers and Mi25 attack helicopters had since been sent to the scene.

The United Nations has a 4,800-strong force in Ituri made up of four contingents from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco and Nepal. The total U.N. force in Congo numbers 16,000, making it the world body's biggest peacekeeping operation. Ituri is one of Congo's worst troublespots, where ethnic militias have killed 50,000 civilians since 1999 — the year the current U.N. mission in the country, known by its French acronym MONUC, was established.

One of the U.N. sources said the patrols were attacked in the Ituri district's town of Ndoki, some 19 miles east of the main city of Bunia and an area controlled by a predominantly ethnic Lendu militia known as FNI. He said it seemed that two peacekeepers were killed on the spot and seven were taken into the bush and murdered. "Lendus are not people that take hostages, they just kill," the source said, adding that it was raining heavily in Ituri, making search and rescue operations difficult.

Kemal Saiki, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Congo, said the attack took place on Friday morning. "There have been casualties in the U.N. forces, including some fatalities," he said, but could not give further details. U.N. spokeswoman in Bunia, Rachel Eklou, said U.N. peacekeepers had carried out searches in the FNI-controlled town of Datule, just east of Bunia, on Thursday. "We arrested 30 people, including 29 who we think were FNI militiamen. They have been transported to Bunia," she said.

The former Belgian colony is struggling to recover from a wider five-year war that at one stage sucked in six neighboring countries and, according to an international aid agency, has killed nearly 4 million people. Despite the size of U.N. force in Ituri, attacks on civilians remain frequent. Clashes between militia during the last two months alone have displaced some 70,000 civilians, aid workers say.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=531244

[Casey]

SA denies Ivory Coast peace process logjam

March 01 2005 at 02:35PM

South Africa, the chief mediator in Ivory Coast's civil conflict, on Tuesday denied rebel claims that the peace process had collapsed after an attack by pro-government militants on a rebel-held town in the restive west.

"We must remember this is an African Union exercise and anybody pulling out of it would have to answer to the facilitation. From our own reports, things are moving," South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said in Pretoria.

An unidentified group, the Ivorian Movement for the Liberation of the West of Ivory Coast (MILOCI), has claimed responsibility for an attack Monday near Logouale, about 450km north-west of the main city Abidjan.

It was the first major clash since government planes bombarded rebel positions for three days in November, killing a reported 85 civilians according to a rebel toll.

"This attack is the umpteenth violation of the ceasefire by troops of (President) Laurent Gbagbo after the events in November," rebel spokesperson Sidiki Konate said on Monday.

"With these acts of war, President Gbagbo has definitively buried efforts at mediation by the African Union and the international community," Konate added.

The 53-nation AU in November appointed South African President Thabo Mbeki, seen as neutral to the conflict, to try and broker a solution for Ivory Coast.

Mbeki submitted a five-point roadmap or peace blueprint during a peace mission to Ivory Coast in December that provides for disarmament and restoring a power-sharing government among other issues.

"We are in constant consultations with (Ivory Coast). The prime minister will be visiting here soon," Pahad said.

"Our ambassador is with the United Nations team today (Tuesday), visiting demobilisation sites. There may be problems but then it's up to the facilitation to solve them," he added.

Ivory Coast, the world's top producer of cocoa, has been split since September 2002, when a military mutiny failed to topple Gbagbo but the rebels gained control of the northern half of the country.

The two sides have been kept apart by United Nations and French peacekeepers.

Under an accord signed at Marcoussis in France in January 2003, a government of national unity was formed in Ivory Coast, but the attack by government forces on northern positions in November halted any progress toward compromise. - Sapa-AFP

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=86&art_id=qw1109677140546B222

[Casey]

Foreign Office tells Britons to leave Ivory Coast

Friday, 01 Apr 2005 13:19
British citizens are being urged by the Foreign Office to leave the Ivory Coast as the security situation in the country deteriorates.



The warning comes amid news that the British embassy in the west African nation has ceased operations.

"This decision is mainly due to the uncertain security situation and our inability to protect staff or British nationals should there be another outbreak of violence," said Chris Mullin, FCO minister for Africa.

The Government has warned that it will be unable to evacuate Britons who do not leave immediately and get trapped in any civil unrest in the war-torn country.

"We suggest that our citizens here think very carefully about whether they want to stay in Ivory Coast," David Coates, the British ambassador to the capital Abidjan, told Reuters.

Mr Mullin said the decision to evacuate the estimated 150 Britons in the country "reflects the lack of progress in the peace process".

"Until all parties genuinely commit to finding a political solution, there is little point in us remaining. The risk is just too high," he said.

A UN peacekeeping force of 6,000 is deployed throughout the country and is supported by 4,000 French troops. http://www.politics.co.uk/foreign-policy/foreign-office-tells-britons-leave-ivory-coast-$8169470.htm#

[Casey]

Ivory Coast leader says disarmament key for talks
Sat April 2, 2005 1:55 PM GMT+02:00


By Loucoumane Coulibaly

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's leader wants peace talks to focus on rebel disarmament on Sunday, setting up a showdown with civil war foes who say they will only give up their guns after political reforms.

The talks in Pretoria, South Africa, are to take place as fears of fresh fighting in the world's top cocoa grower reach boiling point after skirmishes in the lawless west and reports of hundreds of fighters crossing from Liberia.

President Laurent Gbagbo's spokesman said in a statement late on Friday the international community should push the rebels, who hold the north of West African nation, to disarm.

"Today, the only outstanding question is that of disarmament. The international community must insist on this question so that the rebels accomplish their unique part of the agreed-to commitments," Gbagbo's spokesman Desire Tagro said.

Tagro accused the rebels of failing to fulfil any of the commitments made in a January 2003 peace deal. The accord has never been fully implemented because of political wrangling.

An aide to rebel leader Guillaume Soro, who is already in Pretoria, said legislative reforms had to be in place before any talk of disarmament, which he said must involve both sides.

"If President Gbagbo thinks that disarmament is a priority, then he should work towards creating the conditions for that disarmament to take place," Amadou Kone told Reuters.

He also accused Gbagbo of creating militias who were "better armed than (Ivory Coast's) regular forces."

Ivory Coast's civil war exploded in September 2002 after rebels tried to oust Gbagbo. Some 10,000 U.N. and French peacekeepers are monitoring an oft-broken ceasefire.

DISARMAMENT TIMETABLE

The peacekeepers' 12-month mandate is due to expire on Monday night. Diplomats said on Friday the U.N. Security Council was expected to renew the mission for a month on Monday to see whether the South African mediation could show results.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has been mandated by the African Union to mediate in the crisis, which has cast a cloud on presidential elections due in October.

The rebels want a constitutional change to allow the main opposition leader to contest the October polls. Gbagbo says a referendum must be held to do that, but only once rebels disarm.

"The President of the Republic hopes that this meeting will have a visible outcome on the adoption of a clear calendar of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration," Tagro said.

In a stark sign of growing fears, Britain said this week it was shutting its embassy and advising its citizens to leave.

Tensions have been slowly notching up since Gbagbo's forces shattered an 18-month ceasefire last November by bombing rebel towns. One raid killed nine French peacekeepers and the French army crippled the Ivorian air force.

Anti-French riots then exploded in Abidjan and thousands of expatriates, mostly French nationals, fled the country. http://www.reuters.co.za/locales/c_newsArticle.jsp?type=topNews&localeKey=en_ZA&storyID=8067308

[Trinity]

U.S. risks fuelling militant Islam in Sahara

DAKAR (Reuters) - The United States will only fuel a rise in Islamic militancy in countries bordering the Sahara
desert if it takes a heavy-handed approach to fighting terrorism in the region, an influential think tank says.

Proselytising Pakistani clerics, an Algerian fundamentalist group allied to al Qaeda and growing resentment of
U.S. foreign policy were causes for concern but did not make West Africa a hotbed of terrorism, the International
Crisis Group (ICG) said on Thursday.

"There are enough indicators to justify caution and greater western involvement out of security interests, but it
has to be done more carefully than it has been so far," ICG's West Africa project director Mike McGovern said in
a report.

Mindful of the al Qaeda training camps that emerged in Afghanistan, some U.S. officials say countries like Mali,
Niger, Chad and Mauritania, which are among the world's poorest, make similarly fertile hunting ground for
militants seeking recruits.

U.S. Special Forces and military experts have trained soldiers in all four countries as part of efforts to help them
fight the threat in the region's vast swathes of desert.

But a military policy that offers no alternative livelihoods to already marginalised nomadic populations risked
causing resentment and radicalising locals further, ICG said.

Preachers, most of whom are Pakistani, from a fundamentalist Muslim missionary society called Jama'at
al-Tabligh have been converting former Tuareg rebels in Mali, it said.

The group's teachings are similar to those that underpin the philosophy of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Although the movement itself was staunchly apolitical, its converts included British "shoe bomber" Richard Reid
and the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, captured in 2001 during the war in Afghanistan, ICG said.

"Both Western and African intelligence services consider them a significant potential threat," it said. "Many
analysts agree that a turn toward Tablighi fundamentalism is sometimes a first step toward a career in violent
Islamist militancy."

AID NOT JUST SOLDIERS

The Tuaregs, a pale-skinned minority who live and work in the Sahara, launched insurgencies in Niger and Mali
in the early 1990s because they felt persecuted by a black elite governing far away in the countries' capital cities.

Resentment remains high among former fighters in the ancient Saharan trading towns of Kidal and Timbuktu in
Mali and Agadez in Niger. They say too little has been done to integrate them.

U.S. policy in the Sahara has so far focused on fighting smuggling networks and stopping Algeria's last
powerful rebel force, the al Qaeda-linked Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), from gaining a
foothold outside its homeland.

Many Tuaregs in Timbuktu and Agadez viewed the presence of elite U.S. forces in their towns with suspicion
during training exercises last year, seeing them as a threat to the delicate balance of power that has lasted for
generations in the Sahara.

ICG welcomed plans by Washington for more social and economic support but said Islamic charities, some of
whose operations have been under scrutiny since the September 11 attacks on the United States, were already
filling the aid vacuum.

"Even organisations known to most Americans purely as terrorist groups, like Hezbollah or Hamas, use a large
part of their funds to provide social services," the report said.


http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5643697&cKey=1112271300000

[Casey]

10:48 am: Fourteen killed in attack at fake Algerian roadblock Associated Press
April 8, 2005

ALGIERS, Algeria - Islamic insurgents killed 14 people in a brutal attack outside Algiers, trapping the victims at a fake roadblock, then killing them and burning their vehicles, journalists in the region said Friday.

The attack occurred Thursday night at Oued-Djerma in the Larbaa region some 30 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of the Algerian capital, according to the journalists.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack. However, Islamic insurgents have for years used fake roadblocks to rob travelers, usually killing them in the process.

The brutality of the attack and the method recalled the bloody killings and massacres that wracked this North African nation for more than a decade, with violence peaking in the mid-1990s. Continual offensives by security forces have quashed much of the violence.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, marking the first anniversary on Friday of his re-election, said in a speech that 150,000 people were killed in the cycle of violence.

The region of Larbaa was long a major center for insurgent activity by the radical Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, blamed for numerous massacres in the 1990s. However, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC, has taken pre-eminence over the GIA and could be in Larbaa. The GSPC has radicalized and has pledged allegiance to the al-Qaida terror organization.

Bouteflika said in his Thursday speech that security has "largely been re-established everywhere across the country."

The insurgency began after the army canceled legislative elections in 1992 to thwart a likely victory of a Muslim fundamentalist party.



http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/12382.html

[Petronas]

Ethiopia (Country threat level - 3): On 9 April 2005, two explosive devices were found on board a bus in Addis Ababa. Security forces were able to defuse the devices, which were found under a seat during a routine daily security check of Addis Ababa city buses. The devices were reportedly constructed with C4 explosive material. Authorities are investigating the incident.

AIR SECURITY International - HOT SPOTS 4/11/2005

[Casey]

'Militants want amnesty'
18/04/2005 14:46 - (SA)

Algiers - Some 400 armed Islamist militants in Algeria are prepared to lay down their weapons if the government passes an amnesty to end 13 years of civil strife, a senior official was quoted as saying on Monday.

"Around 400 armed militants, or more than 95% of the terrorist elements still present in the field," are ready to give themselves up, the head of the National Commission for a General Amnesty (CNAG), Abderrezak Smail, told the Expression newspaper.

The CNAG, a prominent lobby group, has been "in direct contact with terrorist groups, who have ceased all subversive activity for several months, while they wait for the president to decree a general amnesty," Smail said.

Any militants who refused to surrender under such an amnesty would be viewed as "bandits" and would be dealt with accordingly by the security forces in the troubled north African country, he added.

Last month, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika raised the possibility of a national referendum on a general amnesty, but the idea has met with strong resistance in some quarters of Algerian society.

The CNAG, whose president of honour is former head of state Ahmed Ben Bella, campaigns in a semi-official capacity to back Bouteflika's amnesty proposal, which would extend to both sides in the low-level war against armed Islamic fundamentalists that has claimed 150 000 lives in Algeria since 1992.

The insurgents rose up in arms soon after the army intervened, in January 1992, to call off the second round of a parliamentary election the subsequently outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win.

The war reached its murderous heights in the 1990s when bomb attacks and massacres of civilians were frequent.

A movement called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) is the only insurgent group still active, with an estimated 300 to 500 members.

About 50 people, including about 15 security force members, have been killed in violence involving armed Islamist groups since the beginning of last month, according to a toll compiled using official figures and media reports.

http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1691784,00.html

[Petronas]

Travel Warning
United States Department of State
Bureau of Consular Affairs
Washington, DC 20520---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This information is current as of today, Thu Apr 21 11:48:04 2005.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
April 19, 2005
This Travel Warning is being issued to inform American citizens that although an American officer is now posted at the U.S. Embassy in Bangui, the Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens against travel to the Central African Republic (CAR). This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning for Central African Republic issued October 29, 2004.

In March 2003, rebel forces that had been operating in the countryside outside Bangui took over the capital and seized power from the government of the CAR. The leader of the rebel group declared himself the President of CAR and remains in power. Although the country held peaceful elections in March 2005, the situation remains fluid and U.S. citizens who remain in the CAR despite this Travel Warning are urged to exercise caution at public gatherings. Furthermore, there continue to be reports of armed robberies along roads outside of the capital.

In November 2002, the U.S. Embassy in Bangui suspended operations. In early 2005, limited American staff returned to the Embassy, although dependent minors of American Embassy staff have not been allowed to return. Because there is currently no consular officer posted in Bangui, the Embassy can provide only limited emergency services to U.S. citizens.

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_940.html

[Petronas]

Ethiopia army clashes with rebels
Thursday, 21 April, 2005, 17:21 GMT 18:21 UK

Ethiopia's armed forces say they have killed more than 30 rebels during several days of fighting in Ogaden in the east of the country. Officials says 300 rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front crossed over the border from Somalia. They said 30 of them had been captured, along with various weapons, but there is no word of any army casualties. The rebels, who are ethnic Somalis, have fought for the secession of the Ogaden region since the early 1990s.

Insecurity in Ogaden is one reason why parliamentary elections in the Somali region have been scheduled to take place four months after the rest of Ethiopia goes to the polls, says the BBC's Mohamed Adow in Ethiopia. The government blames ONLF's activities for a lack of meaningful development in the region.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4470649.stm

[Petronas]

US to expand anti-terror, oil interests in Africa
Friday, May 27, 2005

The US is pouring more soldiers and millions more dollars into its anti-terrorism campaign in Africa, including in Algeria and chaotic Nigeria, both oil-rich nations where radical Islam has a following. A new north and west African effort outlined Wednesday in a statement from the US Embassy in Senegal proposes spending US$100 million a year over five years to boost security in some of world's least policed areas, starting with a joint military exercise in the region next month.

An earlier anti-terror exercise with a budget of just US$6 million focused on troop training in four west African nations. The new campaign will target nine north and west African nations and seek to bolster regional cooperation. Analysts were waiting to see if the program would be fully funded -- but said the intended budgetary increase shows the US is taking West Africa more seriously. "If they're turning the corner to US$100 million, that's graduation into something much larger," said J. Stephen Morrison, Africa director at the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's still modest, but it's a dramatic step up."

Major Holly Silkman, a US military spokeswoman, said underpopulated border areas in the region could be sanctuaries for "terrorists or would-be terrorists. We want to increase security in those areas by training with each country's military and creating a regional focus, rather than just a country focus," Silkman said by telephone from European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

US officials have long viewed northwestern Africa's vast desert stretches as prime real estate for aspiring terrorists seeking to set up training camps or other bases. Some US commanders liken the area's ungoverned expanses to Afghanistan during Taliban rule, under which Bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror group thrived. The region is shot through with sandy tracks still traveled by camel caravans bringing salt slabs in from the desert -- ancient thoroughfares officials say militants can use to traverse poorly guarded borders. Much of the troop training will focus on units responsible for guarding frontiers, said Silkman.

Muslims in west and north Africa, like Muslims elsewhere, generally are moderate. But extremists do exist. Militants have roamed south from oil-rich Algeria into West Africa recent years, and in northern Nigeria, years of poverty and brutal military rule has radicalized some in the population. "We're concerned with the radical movement," said Silkman. "Islam isn't the problem, it's only the radicals."

Troop exercises aside, the new program will also bring together for medical training and command-post exercises military staff from the nine participating countries -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Nigeria. The earlier program encompassed just Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger.

Morrison, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the US now appears to have created a "counterterrorism bookend" to its strategy in east Africa, which has seen a spate of terror attacks, including the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania blamed on al-Qaeda. Notable among the new entries is Nigeria -- Africa's most-populous nation of 130 million, the continent's biggest petroleum producer and source of one-fifth of all American oil imports. About half of Nigeria's people are Muslim. Osama Bin Laden purportedly marked the country for liberation in release posted on the Internet earlier last year. The country is led by a Christian president and has seen deadly spates of Christian-Muslim violence, although most Nigerians live peacefully in mixed-religion areas.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/05/27/2003256805

[NYer]

POTENTIAL HOT SPOTS: Democide in Zimbabwe

Items About Areas That Could Break Out Into War



Zimbabwe is about ready to explode in a nightmare mass murder, or bloody revolution. It’s not genocide this time, but democide (government killing massive numbers of its own citizens.) The Zimbabwe government, in power since the country became independent in 1980, dealt with increasing unpopularity by terrorizing political opponents, rigging elections, and paying off supporters by driving its most productive citizens (the white farmers) out of the country and stealing their property. This move made it impossible for the country to feed itself. Relief agencies sent in tons of food, but this was distributed in a punitive fashion, with anti-government areas getting less food, or none at all. Last year, the government proclaimed the food emergency over, and said it needed no more charity from foreigners. That was a face saving lie. This year, the government admitted there was a food problem, and requested 1.2 million tons of food.

But it appears that the government will again use the food as a weapon. For the past month, police have been shutting down black markets in the cities, where the anti-government feeling is the strongest. Over 20,000 people have been arrested and several hundred squatters have been driven back into the countryside. The black markets have been a major source of food and other goods for the urban population. Without the black markets, the urban population will be totally dependent on the government for food. In the countryside, where the government still has some support (because of the distribution of land taken from white farmers), people can grow enough to feed themselves, but not the third of the 12 million population that lives in urban areas. Nearly all the farmers use primitive techniques, and live from harvest to harvest. One bad year, and starvation becomes a major factor. There is much disease, and the average life expectancy is 37 years.

There hasn’t been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority, and over two thirds of the population lives in poverty. The ruling party is corrupt, and hands out what wealth is available only to those that actively support it. There are no large deposits of items like diamonds or gold, that are readily converted into cash. It was that kind of money that fueled the civil wars farther north, in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Religion is not a factor either, with less than one percent of the population being Moslem. Further north, irate Moslem populations have been armed by wealthier Arab nations.

The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns. It’s even difficult for the rest of the world to find out what’s going on, as foreign reporters were expelled years ago, and the local press is under strict government control. This story will only get reported after the dead are buried.

http://www.strategypage.com//fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=POTHOT.HTM

[Casey]

Al Qaeda ally claims Mauritania attack - website
07 Jun 2005 11:44:36 GMT

Source: Reuters
NOUAKCHOTT, June 7 (Reuters) - An Algerian Islamic fundamentalist group allied to al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for a weekend attack in Mauritania which killed 15 soldiers, according to an Internet posting.

Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) (http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?t=200) said it had carried out Saturday's dawn raid on a remote Mauritanian military post near the border with Algeria and Mali, according to the statement (http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8146)on an Islamist website.

"We carried out this operation to avenge our brothers thrown in prison by the heathen regime of (President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed) Taya and in support of the weakest and oppressed among the Muslims of this country," said the statement posted on www.jihad-algerie.com (http://www.jihad-algerie.com/) late on Monday.

"Our valiant GSPC mujahideen led this operation, the first of its kind, with a well-prepared ambush against the heathen army."

It was not immediately possible to confirm the authenticity of the statement, which would be the first from the GSPC claiming responsibility for an attack outside Algeria.

Mauritania's government, which says the GSPC is recruiting Mauritanians to fight both at home and abroad, has already blamed the Algerian rebel group for Saturday's attack.

The GSPC has largely been chased from its homeland but some U.S. military experts fear it may be recruiting and regrouping further south.

Critics say Mauritania, an Islamic republic which straddles black and Arab Africa, is taking advantage of the U.S.-led "war on terror" to crack down on Islamic opponents.

In recent months the West African nation, which hopes to start pumping oil this year, has arrested around 50 suspected Islamists saying they had links to the GSPC. Security forces have searched mosques and confiscated religious texts.

There have been three coup attempts since June 2003. Some of the dissident soldiers wanted for the failed bids to overthrow Taya are still at large.

Many Arabs are angry that Taya, who seized power in a 1984 coup, shifted support from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to the United States and Israel.

He established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state in 1999, making Mauritania only the third Arab League country to do so.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L0767874.htm

[Petronas]

With Eye on Terrorists, US Trains With West African Forces
June 13, 2005

Nairobi, Kenya (CNSNews.com) - United States Marines and Special Forces are in West Africa for counter-terrorism training with 3,000 African troops amid concerns that terrorists have regrouped in the region. The U.S. European Command (EUCOM) initiated the joint military training, known as Operation Flintlock, which began last week.

The joint training comes in wake of a recent attack by Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) against a Mauritanian military post. The assault left 15 Mauritanian troops and nine terrorists dead. The attack is believed to be the first by the al-Qaeda-linked group outside its Algerian homeland.

Intelligence reports say the group and another, the Moroccan Combat Group, are attempting to establish a foothold in the region. The GSPC is believed to have spent about $7 million, which it obtained in ransom for releasing 17 European tourists kidnapped in 2003, on surface-to-air missiles, heavy machine-guns and mortars. Reports said the group also bought satellite-positioning equipment to enable it to conceal weapons in buried caches in the Sahara Desert, and later return to access them.

Operation Flintlock aims to help countries in the region reduce weapons smuggling and stop extremists finding havens around the Sahara, EUCOM's Major Holly Silkman told reporters in Senegal. It would also help the region to plan and execute joint counter-terrorism strategies, as well as peacekeeping, humanitarian and disaster relief operations.

The training is being conducted under the U.S.-Africa military program known as Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, a follow-up to an earlier initiative to train and equip 150-strong rapid-reaction companies in each of the four southern Saharan states -- Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. U.S. defense officials argue that 150 soldiers per country are not enough, given the vast territory involved. Washington has committed $100 million a year for next five years for this program. The current joint training involves forces from nine countries -- Mali, Niger, Chad, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Another African program, the East Africa Counter Terrorism Initiative (EACTI), was announced by President Bush in June 2003. EACTI involves U.S.-East Africa joint military training to enhance border and coastal security, improve aviation security, and strengthen control over the movement of people and goods across borders in seven Horn of African countries. Silkman said the Mauritania attack showed that counter terrorism strategies needed to be planned at a regional level. "In the past the focus has been within their [individual countries'] own borders. Now the focus is much more regional." Although it was difficult to eradicate radical terrorism, she said, the plan was to get the countries to work together so terrorists are denied lines of communication, sanctuary and provisions.

Among other concerns, the U.S. worries that West African volunteers returning from fighting against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq may join and bolster existing terrorist groups. EUCOM's officials said about 25 percent of the nearly 400 foreign fighters captured in Iraq were from Africa.

http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=\ForeignBureaus\archiv e\200506\FOR20050613d.html

[Casey]

I will go back to my own life, says Zuma

By Sheena Adams Just minutes after he was fired as deputy president, the harsh reality of his fall from grace hit Jacob Zuma.

As he addressed the press, officials - in a poignant signal of the door being closed on Zuma's post - shielded the coat of arms behind him with black screens.

No longer the country's second most powerful politician, Zuma now does not even have the distinction of being an ordinary MP.

The empty leather bench next to President Thabo Mbeki, usually reserved for Zuma, also spoke volumes.

'I'm devastated and my heart goes out for the deputy president, his family and his colleagues'

If, however, Zuma had a wrenching day at parliament, he succeeded in not showing it.

Except for puffy eyes that looked as if they'd seen little sleep of late, an undaunted Zuma emerged at a press conference wearing a sunny yellow shirt and cream suit.

In a strong show of support, members of his parliamentary office trooped in with him and fixed steely gazes on the media, who were again berated by their outgoing boss for finding him guilty in absentia.

It was a good thing he was not born an MP or a deputy president, he said.

"I had a life before that," he said in answer to the question of what he plans to do now.

"I will go back to my own life."

Zuma's light-hearted comments, punctuated by much loud laughter, were in stark contrast to those of supporters, such as a tearful Cosatu Secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi, who pledged his solidarity with Zuma.

"It's a very difficult moment for all of us," he said.

"I'm devastated and my heart goes out for the deputy president, his family and his colleagues."

In the house, cabinet ministers - including Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi and Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin - remained after the announcement, rooted to their benches and in animated discussion with one another.

African National Congress deputy secretary-general Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele left the gallery quickly, close to tears.

The public gallery was overflowing with diplomats, ANC figures, schoolchildren and members of the public, many of whom had to stand.

Premiers S'bu Ndebele from KwaZulu-Natal, Ebrahim Rasool from the Western Cape, Beatrice Marshoff from the Free State and Gauteng's Mbhazima Shilowa were also present in the house.

Shilowa was the first person to leap to his feet when Mbeki left the podium, while Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile stood holding papers and didn't applaud.

Waiting for the president to arrive, a jovial Mosiuoa Lekota - defence minister, national chairperson of the ANC and the man punted by many to be the likely successor to Zuma - did the rounds of the National Assembly, hugging and shaking hands with some of his colleagues.

But while many saw this as a clue to what might be coming in the president's speech, Mbeki made it clear he would announce his new deputy president "in due course".

A jittery Mbeki, who fidgeted throughout the speech without the benefit of his worry beads, left the house immediately after first shaking hands with a few senior ANC MPs.

The president received a standing ovation after his announcement, with opposition party MPs also joining in - although the applause was muted compared to the resounding welcome Zuma received in the house last week.

The deputy president of the ANC deftly deflected most of the questions thrown at him during the packed press conference which followed Mbeki's announcement.

"I would not like to respond to that," was the standard response to everything - from his opinion of Judge Hilary Squires's judgment to what his advice to his backers such as Cosatu would be.
He also refused to be drawn on how he was feeling.



http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20050615063007388C411988

[Casey]

No clarity on Zuma's successor
Donwald Pressly | Cape Town

15 June 2005 11:51

There was still no clarity on Wednesday as to when President Thabo Mbeki will announce Jacob Zuma's successor as deputy president -- but an acting president has to be appointed to fill the shoes of Mbeki when he is in Nigeria on Sunday.

It is also not clear if Zuma's dismissal has taken immediate effect –- but clarity on this matter is likely to made later on Wednesday, a government source said.

Zuma was asked when his dismissal -- announced as a "release" from his position by Mbeki on Tuesday at a joint sitting of Parliament -– actually took effect. He appeared to be under the impression that it was immediate, although Zuma noted that he had not been in the Assembly when the announcement was made.

President Mbeki is attending a New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) heads of state meeting in Nigeria on Sunday and this will necessitate the appointment of an acting president.

On previous occasions when both Mbeki and Zuma have been out of the country at the same time, Mbeki has rotated the presidency among a number of Cabinet ministers -- the most recent being Minister of Minerals and Energy Affairs Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Inkatha Freedom Party leader and then Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi has acted as president a number of times -- but he was not reappointed to the Cabinet after the April elections in 2004.

Normally the deputy president would act as president in the absence of the president -- but with Zuma now out or, perhaps, almost out -- the task would fall to one of the Cabinet members.

A permanent appointment of deputy president -- even if it is viewed as an interim measure -- places Mbeki in a strong position to determine his successor in 2009 as president. The president's second -- and constitutionally final term -- comes to an end in that year.

With Zuma now an unlikely successor -- even though he remains the ruling African National Congress's (ANC's) deputy president -- for the party's top job, Mbeki's choice will be a shoe-in for the top government and the top party job.

Among likely candidates mentioned by ANC MPs are the Defence Minister and former Free State premier Mosiuoa "Terror" Lekota; Mlambo-Ngcuka, Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel.

With the insistence by Mbeki that women need to be equitably represented as candidates in the upcoming municipal elections, pressure will be on to appoint a woman as deputy president.

Dlamini-Zuma -- the ex-wife of Jacob Zuma -- is not a popular figure within the party and has failed in the past even to win the presidency of the ANC Women's League when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela won election.

She also carries a less-than-rosy image of having been embroiled in the controversy of the Sarafina II HIV/Aids play while she was Minister of Health in the first democratic government after 1994.

However, Lekota, as number three in the party hierarchy -- as national chairperson -- is well placed for the post of national deputy president. He would also bring in a popular constituency. Significantly, he beat Mbeki's favoured candidate for the party post -- the late Steve Tshwete.

Mlambo-Ngcuka has proved to an able political master of her portfolio and has guided a difficult process of change in the mining industry.

She has managed to be seen to be acting in the interest of workers while being able to negotiate ably with mine owners as well during the controversy over the mining charter.

Manuel may turn out to be a dark horse candidate. He significantly gained the most votes for the national executive committee of his party in 2002. He has served as Minister of Finance since 1996 -- and commands wide respect from the business community and from workers.

But in the meantime, Mbeki is playing his cards close to his chest. He will address a youth day function in Kimberley on Thursday June 16. An announcement of an acting deputy president will probably be made between then and Saturday.

But he is likely to act swiftly in assessing the candidates -- a process with which the president is currently engaged -- for a permanent appointment. - I-

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/&articleid=243190

[Petronas]

Threat Closes U.S. Consulate in Nigeria
June 17, 2005 10:20 AM EDT

LAGOS, Nigeria - The United States temporarily closed its consulate in Lagos because of a terrorist threat, a U.S. military official said Friday, and those of Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia and other nations followed suit. About 100 armed police patrolled the street where the U.S. consulate and several other diplomatic missions are located, some searching cars. A Nigerian police bomb disposal squad brought its van to the area.

The closure came after "there was some kind of terrorist threat made," U.S. Maj. Holly Silkman, a spokeswoman for the Germany-based U.S. European Command, told reporters in Dakar, Senegal. The threat was "called in," she said, offering no further details. She is in Dakar for a U.S.-led joint counterterrorism exercises in nine African countries. The shutdown came Thursday afternoon and the consulate remained closed Friday, U.S. Embassy officials in the Nigerian capital of Abuja said. The Nigerian government had begun "to investigate and address the situation, in collaboration with the United States authorities," Nigeria's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

All diplomatic missions on the street were closed, including those of Italy, Germany, Britain and Russia. The U.S. Embassy in Abuja was operating with only skeletal services, an embassy official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, U.S. Embassy spokesman Rudolph Stewart had confirmed a "security incident.It's an ongoing incident which is currently under investigation," he said by telephone from Abuja, without elaborating. He said Nigerian police were "working closely with us on this matter."

The Foreign Office in London said Britain shut its Deputy High Commission in Lagos following the closure of the nearby U.S. Consulate. "We'll reassess over the weekend, but the plan is to reopen on Monday," said British Deputy High Commissioner Martin Shearman from Abuja.

Al-Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden purportedly marked Nigeria for liberation in a release posted on the Internet last year. The country of around 130 million is roughly evenly split between Christians and Muslims. Political, ethnic and religious violence has claimed well over 10,000 lives since President Olusegun Obasanjo came to power in a 1999 election, but the country has not experienced any terrorist bombings.

http://start.earthlink.net/article/int?guid=20050617/42b24ac0_3ca6_1552620050617-1930054566

[Petronas]

Terrorists in Iraq seen from Africa
June 25, 2005

Military officials say close to a quarter of foreign fighters captured in Iraq come from northern Africa, validating fears that ungoverned swaths of the continent are serving as both a pipeline and safe haven for Islamist radicals. According to a June 17 statement from a U.S. military official, a significant number of the Iraqi recruits are said to have joined Abu Musab Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq network. Zarqawi is the Jordanian militant believed responsible for many attacks that have left hundreds of Iraqis dead in past months. "The potential does exist for [African] individuals or groups to go to Iraq and either conduct operations or receive some of the training," said Maj. Gen. Thomas Csrnko, head of U.S. special operations command in Europe (EUCOM), whose security oversight includes North and West Africa.

While a stream of African jihadists continue to provide manpower and financial support, Gen. Csrnko said many veterans could return to northern Africa to use insurgent tactics developed in Iraq, from bomb-making to strategic planning, against their governments. Gen. Csrnko cited potential for insurgent camps much like those run by al Qaeda in Afghanistan, across the Sahel region, which spans the fringe of the Sahara desert from the west African coast to Sudan.

The disclosure of an Iraq-Africa connection coincided with Operation Flintlock, the first phase of the U.S. military's expanded Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), headed by EUCOM. U.S. Special Forces are engaged in a two-week military exercise, which ends tomorrow, to train 3,000 African troops from nine countries: Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria and Tunisia. The goal is to help ill-equipped forces better coordinate strategies to safeguard borders against militant groups that are on the offensive in the region. According to Gen. Csrnko, enemy No. 1 is the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, listed on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The Algeria-based group, estimated to have around 300 fighters and affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, has been accused of multiple kidnappings of European tourists and has claimed responsibility for recent attacks around the Sahara desert. Thirteen Algerian soldiers were killed and six were wounded when a bomb exploded under a truck convoy June 8, the deadliest incident since 12 soldiers died May 15 in an ambush 300 miles east of Algiers. Additionally, 15 Mauritanian soldiers were killed and 17 wounded during a June 4 raid on a remote military outpost in which some victims reportedly had their throats slit. The group said the offensive was a "message which implies that our activity is not restricted to fighting the internal enemy, but enemies of the religion wherever they are." Al Qaeda in Iraq issued a statement on its Web site congratulating the mujahedeen "who are fighting the converters in Mauritania."

The increasing regularity and style of attacks suggests the terrorists may be expanding lessons learned in Iraq to a new front, forcing Washington to make preventative action in the region a priority. Operation Flintlock is the first phase of many training and border-patrol exercises, with increased funding earmarked for other humanitarian and economic development projects.

The U.S. military and the State Department will reportedly seek to spend $30 million to $60 million this year on TSCTI, and $100 million more each year until 2011. The half-a-billion-dollar budget represents a massive upgrade from the Pan-Sahel Initiative, the $6.25-million forerunner of the TSCTI launched in 2004.

Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, called the previous plan "just a drop in the bucket" compared to the region's needs. She said poverty, lack of education and civil freedoms, and corruption in faltering states create an atmosphere of hopelessness that make citizens more vulnerable to radicals seeking a foothold. She stressed the TSCTI is a comprehensive approach that will succeed through prevention, not response. "This is an excellent example of getting ahead of the power curve and not being behind it and having to try to catch up," she said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050624-105736-5821r.htm

[Petronas]

Chad in 'state of war' with Sudan
Friday, 23 December 2005, 17:18 GMT

Chad says it is in "a state of war" with neighbour Sudan over the security crisis in the east of the country. It accuses Sudan of being the "common enemy of the nation" after a Chadian rebel attack on a town last week. In a statement, the government calls on Chadians to mobilise themselves against Sudanese aggression. Relations between the two states have deteriorated since Chad accused Sudan of being behind Sunday's attack on Adre, which left about 100 people dead. The strong language in the statement will alarm observers who have already warned that tensions along the Chad-Sudan border are nearing breaking point.

In the aftermath of Sunday's attack, Chad accused Sudan of being directly involved in helping to support the Chadian rebels. But the statement issued by Chad's government on Friday afternoon is the most aggressive yet. It claims that not only was Sudan behind the attack on Adre, but it also accuses Sudanese militia of making daily incursions into Chad, stealing cattle, killing innocent people and burning villages on the Chadian border.

"Chad is today in a state of war with Sudan," the statement says. It asks Chadians to form a patriotic front against what it calls "the common enemy of the nation". The statement thanks the international community for its support so far, but says condemnations of the recent violence in Adre do not go far enough. It appeals to the international community, including the African Union, to specifically condemn what it alleges is Sudan's involvement in the attack on Adre.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4556576.stm

[malum]

Sudan says Western forces in Darfur unwelcome
Fri Jan 13, 2006

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM (Reuters (http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-01-13T215344Z_01_KWA378764_RTRUKOC_0_UK-SUDAN-DARFUR.xml&archived=False)) - Sudan on Friday rejected a suggestion by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the United States and Europe help set up a possible mobile force in Darfur to supplement African troops now on the ground.

"We think that the African Union is doing a good job and so far they have not said they are unable to do that job," Foreign Minister Lam Akol told Reuters.

"Naturally what should happen is to give them the money they want, not to complicate matters by involving another force on the ground," he said.

But the U.N. special envoy Jan Pronk said it was premature for Khartoum to react since the African Union and the U.N. Security Council had not yet made a decision.

"The Government of Sudan will have to think and take a position. My advice to each and everybody is to not listen to the first reaction of the Sudanese government," he told a news conference at the United Nations in New York.

"The government in the past starts out with a negative position, which later ends up positive," Pronk said. "The important thing is, what is the final position of the Sudanese government, and we have ample time to discuss that."

But Pronk said Darfur would need 12,000 to 20,000 troops, numbers higher than U.N. military officials are considering. He said soldiers were not only needed to quell fighting to guard people eager to leave squalid camps.

The United States supports augmenting African Union forces in Sudan's western Darfur region with U.N. peacekeepers but has not offered its own troops for such a mission.

LOGISTICAL SUPPORT

U.S. diplomats said Washington would be hard pushed to find enough troops to send into Darfur given its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. contribution would likely be logistical support.

One of two main Darfur rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), said it would welcome U.S. troops.

"If the Americans came they would be preferable to the African Union who so far have failed in their duties to protect civilians," SLA Vice President al-Raya Mahmoud Juma'a said.

"They (the African Union) have enough forces and equipment, but they still cannot do their job and stop the attacks," he told Reuters from Darfur.

The other group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said the nationality of the force did not matter, but said the AU force needed a stronger mandate and more troops.

The African Union has 7,000 peacekeeping troops in Darfur, a region the size of France, a limited mandate to use force and only enough funds until March. If it gets more money, it will leave troops in Darfur for another 9 to 12 months.

The AU depends on donor countries to fund its mission to monitor a tentative truce in the region, where violence has driven more than 2 million from their homes.

In a statement seen by Reuters Friday, the AU said it "expresses its support, in principle, to a transition from (AU) to a UN operation." It planned to meet before the end of March to decide on any future handover to the United Nations.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday the United Nations was drawing up contingency plans and most diplomats expect a U.N. takeover within a year.

Asked whether that would include rich countries like the United States and European nations, Annan said, "Those are the kind of countries with the kind of capabilities we will need, so when the time comes, we will be turning to them."

[NYer]

From Rantburg ...

UN admits they've hosed it in Darfur. (http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=105&sid=593040)

[keith]

Four killed in eight blasts in Ethiopian capital
By Tsegaye Tadesse
Fri May 12, 1:45 PM ET



Eight explosions tore through the Ethiopian capital on Friday, killing four people and injuring at least 43 in the latest of a series of mysterious blasts to strike Addis Ababa this year.

Police scrambled throughout the day to keep track of the apparently coordinated attacks across the city, which followed an earlier pattern targeting public areas and transportation.

A bomb at a cafe in a busy market area around lunchtime killed two, following three explosions earlier in the day that struck a commercial district and a minibus.

"Two who sat on the veranda were killed instantly," cafe manager Seifu Shume told Reuters. Two waitresses were among the injured, including one whose leg was blown off, he said, standing amid shattered glass on a blood-smeared floor.

Later, one person was killed when a bomb went off on another minibus and another was killed in a blast at a hotel parking lot, police said in a statement broadcast on state television.

In a third minibus explosion, the driver and conductor escaped injury by jumping from the vehicle as it began to explode. The force of the explosion hurled the bus against a nearby wall, completely destroying it, witnesses said.

Two blasts also struck later in the city's market area, officials said, but did not specify how many were hurt there.

Police cordoned off the blast sites and urged people to come forward with any information about who was behind the bombings.

"These explosions were meant to terrorize the people," Addis Ababa police said in a statement read on state television.

This is the second time someone has been killed in what appears to be an orchestrated bombing campaign. One person died and 14 were injured in five blasts on March 27.

No one has yet been arrested and charged in any of the attacks, which started in January and have escalated since.

Authorities have blamed various groups, including members of the main opposition group and separatist rebels from the Oromo and Ogaden regions.

Authorities said plastic explosives used in the March attacks pointed the finger at insurgents from neighboring Eritrea. The two countries fought a 1998-2000 war over their border, which is still in dispute.

Asmara denies the accusations.

Friday's attacks began when a blast ripped across De Gaulle Plaza at 5 a.m., knocking out windows at a bank and an office of state-owned Ethiopian Airlines.

A second hit the state electricity company headquarters 200 meters away several hours later, injuring several people.

The unexplained blasts have increased tension in Addis Ababa, which has been shaken by two bouts of violence after disputed parliamentary elections last year.

At least 80 people were killed in clashes between police and opposition demonstrators in a protest over what they said were rigged election results.



Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

[keith]

A plot to assassinate US Ambassador Mark Wall in the Chad capital Saturday night is disclosed
by DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources

May 20, 2006, 6:27 PM (GMT+02:00)

Three suicide bombers were reportedly assigned to arrive at the Le Meridien Chari hotel in N’Djamena later Saturday where the ambassador is invited to an event.

Chad intelligence, helped by foreign agents, are seeking the three bombers who are expected at the hotel with identity cars in the names of Samuel Gruben, Charles Mahashiri and Behamin Shaster.

DEBKAfile’s sources report that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are suspected of complicity.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly 252 reported May 5 that Revolutionary Guards units had landed in Khartoum in transit for Darfur and groups of Iranian agents had been assigned on spying missions in Chad. The units arrived in Sudan with Lt.-Col Asghar Mobarake and Hojat-Ol Eslam Mostafa Ramazani, head of the RG intelligence division.

[keith]

Congo army fights on a shoestring in lawless east
By David Lewis
Mon May 22, 7:58 AM ET



The Congolese army commander screamed over the radio for more ammunition as mortars pounded down and machinegun fire rattled around him.

Several hours later about 20 mostly barefoot villagers -- offered as porters to the army by a local chief -- trudged toward the front line with mortar tubes and cases of ammunition balanced on their heads.

"We can't fight properly without civilians," said an army officer walking with the villagers, urging them to push on to the front 16 km (10 miles) up through steep hills.

"We have no trucks or tanks so we have to use them to help carry our equipment," he said.

Democratic Republic of Congo's fledgling army, backed by the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission, is trying to pacify the mineral-rich east ahead of long-awaited elections on July 30, the first democratic polls in four decades.

Some 1,000 Bangladeshi, Pakistani and South African U.N. peacekeepers are backing 3,000 Congolese troops in an offensive to regain control of Tchei, a rebel stronghold in Ituri district where militia violence has killed tens of thousands since 1999.

The U.N. blue berets followed at a distance as Congolese soldiers led the ground assault on the town over the weekend. Fighting with heavy machinegun and mortar fire has so far killed 32 rebels, according to the army.

U.N. helicopter gunships known as Firebirds hovered overhead, communicating with the troops in English, French, Bangladeshi, Swahili and Lingala, airlifting in more ammunition and evacuating wounded soldiers.

CHAOTIC

Previous operations have been compromised by ill-disciplined Congolese soldiers, some of whom mutinied and attacked the U.N. after being sent to the front without enough ammunition or food in the last attempt to take Tchei in March.

The poorly-paid soldiers are notorious for looting and harassing people they have been sent to protect.

"They are not paid. They are not fed. But they are sent off to fight on foot," a senior U.N. peacekeeper told Reuters. "Of course they are going to live off the back of the population."

July's presidential and legislative polls are meant to draw a line under a war which was officially declared over in 2003 but sparked a humanitarian crisis that has killed 4 million people since the conflict began in 1998.

Instability in the east and the slow pace of security sector reform have complicated preparations for the polls.

Diplomats have repeatedly pressured the authorities in Kinshasa to ensure that money released from the central bank for paying army salaries and training men is not stolen before it reaches foot soldiers in the east.

The International Crisis Group think-tank warned in a report earlier this year that the army "could collapse again quickly if faced with a serious threat" and said the leaders of some former factions were deliberately keeping it weak to preserve their ability to destabilize the country.




Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments

[keith]

Congo arrests 32 foreigners in "coup plot" By Willy Kabwe
2 hours, 34 minutes ago



Congo's government said on Wednesday it had arrested 32 South Africans, Nigerians and Americans involved in a suspected coup plot ahead of July elections, but some diplomats saw politics behind the move.

Diplomats and security sources said the arrests could be linked to domestic political rivalries and that the alleged "plot" posed no serious threat to July 30 parliamentary and presidential polls in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most of the 19 South Africans arrested were employees in Congo of a Pretoria-based security firm, Omega Risk Solutions.

The Omega staff were providing security training for Congo's National Transport Authority. But some were also advising a Congolese presidential candidate, Harvard-trained doctor Oscar Kashala, one of 32 contenders vying with President Joseph Kabila for the country's top job.

The polls will be the first multi-party elections in four decades in the central African country, a former Belgian colony.

"About 30 people claiming to work for a security company have been arrested. They say they were working for the company but our information suggests they had other intentions," government spokesman Henri Mova Sakanyi told Reuters.

Sakanyi said they would be put on trial. "They wanted to destabilize the institutions of the country, that means a coup attempt," he said.

"Omega denies that the company or its employees have been involved in any wrongdoing or illegal activities in the DRC," Omega Risk Solutions said in a statement.

Those arrested included three U.S. citizens. Some of the 32 detained had recently returned from working in Iraq.

Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the United Nations mission in Congo, said the U.N. had noted the arrests. "It was announced very publicly, but we have no information that it was any kind of threat to the election process," he told Reuters.

TENSION BEFORE ELECTIONS

A Congolese security source saw domestic political motives behind the arrests. "I don't think there was any real coup threat," he said, asking not to be named.

"This is a clear sign things are getting very tense in Kinshasa in the lead up to the elections," a regional analyst, who declined to be named, said. "It is not clear whether this is a front to clamp down on people," he added.

Congolese opposition sources denounced the coup plot announcement as a diversionary tactic by Kabila's government.

They said the houses of several opposition figures in Kinshasa were surrounded by police early on Wednesday to stop them holding a planned demonstration.

The elections are intended to draw a line under a five-year war which was officially declared over in 2003.

But fighting by rebels and renegade militias has continued in many parts of the vast country, especially the east, prolonging a humanitarian crisis that has killed 4 million people since 1998.

Kabila is among 33 candidates running for the presidency, who include former rebels he fought against.

Among the candidates is Kashala, a cancer researcher who has lived in the United States. Omega said it was helping, at the request of an American consultant, in "scouting a safe environment for Dr. Kashala to operate from."

Several thousand candidates have also applied to stand for 500 parliamentary seats in the polls.

The U.N. has its biggest peacekeeping force in the world in Congo, but its 17,000 soldiers and policemen deployed there are thinly stretched. The European Union has also agreed to deploy a small peacekeeping force during the elections.

(Additional reporting by David Lewis and John Chiahemen in Johannesburg)



Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

[keith]

DR Congo changes tune on 'coup plotters'

May 25, 2006
By Andnetwork .com

AND Africa - The DRC seems to have changed its tune on the seriousness of the case involving 32 alleged mercenaries.

According to reports coming from Kinshasa, the change in attitude which had raised alarm across the vast country ahead of the July elections could see some of those arrested released. Though the men have not yet been charged, some could face charges like working in the country without a work permit.

19 South Africans are among those arrested. Others are from Nigeria and the US. They had all been accused for trying to commit a coup. They had been held on allegations of "destabilisation of government institutions".

The DRC elections are scheduled for July 30, the first in 40 years.

http://www.andnetwork.com/index?service=direct/0/Home/top.titleStory&sp=l36112

[keith]

CHAD-SUDAN: 100s Chad villagers killed, but no definitive link with Sudan May 25, 2006

By Andnetwork .com

Militia fighters armed with machetes, knives and guns killed over 100 people in eastern Chad last month, including more than 75 people in one village alone, but there is no definitive proven link between the attackers and the Sudanese government, according to researchers from Human Rights Watch.

In the village of Jawara, which was visited last month by researchers from the US rights NGO, 38 people gathered together praying under a tree were killed in one swoop. Another 37 who came back to the village later to bury the dead were also massacred, HRW said.

Those attacks took place on 12 and 13 April, according to villagers. That week, rebel groups were seeping across the semi-arid central African country to launch an attack on the capital N'djamena and remove President Idriss Deby.

HRW said it also learnt of a further 43 people killed in three villages close to Jawara in eastern Chad at around the same time. "The bodies were still out in the open. There were blood stains on the floor, machetes, and bodies," said HRW researcher David Buchbinder.

"These attacks were deeper inside Chad than we have ever seen before, and there were far more people killed -- we are talking about hundreds of people butchered with machetes and knives," he said.

HRW researchers spoke to IRIN in N'djamena after a six-week visit to camps and villages across eastern Chad, which borders Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region.

Chad's government has blamed the Sudanese government in Khartoum for sponsoring militia groups to enter Chad with the goal of destabilising the Deby’s government. The same groups are blamed for violence in the Darfur region, where around two million people have been displaced by fighting.

In the east of the country, Chadians have been arriving at informal camps for displaced people by the truckload in recent weeks, almost all because they are too afraid of attacks to stay in their villages, aid agencies have said.

HRW said it had gathered evidence of Sudanese army soldiers being involved in attacks on Chadian civilians. It showed IRIN copies of Sudanese army badges, identity papers, and personal documents, it said were taken off militia members killed in eastern Chad.

However, the HRW researchers said they were unable to decisively prove a link between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the militias operating in Chad.

"The Human Rights Watch definition of a Janjawid is an Arab militiaman trained and equipped by the Sudanese government to implement their missions," HRW counsel Oliver Bercault said in N'djamena.

"Now we have people crossing the border with the same equipment as was used in Sudan, but we can't link these people, even the Sudanese guys, with Khartoum. We could clearly link the evidence with Khartoum in Darfur, but not in Chad," he said. Sometimes Chadians were among them.

People questioned by HRW in eastern Chad nonetheless blame the Janjawid -- an Arabic word that means "devils on horseback" -- for the attacks against then.

According to HRW some of the attacked villages do appear to have been re-occupied by Arab families, although others are deserted.

"A white flag in a village means it has brokered a deal with the Janjawid," said Buchbinder. “There are other villages which locals don't go to because they say ‘the Janjawid live there now,’” he added.

But "Janjawid has just become a word that means someone Arab or someone who attacks you," said Buchbinder.
The HRW researchers said they found that militia groups were still active throughout eastern Chad, especially around the town of Kou Kou, 80 kilometres from the Chadian border and less than 10 kilometres from a refugee camp at Goz Amir.

Among the more than 200,000 Darfur refugees in eastern Chad, some of whom have been living in camps for longer than three years, aid agencies say there are a disproportionate number of women and children, as many of the men were killed in attacks in Darfur.

"Most of the people in the camps have had family members killed in attacks, so they are very sympathetic to the (Darfur) rebellion," said Buchbinder.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR has said many Chadians are being forcibly recruited to join Darfuri militia groups that have crossed into Chad to regroup and rest, before returning to Darfur to fight.

But Buchbinder said in many camps HRW found no evidence that people were being forcibly recruited into the militias. He said people are instead joining the rebel groups freely and are "very sympathetic to the rebellion."

"Part of the background static of life in the camps is recruitment," he said, adding that recruitment is "assisted by people who are passing through and say, come on, come fight for your homeland."

http://www.andnetwork.com/index?service=direct/0/Home/recent.fullStory&sp=l36116

[keith]

Zimbabwe has no money to print currency

May 29, 2006
By Andnetwork .com

Cash shortages have returned to haunt Zimbabweans. Banks started rationing money on Friday, allowing clients to withdraw only Zim$5 million (about US$49) to avert crowd trouble, but most ran out of mint-print, prompting desperate clients to form overnight queues outside.

Last month the government awarded civil servants hefty salary increases after the opposition Movement for Democratic Change urged them to join planned future demonstrations. Official sources said the recent 150 percent pay rise for soldiers, teachers, policemen and nurses had put a strain on money supply.

Reserve Bank officials told IRIN that plans to print about Zim$60 trillion (about US$592.9 million) were briefly delayed after the government failed to secure foreign currency to buy ink and special paper for printing money.

Inflation has shot to 1,042 percent and is still climbing as the economic meltdown continues, putting Zimbabwe's rapidly dwindling working class in an ever more precarious position. Cash shortages were last experienced in 2003 and only ended after the introduction of high- denomination bearer cheques.

One bank manager told IRIN: "We don't have enough money. The best we can do is to share the little money that is there among our clients," but added quietly, "As the manager I can use my discretion and assist genuinely desperate cases."

However, his voice was not low enough and he was immediately surrounded by more than 20 people. "I need to pay $40 million [US$395] at the hospital, $5 million [US$49] is of no use to me," pleaded one man.

Another in his late 20s was equally desperate. "I need to withdraw $200 million [about US$1,976] by Saturday to pay the bridal price for my girlfriend, but at $5 million [US$49] a day I will not have enough money on the day," he lamented.

The manager, sweating profusely, escaped to the safety of another office.

Margaret Phiri, 36, who teaches at a school 70km east of the capital, was equally devastated.

"I had borrowed a total of $6 million [US$59] from friends and I was supposed to pay them back this week after getting my salary from the bank, but as things stand now I am in trouble because those people expect me to bring them their money, while I also need to get money to sustain myself," she said.

A soldier who refused to identify himself could not hide his frustration. "What do you think I will do with this $5 million[US$49]? It cannot buy much. I usually withdraw all my salary at once, but now I am being given the burden of coming to the bank again for more withdrawals," he complained.

The soldier was followed by murmurs of: "The government has failed," and "This is a sign of poor economic management."

It took a long wait on the sidewalk in a temperature of 25 degrees centigrade before Given Maramba, a Harare resident, reached the bank teller. "You really need nerves of steel to endure the torture of those queues - I queued for a solid three hours before I was finally served," he said, brandishing a wad of notes.

http://www.andnetwork.com/index?service=direct/0/Home/top.fullStory&sp=l36645

[keith]

Chad said to be on the brink

June 1, 2006,

By ANDnetwork .com

Chad, which has had a history of turbulent change since independence, is again teetering on the brink of a crisis, the independent think-tank International Crisis Group said in a report released on Thursday

Although President Idriss Deby last April successfully repelled a rebel attack at the gates of the capital N’Djamena, the victory “settled nothing on the military front and underscored the political fragility of the regime,” said a 38-page report published by the Brussels-based group. “The crisis is far from resolved, and is likely to be an enduring one,” it added. Deby, who has faced a string of mutinies, rebel attacks and high-level defections since December, is also having to contend with the spill-over from conflicts in Sudan’s Darfur region and the Central African Republic (CAR). But despite his government’s claims that Sudan is arming Chadian rebels, the current crisis is as much about a deficit of democracy as it is about regional crises, said the ICG report. “It is equally the manifestation of the political crisis of the semi-authoritarian regime and the absence of domestic political space that has militarised all political differences in the country,” the report said. While the country has known more political freedom since Deby took over in 1990, his party’s decision last year to change the constitution to allow him to run for a third term was a final straw for much of the opposition. Wide-scale corruption meanwhile appears to be responsible for economic stagnation at a time when new oil revenues should have improved the standard of living for ordinary Chadians. In Darfur, Zaghawa people from the president’s tiny ethnic group are helping Darfur rebels to combat Khartoum, while the Sudanese authorities have countered by aiding Chadian rebels, notably the FUCD, one of the three most significant armed rebel groups. Peace in Sudan and CAR are key to helping Chad resolve 25 years of strife, but the core of the problem lay at home, the report said. “If a solution exists in Chad, the first step will have to be to seek national dialogue. The consensus that existed after the departure of (former president) Hissene Habre evaporated after the 2001 and 2002 elections. The May 2006 elections have made political debate even more difficult,” it said, referring to Deby’s 3 May re-election in a poll boycotted by the opposition. The alternative scenario was continued simmering conflict within Chad that would feed the violence taking place in neighbouring Darfur and CAR. To read the full report, go to http://www.crisisgroup.org/ ccr/sas

http://www.andnetwork.com/index?service=direct/0/Home/top.fullStory&sp=l37126

[keith]

Scores killed in Chad clashes
From correspondents in N'djamena
08-07-2006
From: Agence France-Presse
AT least fifteen people were killed and several others injured this week in eastern Chad close to the Sudanese border in clashes between two rival ethnic groups, military sources said overnight.

According to the first witness accounts compiled by security forces, the clashes on Monday were sparked by the disappearance of two men from the Gorane ethnic group.
They went missing during a visit to a weekly market in Guereda, 900 km north east of N'Djamena which is run by traders from the Tama ethnic group, the sources said.

Relatives of the two missing men accused the Tama traders and clashes ensued, involving the use of automatic weapons, between the two ethnic groups which both have self-defence groups.

Several of the injured were taken to hospital with serious injuries.

Villages along Chad's border with Sudan have over the past few months been regular targets for raids by rebels opposed to Chad President Idriss Deby Itno, by rebels of the neighbouring Sudanese province of Darfur and by groups of Janjaweed rebels fighting them along with Sudanese government forces.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19722726-38195,00.html

[Petronas]

Niger (Country threat level - 4): On 26 August 2006, government officials announced that two kidnapped Italian tourists had been taken out of the country by their abductors. The tourists were kidnapped in the southeastern part of the country near the border with Chad on 21 August while they were traveling in a convoy along with 19 other Italian nationals, who were also kidnapped but were released on 22 August. A formerly unknown rebel group called the Front of Armed Revolutionary Forces of the Sahara claimed responsibility for the abductions.

http://www.airsecurity.com/hotspots/HotSpots.asp

[keith]

Long, but worth a read.

Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
by Michael Watts

Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both.
—Perry Anderson, “Scurrying Towards Bethlehem,” New Left Review, July–August 2001

In his 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush finally put into words what all previous presidents could not bring themselves to utter in public: addiction. The United States, he conceded, is “addicted” to oil—which is to say addicted to the car—and as a consequence unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers. What he neglected to mention was that the post–Second World War U.S. global oil acquisition strategy—a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their “special relationship” aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep within the U.S. imperial fold.

With surplus capacity in OPEC at an all-time low and speculation running rampant in the commodity exchanges, Big Oil is awash with money. Corporate profits are historically unprecedented. Chevron netted a cool $14 billion in 2005, and first quarter earnings in 2006 are 50 percent higher than the previous year, a historic high obscene enough to have Congress muttering about a windfall profits tax. So-called supply risks in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria coupled with the speculative impulses of the oil traders have driven up the price of oil to around $70 a barrel, and a former oilman (surrounded by a posse of former oilmen) stalks the halls of the White House. As if that were not enough, the New York Times (March 27, 2006) reported that through a “vague law” the U.S. government will waive, for the oil supermajors, about $7 billion in state royalties over the next seven years. All of this takes us back to the 1973 oil embargo and President Nixon’s Project Independence, designed to achieve U.S. self-sufficiency by 1980. The policy failed miserably (U.S. dependency upon imported oil in the late 1960s was 20 percent and is expected to be about 66 percent by 2025) and Nixon resorted to maximizing domestic supply and turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal cost—just as George Bush intends to do.

It is no surprise, then, that alternative sources of oil should be very much on the Bush radar screen (since conservation strategies or increased gas taxes are conspicuously absent). Cheney’s National Energy Strategy Report in 2001 bemoaned the U.S. oil habit—“a dependency on foreign powers that do not have America’s interests at heart”—long before the State of the Union address. A recent report in the Financial Times (March 1, 2006) makes the new agenda crystal clear. Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy companies.” IHS Energy—one of the oil industry’s major consulting companies—expects African oil production, especially along the Atlantic littoral, to attract “huge exploration investment” contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields (see map).

Energy security is the name of the game. No surprise, then, that the Council on Foreign Relations’s call for a different U.S. approach to Africa in its new report, More than Humanitarianism (2005), turns on Africa’s “growing strategic importance” for U.S. policy. It is the West African Gulf of Guinea, encompassing the rich on- and offshore fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola, that represents a key plank in Bush’s alternative to the increasingly volatile and unpredictable oil-states of the Persian Gulf. Nigeria and Angola alone account for nearly four million barrels per day (almost half of Africa’s output) and U.S. oil companies alone have invested more than $40 billion in the region over the last decade (with another $30 billion expected between 2005 and 2010). Oil investment now represents over 50 percent of all foreign direct investment (FDI) in the continent (and over 60 percent of all FDI in the top four FDI recipient countries), and almost 90 percent of all cross-border mergers and acquisition activity since 2003 has been in the mining and petroleum sector. The strategic interests of the United States certainly include not only access to cheap and reliable low-sulphur oil imports, but also keeping the Chinese (for example in Sudan) and South Koreans (for example in Nigeria)—aggressive new actors in the African oil business—and Islamic terror at bay. Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror.

The Road to Serfdom

The backdrop to the new scramble is the calamity of African poverty—in the language of Our Common Interest: The Report of The Commission on Africa (2005), assembled by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, “the greatest tragedy of our time.” They dubbed 2005 the “Year of Africa.” In June of that year the Live 8 concerts drew a global audience of two billion, and a week later the G8 pledged to double aid to Africa ($25 billion by 2010) and forgive the debts of fourteen African states. African poverty had forced itself into the international limelight aided and abetted by a motley crew of humanitarians from Bono to Jeffrey Sachs to the Pope. The milestones in the growing international visibility of the African crisis include the United Nations Millennium Declaration in 2000; the Millennium Challenge Account; the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and the African Growth And Opportunity Act, all launched by President Bush; and now, the new World Bank African Action Plan. Collectively these palliatives were belated responses to the unacceptable face over two decades of globalization, reform, and the search for the Holy Grail of good governance. On the continent itself, the New Economic Partnership for African Development [NEPAD] (2001) and the revamped African Union (formerly the Organization for African Unity) offered the prospect that poor leadership (the pathologies of the African postcolonial state variously described as patrimonialism, prebendalism, predation, quasi-statehood, the postcolony, and politics of the belly) were to be taken seriously by an African political class that purportedly represented a new sort of democratic dispensation unleashed by a raft of the political transitions during the 1990s.

To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed catastrophically.

William Easterly, former high-ranking World Bank apparatchik, in his new lacerating demolition of structural adjustment—“a quarter century of economic failure and political chaos”—boldly states that the entire unaccountable enterprise of planned reform is “absurd” (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/). It was Africa after all that was the testing ground for the Hayekian counter-revolution that swept through development economics in the 1970s. It began with the publication of Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (known as the “Berg Report”), the first in a series of World Bank reports that focus on the development problems of sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first systematic attempt to take the Chicago Boys experience in post-Allende Chile and impose it on an entire continent. The ideas of Elliot Berg and his fellow travelers marked the triumph of a long march by the likes of Peter Bauer, H. G. Johnson, and Deepak Lal (ably supported by the monetarist think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society, and the astonishing rise to power from the early presence of Leo Strauss and Fredrich Hayek of the “Chicago School”) through the development institutions like the World Bank. Long before shock therapy in Eastern Europe or even the debt-driven “adjustments” in Latin America, it was sub-Saharan Africa that was the playground for neoliberalism’s assault. According to the United Nations, twenty-six of thirty-two sub-Saharan states had a “liberal” economic regime by 1998. Almost all had experienced some sort of structural adjustment program in the wake of the Berg report.

If the 1980s were Africa’s Lost Decade with collapsing commodity prices, deteriorating terms of trade, and the first crashing waves of IMF austerity—then how might one characterize the last fifteen years, in which the benefits of reform were to be finally felt, but in which life expectancy across sub-Saharan Africa steadily fell and per capita income has at best stagnated? And all of this during a period in which net official overseas development aid fell by 40 percent (from $18.7 to $10 billion).

In Africa, the court of neoliberalism has been concluded, and the verdict is in. The picture is not pretty. Over the last thirty years there has been no growth in income for the average African. Life expectancy is forty-six years. Twenty-three of forty-seven sub-Saharan states have currently a GDP of less than $3 billion (ExxonMobil’s net profit in the first quarter of 2006 was $8 billion). By 2005, thirty-eight of the top fifty-nine priority countries that failed to make headway toward the Millennium Goals were sub-Saharan states, and according to the Chronic Poverty Report 2004–05, all sixteen of the most “desperately deprived” countries are located in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 300 million people live on less than $2 per day—and this is expected to rise to 400 million by 2015. One-third of the population of the continent is undernourished; stunting rates run at almost 40 percent. According to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization assessment in January 2006, twenty-seven countries are in need of emergency food relief. As I write, the famine in Somalia is of the order of the catastrophic food crisis that devastated the region in the mid-1980s; the nightmare in Darfur has spread to Chad with the prospects of hundreds of thousands of refugees being pushed and shoved across the greater Chad basin in a way all too familiar to the central African crisis a decade earlier.

The neoliberal tsunami broke with a dreadful ferocity on African cities, and the African slum world in particular. Reform—the privatization of public utilities creating massive corporate profits and a decline in service provision, the slashing of urban services, the immiseration of many sectors of the public workforce, the collapse of manufactures and real wages, and often the disappearance of the middle class—was remorselessly anti-urban in its effects, as Mike Davis documents in Planet of Slums (Verso, 2005). As a consequence, African cities confronted the horrifying realities of an economic contraction of 2–5 percent per year combined with sustained population growth of up to 10 percent per annum (Zimbabwe’s urban labor market grew by 300,000 per year in the 1990s while urban employment grew by just 3 percent of that figure). In Dar es Salaam public service expenditures per capita fell by 10 percent a year in the 1980s; in Khartoum adjustment created one million “new poor”; and urban poverty in Nigeria almost tripled between 1980 and the mid 1990s. No wonder that 85 percent of urban growth in Nairobi, Kinshasha, and Nouakchott in the 1980s and 1990s was accommodated in the slums barracks of sprawling and ungovernable cities. Everyone’s worst urban nightmare—Lagos—grew from 300,000 to 13 million in over fifty years and is expected to become part of a vast Gulf of Guinea slum of 60 million poor along a littoral corridor 600 kilometers stretching from Benin City to Accra by 2020. Black Africa will contain 332 million slum dwellers by 2015, a figure expected to double every fifteen years. The pillaging and privatization of the state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession, all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city, notes Davis, has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of neoliberal utopianism in Africa.

As if to confirm the catastrophism of commentators like Robert Kaplan, the calamity that is African development ran straight into another: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While new epidemiological data suggests that the prevalence rates and possible demographic and socio-economic impacts for much of western and northeastern Africa may have been exaggerated (Guardian, April 21, 2006), the pall that the disease has imposed on some regions is incontestable. The impact of HIV/AIDS—with an 8 percent adult prevalence and 28 million infected, Africa accounts for 2.3 million AIDS deaths per year—has transformed life expectancy in southern and eastern Africa. Twenty years ago, a male child could reasonably expect to live to sixty in Botswana; currently it is about thirty. By 2010 there will be more than 50 million orphans in Africa.

Of course, there are those within the development business for whom the failure of secular nationalist development is a result not of too much neoliberalism, but not enough. The complaint here, typically from those within the free-market establishment, is that adjustment and stabilization has never really been implemented (a right-wing version of the left-wing claim that adjustment was asking African ruling classes to commit political suicide). There is, of course, some truth to this (but the cry of any failure will always be “we were defeated by not going far enough”). Despite the radically uneven geographical patterns of neoliberal governance and rule, the overall tendency has been to increase social inequality and expose the poor to austerity and marginalization. And the reality is that in Africa World Bank reforms, and the pressures imposed by the WTO from the mid 1990s onwards, did have drastic consequences for trade and investment—the litmus test of neoliberal development—seen in the widespread dismantling of state marketing boards and of trade protections. And here the picture is devastating. In absolute terms African exports grew quite rapidly from 1963–2000, but at a much slower rate than world trade generally. Africa’s share of world exports fell from almost 6 percent in 1962 to 2 percent in 2000. In non-oil products (food and manufactures) growth rates of exports between 1980 and 1998 were miserable. It has been argued that given African conditions (income, geography, and socioeconomic conditions), the performance is “average.” Yet it is incontestable that African exports are characterized overall by a “disintegration from Northern markets” and “isolation from more dynamic developments in the composition of international trade” (Peter Gibbon & Stefano Ponte, Trading Down [Temple University Press, 2005], 44). UNCTAD showed that of the exports from twenty-six African states, the average concentration on primary exports has remained basically unchanged (roughly 85 percent) since 1980. In all categories, sub-Saharan Africa has failed to move up the value-added chain away from primary commodities.

What is especially striking is that the fear that Africa was largely marginal to the circuits of capitalist accumulation and global resource flows during the 1980s and might be marginalized further, in some respects, proved to be a massive understatement. It is almost shocking to think that in the 1970s, Africa accounted for 25 percent of FDI to the third world. By 2000 it had crashed to 3.8 percent (Africa’s share of world FDI is currently less than 1 percent). Over the period 1981–85, FDI inflow into Africa was running at $1.7 billion per annum; by 1991–95 it had grown to $3.8 billion. Yet as a percentage of all developing country FDI inflow, the figure represented a secular decline from 9 percent to less than 5 percent (all-in-all miniscule compared to South and East Asia and Latin America). Between 1995 and 2001, FDI inflow amounted to $7 billion per year but almost two-thirds of the portfolio was destined for three countries (Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa, in which oil FDI accounted for 90 percent of all FDI inflow, see figure 3). Half of Africa’s states had effectively none. Two-thirds of FDI was derived from the same three countries (United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States) that had dominated FDI supply in 1980. According to the World Investment Report (2005), FDI into Africa is currently $18 billion; four countries account for 50 percent, and the top ten almost three-quarters. To put the matter starkly, the vast bulk of private transnational investment—the hallmark of success for the neoliberal project—was monopolized by a quartet of mining-energy economies. The remainder of the continent was essentially insignificant. From the vantage point of the Year of Africa, investment flows into the continent have been a grave disappointment.

The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables) in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African development.

It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and unaccountable) failure. The solution is not to plan at all. Rather than planners—in his view the IMF/IBRD stenographers are really Stalinists in neoliberal garb—and the likes of Bono and Tony Blair, we need to find a raft of “searchers” like microcredit guru Mohammed Yunus. On the other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance failure.

In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphically depicted in the documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare. At the other pole are the black holes of recession, withdrawal, and uneven commodification. These complex trajectories of accumulation are dominated at this moment by the centrality of extraction and a return to primary commodity production.

Petropolitics and the New African ‘Gulf States’

Currently Africa is the center of a major oil boom, an index of the centrality of the primary commodities sector as the most important source of capitalist accumulation on the continent. The continent accounts for roughly 10 percent of world oil output and 9.3 percent of known reserves. Though oil fields in Africa are generally smaller and deeper than the Middle East—and production costs are accordingly 3–4 times higher—African crude is generally low in sulfur and attractive to U.S. importers. As a commercial producer of petroleum, Africa arrived, however, rather late to the hydrocarbon age. Oil production in Africa began in Egypt in 1910 and only in earnest in Libya and Algeria (under French and Italian auspices) in the 1930s and 1940s. Now there are twelve major oil producers in Africa—members of the African Petroleum Producers Association—dominated, in rank order of output, by Nigeria, Algeria, Libya, and Angola which collectively account for 85 percent of African output. All of the major African oil producers are highly oil-dependent. Among the top six African oil states, petroleum accounts for 75–95 percent of all oil export revenues, 30–40 percent of GDP, and 50–80 percent of all government revenues. Up until the 1970s North Africa dominated production of oil and gas on the continent, but in the last three decades it has moved decisively to the Gulf of Guinea encompassing the rich on and offshore fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola. The Gulf—constituted by the so-called West African Gulf States—has emerged as the predominant African supplier to an increasingly tight and volatile world oil market. The Washington D.C. think tanks and the phalanxes of oil lobbyists are deeply concerned with Gulf of Guinea security, U.S. interests, and U.S. engagement there.

Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are the only African oil producers with high oil per capita (so-called petroleum endowments), comparable to the oil rich and sparsely populated states such as Kuwait and Qatar. Only Nigeria ranks within the world’s top fifteen oil producers. Nigeria, Algeria, and Libya are respectively the world’s eighth, tenth, and twelfth largest oil exporters. These three states and Gabon are all members of OPEC.

All African governments have organized their oil sectors through state oil companies that have some forms of collaborative venture with the major transnational oil companies (customarily operated through oil leases and joint memoranda of understanding). In general the international oil companies operating in Africa have production share arrangements with state oil companies (Nigeria is the exception which operates largely through joint ventures). African governments guarantee the companies a minimum profit according to geological, technological, and investment criteria. The national company pays royalties for the quantity of crude produced after deductions are made to cover the costs of operations. All of these petro-states are marked by the so-called resource curse: staggering corruption, authoritarian rule, and miserable economic performance (see Ian Gary & Terry Karl, Bottom of the Barrel, Catholic Relief Services, 2003). The deadly operations of the alliance between corporate oil and autocratic oil states have helped force the question of transparency of oil operations onto the international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the IMF’s Oil Diagnostic program, and the Soros Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all “voluntary” regulatory efforts to provide a veneer of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry.

Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of an Oil State

Nigeria is the jewel in the African oil crown. Nobody would doubt the strategic significance of contemporary Nigeria. One of every five Africans is a Nigerian—the country’s population is currently estimated to be 137 million—and it is the world’s seventh largest exporter of petroleum providing the U.S. market with roughly 8 percent of its imports. A longtime member of OPEC, Nigeria is an archetypical “oil nation.” With reserves estimated at close to forty billion barrels, oil accounted in 2004 for 80 percent of government revenues, 90 percent of foreign exchange earnings, 96 percent of export revenues according to the IMF, and almost half of GDP. Crude oil production runs currently at more than 2.1 million barrels per day valued at more than $20 billion at 2004 prices. Mostly lifted onshore from about 250 fields dotted across the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s oil sector now represents a vast domestic industrial infrastructure: more than three hundred oil fields, 5,284 wells, 7,000 kilometers of pipelines, ten export terminals, 275 flow stations, ten gas plants, four refineries, and a massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) project (in Bonny and Brass).

The rise of Nigeria as a strategic player in the world of oil geopolitics has been dramatic and has occurred largely in the wake of the civil war that ended in 1970. In the late 1950s petroleum products were insignificant, amounting to less than 2 percent of total exports. Between 1960 and 1973 oil output exploded from just over 5 million to over 600 million barrels. Government oil-revenues in turn accelerated from 66 million naira in 1970 to over 10 billion in 1980. A multi-billion dollar oil industry has, however, proved to be a little more than a nightmare (Nigeria: Want in the Midst of Plenty, Africa Report 113, International Crisis Group, 2006). To inventory the “achievements” of Nigerian oil development is a salutary exercise: 85 percent of oil revenues accrue to 1 percent of the population; of $400 billion in revenues, perhaps $100 billion have simply gone “missing” since 1970. The anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu, claimed that in 2003, 70 percent of the country’s oil wealth was stolen or wasted; by 2005 it was “only” 40 percent. Over the period 1965–2004, income per capita fell from $250 to $212; income inequality increased markedly over the same period. Between 1970 and 2000 in Nigeria, the number of people subsisting on less than one dollar a day grew from 36 percent to more than 70 percent, from 19 million to a staggering 90 million. According to the IMF, oil “did not seem to add to the standard of living” and “could have contributed to a decline in the standard of living” (Martin & Subramanian, Addressing the Resource Curse [IMF, 2003], 4). Over the last decade GDP per capita and life expectancy have both fallen, according to World Bank estimates.

What is on offer in the name of petro-development is the terrifying and catastrophic failure of secular nationalist development. It is sometimes hard to gasp the full consequences and depth of such a claim. From the vantage point of the Niger Delta—but no less from the vast slum worlds of Kano or Lagos—development and oil wealth is a cruel joke. These paradoxes and contradictions of oil are nowhere greater than on the oilfields of the Niger Delta. In the oil rich states of Bayelsa and Delta there is one doctor for every 150,000 inhabitants. Oil has wrought only poverty, state violence, and a dying ecosystem. It is no great surprise that a half century of neglect in the shadow of black gold has made for a combustible politics. All the while the democratic project initiated in 1999 appears ever more hollow.

The nightmarish legacy of oil politics must be traced back to the heady boom days of the 1970s. The boom detonated a huge influx of petro-dollars and launched an ambitious (and largely autocratic) state-led modernization program. Central to the operations of the new oil economy was the emergence of an “oil complex” that overlaps with, but is not identical to, the “petro-state.” The latter is comprised of several key institutional elements: (1) a statutory monopoly over mineral exploitation, (2) a nationalized (state) oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil majors who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), (3) the security apparatuses of the state (often working in a complementary fashion with the private security forces of the companies) who ensure that costly investments are secured, (4) the oil producing communities themselves within whose customary jurisdiction the wells are located, and (5) a political mechanism by which oil revenues are distributed.

The oil revenue distribution question—whether in a federal system like Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia—is an indispensable part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil. In Nigeria there are four key distribution mechanisms: the federal account (rents appropriated directly by the federal state); a state derivation principle (the right of each state to a proportion of the taxes that its inhabitants are assumed to have contributed to the federal exchequer); the federation account (or states joint account) which allocates revenue to the states on the basis of need, population, and other criteria; and a special grants account (which includes monies designated directly for the Niger Delta, for example through the notoriously corrupt Niger Delta Development Commission). Over time the derivation revenues have fallen (and thereby revenues directly controlled by the oil-rich Niger Delta states have shriveled) and the states joint account has grown vastly. In short, there has been a process of radical fiscal centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed of ethnic minorities) have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained—by fair means or foul.

Overlaid upon the Nigerian petro-state is, in turn, a volatile mix of forces that give shape to the oil complex. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil means that military and other forces are part of the local oil complex. Second, local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business—the majors, the independents, and the vast service industry—are actively involved in the process of local development through community development, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder inclusion. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over oil wealth—who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the wealth is to be deployed and used—inserts a panoply of local political forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements, and so on) into the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary case). In some circumstances oil operations are the object of civil wars. Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key “brokers” in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states (and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil theft for example), mercenaries, and the black economy.

The oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has taken center stage over the last decade in Nigeria as the Niger Delta has become more ungovernable (because the struggle has assumed a more militant cast) grows precisely from this mix of forces that constitute the oil complex.

Imperial Oil: The Contradictions of U.S. Oil Security Policy

On this canvas of African oil security and the conspicuous failure of postwar U.S. petro-policy, recent events in Nigeria—and most especially in the oil-producing Niger Delta—have necessarily grabbed the headlines (and the attention of the oil markets). The fragility of Nigeria’s oil economy was thrown into dramatic relief by the walkout by political representatives from the oil-producing region from a national meeting on the distribution of oil revenues; the arrest of a Delta militant and insurgency leader on treason charges in late 2005; and a major escalation in violent attacks on oil installations in December 2005 and January–February 2006 by Ijaw militants that included the taking of hostages by a largely unknown militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). By early 2006, 630,000 barrels per day were compromised by political instability and attacks. But this turbulence must itself be placed on a larger historical landscape. Since the late 1990s, there has been a very substantial escalation of violence across the delta oil fields, accompanied by major attacks on oil facilities. Civil violence among and between oil producing communities and the state security forces is endemic (it is estimated that more than one thousand people die each year from oil-related violence).

Over the last decade, the Niger Delta has been wracked by insurrection. An industry analysis prepared for the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) and published in 2003 was entitled Back from the Brink. It painted a gloomy “risk audit” for Big Oil. A leaked report by Shell in the same year explicitly stated that their “license to operate” in Nigeria was in question. And with good reason. The NNPC estimated that between 1998 and 2003, there were 400 “vandalizations” on company facilities each year (581 between January and September 2004), and oil losses amounted to $1 billion annually. The tactics and repertoires deployed against the companies have been various: demonstrations and blockades against oil facilities; occupations of flow stations and platforms; sabotage of pipelines; oil “bunkering,” or theft (from hot-tapping fuel lines to large-scale appropriation of crude from flow stations); litigation against the companies; hostage taking; and strikes. A large group of Ijaw women that occupied the Chevron oil refineries near Warri in 2002, demanding company investments and jobs for indigenes (New York Times, August 13, 2002), reflected the tip of a vast political iceberg. Mounting communal violence in the following year resulted in many deaths and widespread community destruction and dislocation around the Warri petroleum complex. Seven oil company employees were killed in March 2003, prompting all the major oil companies to withdraw staff, close down operations, and reduce output by more than 750,000 barrels per day (40 percent of national output).

These events in turn provoked President Obasanjo to dispatch a large troop deployment to the oil-producing creeks. Ijaw militants, struggling to get a cut of the illegal oil bunkering trade (some estimates suggest that this innovative form of oil theft siphons a staggering 15 percent of national production), threatened to destroy eleven captured oil installations. In April 2004, another wave of violence erupted around oil installations (at the end of April, Shell lost production of up to 370,000 barrels per day, largely in the western delta), this time amid the presence of armed insurgencies, specifically two ethnic militias led by Ateke Tom (the Niger Delta Vigilante) and Alhaji Asari (the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force). Each of these were driven, and partly funded, by oil monies and highly organized oil theft. Ten years after the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the militarization of the Ogoni oilfields little has changed. Conditions across the oilfields remain the same, only worse. Security forces still operate with impunity, the government has failed to protect communities in oil producing areas while providing security to the oil industry, and the oil companies themselves bear a share of the responsibility for the appalling misery and the political instability across the region.

The new violence and instability is something of a watershed however. Among MEND’s demands were the release of two Ijaw leaders of note, the Ijaw being the largest and most militant minority group in the Nigerian Delta. On January 29, 2006, these hostages were released unharmed although the Ijaw leaders in question remained under arrest in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. By the first week in February MEND was calling for the international community to evacuate from the Niger Delta by February 12, or face violent attacks. Two weeks later MEND claimed responsibility for attacking a federal naval vessel and for the kidnapping of nine workers employed by the oil servicing company Willbros, apparently in retaliation for an attack by the Nigerian military on a community in the western delta. The Nigerian government claimed they had attacked barges involved in the contraband oil trade. MEND’s stated goal was to cut Nigerian output by 30 percent. Within the first three months of 2006, $1 billion in oil revenues had been lost; and twenty-nine Nigerian soldiers had been killed in the uprising and as I write, forty hostages were taken from an AGIP flow station in Bayelsa State. The situation across the oil fields is now as fraught as at any time since the end of the civil war in 1970. By late July 2006 oil production had been cut by 700,000 barrels per day (see The Swamps of Insurgency: Nigeria’s Delta Unrest, Africa Report 115, International Crisis Group, 2006).

The current crisis points to the fact that the oil-producing region in Nigeria now stands at the center of Nigerian politics—for four reasons. First, the efforts led by a number of Niger Delta states for “resource control” expanded access to and control over oil and oil revenues. Second, there was the struggle for self-determination of minority peoples in the region and the clamor for a sovereign national conference to rewrite the constitutional basis of the federation itself. Third, there is a crisis of rule in the region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless by militant youth movements, growing insecurity, and ugly intra-community, inter-ethnic, and state violence which—as the recent events point out—can threaten the flow of oil and the much vaunted energy security of the United States. And not least, there is the emergence of a so-called South-South Alliance making for a powerful coalition of small and hitherto politically marginalized oil producing states (Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Ondo, and Rivers) capable of challenging the ruling ethnic majorities (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.

Not surprisingly the deadly operations of corporate oil, autocratic petro-states, and the violent potentialities of the oil complex have forced the question of transparency and accountability of oil operations onto the international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the IMF’s oil diagnostics program, and the Soros Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all (voluntary) efforts to provide a veneer of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry. But the real action lies elsewhere. The danger is that the ongoing U.S. militarization of the region could amplify the presence of mercenaries and paramilitaries, creating conditions not unlike those in Colombia. In February 2006 Nigeria’s Vice President Atiku Abubakar unsuccessfully requested two hundred patrol boats and a military package from the United States. In turn, Nigeria appealed directly to China for military aid, citing that the United States was slow to support them in this area. The Financial Times (March 1, 2006) cited the Africa director at the Washington based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Stephen Morrison, to the effect that the “Chinese are very competitive players and we have to come to terms with that. They are going to places that really do matter.”

The availability of arms to both government and insurgent groups has “democratized” the access to the means of violence in the struggle for political power. In the run-up to the 2007 elections the windfall oil revenues will, as in 1999 and 2003, fund all manner of political thuggery and the arming of political parties and local militants who will be expected to deliver votes and intimidate voters. The prospect of U.S. militarization in the south to protect the oil fields, and in the north to control Islamic terror through the Pan Sahel Counter Terror Initiative, is a recipe for massive political violence. Nigeria provides, in this sense, a microcosm of the new scramble for Africa under military neoliberalism and the war on terror. It might well be the next Iraq.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906watts.htm

[Petronas]

Sahara seen as potential terrorist breeding ground By Nick Tattersall
Thu Sep 14, 8:23 AM ET

The vast Sahara has long sheltered rebels and bandits but security experts fear its remote oases and mountain hideouts may also be an ideal recruitment and training ground for al Qaeda-linked militants. Rebellious nomads, large Muslim communities and dire poverty in a largely unpoliced territory have made the U.S. intelligence community increasingly nervous that the Sahara's southern fringe in West Africa could become a launch pad for terrorist attacks.

"We're not talking about large numbers of terrorists, like Iraq or Afghanistan, or fixed training bases," one U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington told Reuters. "We're talking about relatively small numbers of moving targets who are difficult to fix and destroy but who represent an increasing threat ... It's not the biggest threat in the world, but it's a significant emerging one."

One of Washington's greatest concerns is the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian rebel movement which has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and publishes Osama bin Laden's messages on its Web site. French and Italian police arrested suspected GSPC members earlier this year thought to have been planning attacks, some of them in Algeria and in Iraq. The head of French police has said the group also poses a major threat to France.

Regional diplomats, security sources and U.S. officials believe the GSPC and its allies have been running mobile camps in the Sahara, teaching recruits guerrilla tactics before sending them home as "sleepers" to await further instructions. "After training they are dormant. They become sworn members who know they are going to die," said Mamour Fall, a reclusive Senegalese imam expelled from Italy in 2003 after being branded a national security threat. "One day you receive your ticket telling you it is your turn to go, and you go," he told Reuters in Dakar last year.

Fall said he met bin Laden in Sudan in the early 1990s, fought alongside him in Bosnia and was still preaching his message in West Africa. He said three camps in the Sahel -- the southern fringe of the Sahara -- trained a total of 100 men every six months sent from around the region. Intelligence experts believe such activity is very much ad hoc. "It's two or three vehicles meeting somewhere in an oasis, bringing out a laptop computer and showing people how to construct bombs. Or it's someone setting up a temporary firing range," one senior U.S. intelligence official said.

U.S. Special Forces have been training local armies in 10 countries in the region to confront the threat as part of the U.S. government's Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative. But radical voices such as Fall's are the exception in West Africa, which has a strong tradition of moderate Sufi Islam whose brotherhoods are renowned for their tolerance.

Opposition to U.S. foreign policy may be common among many West Africans, largely due to the war in Iraq and U.S. support of Israel, but it is rarely fervent -- the strongest resentment is often reserved for former European colonial powers. But Washington fears the region's poverty and weak governance leaves it prone to influence from movements like the Salafis, a purist group among Sunni Muslims whose extreme followers fought armed struggles in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya and in Algeria with the GSPC.

"Over the years, especially over the past 5 or 10, there has been an influx of Saudi and Pakistani, mostly Saudi, money and you've seen mosque building and proselytizing across the whole belt of the Sahel," the U.S. counterterrorism official said. "They bring a new kind of Islam to the region that is inconsistent with the historic brotherhoods and the Sufi tradition that has been dominant."

Fall said although violent jihad was largely alien to African Muslims, preachers such as himself portrayed Africans as victims of colonial powers in much the same way as some Arabs saw themselves as victims of U.S. imperialism. "The context is linked. We have the same religion, the same economic situation, the same culture. Young men know they have to do something to be respected," he said.

Militant Salafist groups in the Sahara, such as the GSPC, nonetheless appear so far to have had limited success in finding support for their ideology among local populations. Tuareg nomads in northern Mali and northern Niger are seen as particularly ripe for recruitment because they come into contact with GSPC fighters on desert trading routes and themselves fought armed rebellions in the 1990s.

Yet they publicly reject the GSPC cause. Eglasse Ag Idar, a Tuareg leader who was part of a revolt in Mali's desert town of Kidal in May, helped conduct hostage negotiations with the GSPC when they kidnapped 32 European tourists in 2003. "We talked a lot about the fact we were all Muslims. We told them that Islam never demands such violent acts, that for us it was not legitimate," Ag Idar told Reuters from Kidal, adding he believed the GSPC still had logistics bases north and west of Timbuktu near the Algerian border. "They do not have a big presence ... but we tell people in the region, particularly our youths, not to approach them."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060914/lf_nm/security_africa_sahara_dc&printer%3D1

[Petronas]

The kind of environment in which Al Qaeda thrives.

Rebel raid shakes Central African-Chad-Sudan zone
30 Oct 2006 23:51:23 GMT

The rebel capture on Monday of a Central African Republic town near the border with Chad and Sudan shows the need for greater international attention to the volatile area, a U.N. envoy said. The seizure of the northern town of Birao was "quite worrisome because this is a border zone," said Lamine Cisse, the U.N. special representative for the Central African Republic. All three countries in the area have been shaken by conflict or civil war and the various rebel groups use the neighboring countries as bases to launch attacks into the others.

Rebel groups based in the troubled Darfur region in Sudan's west, for example, have marched into Chad to seek to topple President Idriss Deby and launched raids into the Central African Republic to drive out President Francois Bozize. The large number of unemployed armed youths in the border areas makes the region "a breeding ground for recruitment for armed groups," Cisse told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council on the area's troubles. "This is why it is easy to find groups to destabilize a country," he said. "This is a threat for Sudan, for the Central African Republic and for Chad. This is a full-time danger."

Cisse called on world governments to stabilize the area by supporting job training for the young people in local trades such as carpentry and masonry. "Such efforts will help the Central African Republic find stability," he said.

The United Nations announced last week it was considering a monitoring mission or peacekeeping force in Chad and the Central African Republic, where spillover from the violence in Darfur has resulted in more than 200,000 refugees. Jean-Marie Guehenno, the head of U.N. peacekeeping, told the Security Council he was sending a mission to the two countries to investigate options. Cisse said the Central African Republic president had expressed support for such a deployment, depending on the force's mandate.

Aside from the border problems, the Central African Republic, which became independent from France in 1960, has suffered decades of army revolts, coups and rebellions in the nation of 3.6 million. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a recent report, said although the security situation in Bangui, the capital, had stabilized somewhat, the interior was plagued by armed gangs and rebels preying on civilians, and kidnapping children of herdsmen for ransom.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30175926.htm

[Petronas]

ANALYSIS-Is U.S. hyping the terror threat in Africa?
Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:04am ET

The question made the Malian army officer laugh out loud. After four years of counter-terrorism training from the U.S. military to tackle what Washington sees as a militant Islamist threat, did this West African nation feel part of the global war on terror? "No, not at all," came back the reply.

So what about the U.S. argument that al Qaeda or its offshoots could find sanctuaries in countries like Mali, just as Osama bin Laden took refuge in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s? "No, no, I don't believe this, no."

It was a rare departure from the official U.S. line -- loyally supported by other Malian commanders in interviews this week -- that Mali and its neighbours on the fringe of the Sahara desert risk becoming destabilised by militant Islamists.

A senior U.S. military official said Washington is set to channel some $600 million over the next five to seven years into the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, a programme to boost security ties with nine countries: Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria and Tunisia.

"Broad expanses of marginally governed areas can become havens for terrorists and criminals and have become ... attractive to terrorist groups increasingly denied sanctuaries in Afghanistan and the Middle East," Gen. James Jones, head of United States European Command (EUCOM), said earlier this year.

A EUCOM internal paper dated Aug. 30 described the trans-Sahara region as "a fertile recruiting ground susceptible to radical terrorist influence and other destabilising activity".

Frequently cited evidence for the U.S. case is the activity of Algerian militant faction the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), beginning with its kidnap of 32 European tourists in the Sahara desert in 2003. It has continued to stage intermittent attacks in Algeria, which seem to have increased in scale and frequency in recent weeks. In the past month, suspected GSPC rebels have carried out a string of attacks, most recently on Nov. 8, when they killed at least seven government soldiers, local press reports say. At the same time, the group has clashed with nomadic Tuareg fighters in northern Mali, which borders Algeria, losing one senior figure but killing nine Tuaregs in a revenge attack on Oct. 23.

Senior Malian officers are concerned about the situation in the north, where the government reached a peace accord in July with Tuaregs who had staged a revolt for more autonomy. But whether the problems there are caused by terrorists, smuggler gangs or unresolved political grievances is largely a matter of who you speak to.

Acting regional commander Lieutenant-Colonel Brehima Haidara told Reuters the terrorist danger was real: "The threat is the GSPC, al Qaeda." But he said there was also a battle between the GSPC and Tuareg elements to control trafficking routes across the Sahara, a lucrative channel for contraband cigarettes, drugs and weapons.

A second Malian officer said it was hard to distinguish between GSPC members and smugglers, and played down the notion that the Algerian militants could gain a lasting foothold in Mali. "It's true some of these people pass through Mali. But to say they are staying here in Mali safely -- no, that's not the case," he said.

Some Western analysts suspect the U.S. military has deliberately talked up the threat of terrorism in the region. Using the "T" word was an effective way to win more funds for security initiatives there, even though the region is a "pretty distant second" to east Africa and the Horn of Africa in terms of al Qaeda-linked activity, said Mike McGovern of Yale University, formerly West Africa project director with the International Crisis Group think-tank.

British academic Jeremy Keenan went further, accusing Washington of inventing the threat as a means of "securing Africa" and guaranteeing access to its oil supplies. The Gulf of Guinea countries in West Africa -- Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Sao Tome and Principe -- now account for 16 percent of U.S. energy needs, a share expected to rise to 25 percent by 2015 as Washington reduces reliance on supplies from the volatile Middle East. "By creating this whole terrorist story, what the Americans have done is create the ideological conditions for the militarisation of Africa," Keenan said in a telephone interview.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. military rejects the charge it has hyped the threat. "We're not overplaying or underplaying what is going on," EUCOM deputy commander General William 'Kip' Ward told Reuters in an interview last month.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlebusiness.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=nL16709879&from=business

[Petronas]

French - Backed CAR Troops Retake Rebel - Held Airport
November 28, 2006

Government troops in Central African Republic, backed by French forces, have launched an offensive to retake a northeast town from rebels, and have recaptured its airport, a French military spokesman said on Tuesday. French armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck said French troops fired in self defense during the operation on Monday to retake Birao, capital of Vakaga prefecture, which was seized on October 30 by rebels opposed to CAR President Francois Bozize.

``The Central African Republic defense minister has announced the retaking of Birao airport in an operation where we were present,'' Prazuck told reporters in Paris. He said a French military transport plane flew the Central African Republic troops up to Birao, which is located more than 800 km (500 miles) northeast of Bangui in remote, rugged country.

French troops led an intelligence operation to ensure the Birao airstrip was safe before the troops disembarked, Prazuck added. ``During this operation, the troops were attacked and retaliated. So French troops shot in self defense at rebels who were attacking them,'' he said. He said no French soldiers were injured.

No further details were immediately available on the operation to recapture the town of Birao, from where rebels of the anti-Bozize Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR by its French initials) had been advancing south and west. Under bilateral accords with former French African colonies like Central African Republic and Chad, France's military provides logistical and intelligence support to their governments' armed forces.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-centralafrica-rebels-france.html?pagewanted=print

[Petronas]

Central African Republic (Country threat level - 5): On 30 November 2006, French Mirage fighter jets bombed two rebel-held towns, Ouddda and Ndele, in northern Central African Republic (CAR). Reports indicate that CAR government soldiers have regained control, as rebel forces have pulled out of the towns. The national forces are pursuing a counter-offensive against the rebels, and are engaging in a two-front offensive, as Biaro, located approximately 500 mi/800 km from Bangui, the capital, was retaken from the Union of Democratic Forces for Rally (UFDR) rebel force. CAR government forces are expected to continue toward the mining town of Bira. France has increased its troop level to 300 in order to aid the CAR military in the rebellion and to assist it in securing the borders with Sudan and Chad. Troops from the Economic and Monetary Union of Central Africa are also assisting the CAR army. The insecurity of the region is more than likely linked to the fighting in Chad and Sudan.

http://www.asigroup.com/HOTSPOTS.asp

[Petronas]

Zimbabwe sees kindred spirit in Iran
21 November 2006 11:45

Iran and Zimbabwe "think alike" and "should fight against Western superpowers and their evil systems", President Robert Mugabe was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The Zimbabwean leader, who is on a four-day state visit to Iran aimed at bolstering political and business ties, said his country and Iran had to come together and work out "mechanisms for defending ourselves", according to Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper.

Iran and Zimbabwe have been labelled "outposts of tyranny" by United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But Mugabe -- who proudly describes Iran as a great friend -- dismissed the accusation, saying that "only God can judge".

"Some people who regard themselves as demigods say we belong to the axis of evil. Who are they to judge us?" Mugabe asked shortly before holding closed-door talks with his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=290681&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

[NYer]

Zimbabwe sees kindred spirit in Iran
21 November 2006 11:45



Birds of a feather ...

[Petronas]

Bin Laden brother-in-law shot dead in Madagascar
Wednesday, January 31, 2007 18:24 IST

A Saudi businessman and brother-in-law of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Madagascar, his brother said on Wednesday. Jamal Khalifa, who traded in gems, was killed in cold blood while sleeping in his room, which was raided by an armed gang of 25 to 30 people, Malek Khalifa told Dubai-based Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television. The assailants stole all of Khalifa's belongings, the brother said by telephone from the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Al-Arabiya quoted unspecified sources as saying the gunmen stormed a precious stone mine owned by Khalifa at dawn on Wednesday and killed him, making off with documents and other possessions.

Malek Khalifa insisted that his brother had no links with bin Laden despite being a brother-in-law of the Saudi-born terror chief, who has been disowned by his family. "He has no relation whatsoever with Osama bin Laden. He had told all international channels that he has no links with Osama bin Laden's organization or any other organization," Malek said.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1077184

[NYer]

Task Force 145? (http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/01/mohammed_jamal_khali.php)

Some background here. (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=mohammed_jamal_khalifa)

[Petronas]

WAR OF TERROR MOVES TO AFRICA
Thursday, February 08, 2007

President Bush has authorized a Department of Defense plan to expand the war of terror to Africa. As part of the plan, the US will construct a strategic command center to take military control over the continent, according to the Telegraph and al Jazeera.

The command center, known as Africom, will be fully operational by September 2008 under the plan. US officials argue that the command center will be used to fight Islamic militants and curb Chinese influence over Africa’s natural resources. About 20 percent of US oil imports originate from West Africa. The US currently operates African military missions from Central Command in the Middle East and Pacific Command.

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=33662

[Petronas]

Violence, Islamism, and Terror in the Sahel
February 21, 2007

Earlier this month, by coincidence, as President George W. Bush made the announcement in Washington that the United States Department of Defense would be establishing a unified combatant command for Africa (see my column last week on the new structure, to be known by the acronym AFRICOM), the deputy commander of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM), Army General William E. “Kip” Ward, was sitting down in Dakar, Senegal, with the military chiefs of nine African countries who have been key partners in the effort to prevent the efforts of Islamist militants from turning the their subregion into the next front in their wider war against international society in general and America in particular.

The Sahel—the name is derived from the Arabic sahil, “shore” or “border” (of the Sahara Desert)—is the critical boundary region where increasingly significant Sub-Saharan Africa meets North Africa, also known as the Maghreb (from the Arabic maghrib, “place of sunset” or “western”). Since 9/11, a number of experts have voiced concern that the Sahel, with its vast empty spaces and highly permeable borders, could serve local and international terrorists both as a base for recruitment and training and as a conduit for the movement of personnel and material—much as Afghanistan had been for al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. With these concerns in mind, in one of its less heralded but nevertheless highly significant diplomatic successes, the Bush administration has worked to develop closer military, political, and economic ties with the states in the region.

At the end of 2002, the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), a modest program with an initial budget of less than $10 million, was launched. PSI sent U.S. Army Special Forces from EUCOM to train counterterrorism units from the militaries of Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. The program, which wrapped up in 2004, was a remarkable success, with PSI-trained personnel from Chad and Niger sweeping up members of the Algerian Islamist terrorist organization Salafist Group for Call and Combat (usually known by its French acronym GSPC) who had taken refuge in their respective countries.

Following up on this success, the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was inaugurated the following year with an approximate annual budget of $80 million. The TSCTI currently includes Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia, and, operationally, is centered on the deployment of about 200 members of the 10th U.S. Army Special Forces Group to train military units of partner countries and improve their strategic and tactical coordination with American military and intelligence operations. As U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism Henry A. Crumpton noted at a conference last year in Algiers:

We envision a multi-faceted, multi-year strategy aimed at defeating terrorist organizations by helping to strengthen regional counterterrorism capabilities, by enhancing and institutionalizing cooperation between your security forces and ours and most importantly, by promoting economic development, good governance, education, liberal institutions, and democracy. Through broad policy success we discredit terrorist ideology and deny them the recruits they need, while providing these erstwhile recruits opportunity and hope.

In addition to the Pentagon-led efforts, the Sahel countries have also received support from State Department programs—especially the Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program and the Terrorist Interdiction Program (TIP)—and other U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of the Treasury. These efforts have already borne fruit. For example, Amari Saifi, a former Algerian army officer-turned-GSPC leader better known by his nom de guerre Abderrazak al-Para (“the paratrooper”) who was responsible for the daring 2003 kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists, was captured after an unprecedented U.S.-coordinated pursuit involving U.S. Navy P-3C Orion long range surveillance aircraft across the open deserts of Mali, Niger, and Chad; he now serves a life sentence in far-less-open confines of an Algerian prison.

Despite successes like the capture of al-Para, discussions concerning Africa’s place in the global war on terrorism, including those in this column, have largely focused on al-Qaeda-liked groups in the Horn of Africa and Islamist penetration of local militant groups in places like Nigeria. Meanwhile the Sahel has witnessed an increase in terrorist activities as militant Islamists groups under pressure from TSCTI partners in the Maghreb—including Algeria’s GSPC, the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group (known as GICM from its French acronym) implicated in the simultaneous bombings in Casablanca (2003) and Madrid (2004), and the Tunisian Islamic Front (FIT)—have shifted their operations to the remoteness of the Sahara. General Ward himself noted at the Dakar meeting: “There is a demonstrated history of activities occurring in one area so they can be exported and conducted and carried out in another.”

Of these challenges, the most significant may be that presented by the GSPC whose “emir,” Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, it should be recalled, formally pledged allegiance last year to “Sheikh Osama” and al-Qaeda; since then, the GSPC has begun to identify itself in communiqués as “Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb.” This link was confirmed by Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri who, in the “commemorative video” issued on the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the American homeland, declared: “Our mujahid Sheikh and the Lion of Islam, Osama bin Laden,...has instructed me to give the good news to Muslims in general and my mujahidin brothers everywhere that the Salafist Group for Call and Combat has joined al-Qaeda of Jihad Organization.” The Egyptian terrorist hailed the “blessed union” between the GSPC and al-Qaeda, pledging that it would “be a source of chagrin, frustration and sadness for the apostates [of the regime in Algeria], the treacherous sons of [former colonial power] France,” and urging the group to become “a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders” in the region and beyond.

While declarations of support for al-Qaeda are one thing, evidence has emerged within the past year of actual operational collaboration between the GSPC and global Islamist extremist movements. While many former members of the GSPC availed themselves of a general amnesty program that expired last summer, the leader of the group’s southern command, Khaled Abu al-Abbas, also known as Mukhtar Bilmukhtar, has led a group of Algerians, Malians, and Mauritanians in sophisticated hit-and-run attacks on isolated military outposts. In various web postings, Bilmukhtar has acknowledged both his debt to al-Qaeda and his desire to “punish” the governments of Mali, Mauritania, and Niger for their cooperation with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

I reported last month, a prominent Islamic cleric in northern Nigeria, Mohammed Bello Ilyas Damagun, has been formally charged with receiving $300,000 from al-Qaeda accounts in Sudan to use in sending seventeen young men to receive terrorism and other combat terrorism at the GSPC’s Ummul Qurah camp in Mauritania. Even more disconcerting is, as Olivier Guitta reported last week in the online edition of The Weekly Standard, the GSPC-cum-al-Qaeda branch has as its objective “to make the Maghreb a springboard to Europe with the help of the Algerian Islamist Khalid Abou Bassir, believed to be one of al-Qaeda’s leaders in Europe.” Guitta’s concern is well-founded: just last week the Spanish daily El País reported that one Mbar El Jaafari, a Moroccan militant, had been arrested in the port city of Tarragona, south of Barcelona, for sending some thirty-five young recruits from Spain for weapons training, including the use of ground-to-air missiles and explosives, at GSPC-run camps in the Sahel with the aim of establishing al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” upon their return.

Furthermore, incursions by Sudanese Janjaweed fighters as well as Chadian rebels backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum into eastern Chad, to say nothing of the imminent “success” of the genocide in Darfur, as my colleague Professor Michael I. Krauss and I have reported, threaten to inject yet another complicating factor into the geopolitical dynamics of the Sahel. Quite aside from its genocide in Darfur and its on-again-off-again war with South Sudan, the longstanding and never disavowed violent Islamist ideological underpinnings of the Sudanese regime should not be discounted.

All that said, it should be noted that fortunately to date radical Islamism has not attracted widespread support among the 100 million or so inhabitants of the Sahel. Yet the extreme poverty of and simmering ethnic tensions within the region, when compounded on the general weakness of its governments, render the terrain especially fertile for extremist penetration. As I noted in a Voice of America report last week on the rising violence in the region: “Groups that have what I would call purely local grievances some of which I might add are also legitimate but in their desperation, in an asymmetric combat, will take help from anywhere they can receive it and these groups have received input from outside groups that do not necessarily share their immediate concerns but have an interest in creating havoc and chaos in whatever region.”

In this context, and given the strategic importance of Africa to U.S. national interests as reaffirmed by the creation of AFRICOM, it would behoove American policymakers to follow the situation closely and to continue engaging the countries of the Sahel and Maghreb—“bring[ing] ‘value added’ to the good work that’s being done by the U.S. European Command in Africa,” in General Ward’s terms—cultivating their cooperation in security matters and, just as importantly, developing their governance and socio-economic capacities as the surest bulwark against violence, Islamism, and terrorism.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=751499

[keith]

The Danger of Terrorist Black Holes in Southern Africa

03/15/2007 - By John Solomon (from Terrorism Monitor, March 15) - On March 13, a South African intelligence official warned that a number of international terrorists may be spending time in South Africa, using the country as a safehaven (South Africa Press Association, March 13). Furthermore, in October 2004, the CIA reportedly identified 29 al-Qaeda leaders serving in management and support positions operating from Pakistan and Iraq to South Africa (South Africa Press Association, October 4, 2004). Recent evidence suggests that prominent al-Qaeda financiers, facilitators and recruiters continue to operate in the generally underreported region of southern Africa. A brief historical survey of these events seems to reveal a discernible pattern that prominent global jihadis—sometimes serving as conduits between UK- and Pakistan-based networks—have used southern Africa as a possible medium through which to not only stage operations, but also secure refuge, money and recruits; all critical factors for executing attacks in support of the movement.

The new terrorism, epitomized by al-Qaeda and the broader jihadi movement, enjoys a dispersed, decentralized and arguably leaderless structure, instructed and driven more by ideology, doctrine and bottom-up social networks than by any one central figure. Since headless, flat organizations and movements are difficult to destroy in the most open, accessible environments, the task becomes even greater in regions riddled with "black holes" where porous borders, swathes of ungoverned space, lawlessness and easy access to arms and illicit trade converge to create comparative advantages for terrorists seeking refuge and support mechanisms for operations and attacks [1]. These opaque corridors, coupled with information technology, afford ample space for jihadi "hubs" to move, nest and grow their networked infrastructure while retaining a quiet, threatening posture worldwide.

Southern Africa exemplifies one such corridor in which al-Qaeda might utilize comparatively advantageous conditions in order to remain viably intact and active. Al-Qaeda franchises are well-placed across west, north and east Africa, with growing signs that southern Africa may have been or is a key support base. Much of southern Africa contains "terrorist black holes" where lawlessness provides terrorists with the means to develop support structures—safehouses, training opportunities, mobility and funding channels—to advance their objectives. The fact that southern Africa has played host to a number of recent incidents involving prominent al-Qaeda facilitators further indicates its use and value, and warrants a closer look at this generally underreported region. With lawlessness, government corruption and a wide-range of preferred terrorist financing methods available—minerals, gemstones, pirated products and narcotics—al-Qaeda could indeed partake in illicit and unregulated trade in southern Africa to sustain itself.

Madagascar

When Jamal Khalifa was found dead in his gemstone mine in southeastern Madagascar in late January, it was unclear which was more puzzling: the murky circumstances surrounding his death, which his brother Malek emphasized to the press, or the more alarming assertion that he was involved in the African gemstone trade (Asharq al-Awsat, February 1). Jamal Khalifa was a widely-suspected al-Qaeda financier linked to a dizzying array of terrorist operatives, plots and front organizations across the globe. Through fronts established in the Philippines, Khalifa reportedly funded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and his nephew Ramzi Youssef to execute Operation Bojinka, a plot to simultaneously destroy 12 transpacific airliners bound for the United States from Asian cities. He is notably also credited with the creation of the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines (Manila Times, February 1). Since 9/11, Saudi Arabia reportedly restricted Khalifa, who is also Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, to the kingdom and the seafood restaurant that he co-owned with his brother Malek in Jeddah. The fact that an al-Qaeda suspect of this profile maintained mining interests in Madagascar and elsewhere raises questions regarding al-Qaeda's ability to capitalize on ungoverned spaces in southern Africa and beyond for its financing activities.

Coincidently, less than a week after Khalifa's death, Midi Madagaskira, an Antananarivo-based daily, reported that Fazul Mohammed, a Comoros-born al-Qaeda leader, had not only survived a U.S. air strike that targeted him in Somalia, but also had been seen in Majunga, a seaside town in northwest Madagascar [2]. Mohammed allegedly directed the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. If it is true that he found safe passage from Somalia to Madagascar or the Comoros, it strongly suggests that there was an existing support infrastructure there to facilitate his movements. Another possible scenario is that he was directing fighters in Somalia while based in Madagascar or another African country.

Analysts and media reports often also associate Fazul Mohammed with diamond trading in western Africa in the late 1990s. He allegedly organized and took part in a smuggling scheme in Sierra Leone and Liberia through a Senegalese trader named Ibrahim Bah who was also a close associate of the president, Charles Taylor. Coincidently, it may also be remembered that around the same time these alleged al-Qaeda diamond schemes took place, Yassin al-Qadi, another U.S.-designated terrorist financier, invested US$3 million for a 12% interest in Global Diamond Resources, a California-registered company that mined diamonds in South Africa, and another multinational gemstone operation through New Diamond Corp. Ltd., an offshore company that he controlled. While the two individuals and their involvement in the gemstone trade may not be linked, the use of diamonds for terrorist financing activities is well-known and would most likely take place in southern Africa or other parts of the continent where precious stones are mined and traded.

South Africa

Madagascar is not the only example of a southern African country playing host to prominent jihadi operatives. While South Africa witnessed a spate of terrorist attacks and extremist activities in the Cape Town area by the Salafi-inspired PAGAD and Iranian-sponsored Qibla organizations in the late 1990s, there is perhaps a more worrying trend that prominent al-Qaeda operatives, with a much more global agenda, are using the state as a base of support operations. In January, the United States and the United Nations moved to freeze the assets of South African-based cousins Junaid and Farhad Dockrat for providing material and financial support to al-Qaeda [3]. The cousins illustrate how jihadi hubs—individuals with extensive social networks within the movement—can become tentacles of support that facilitate the movement of human resources and capital to perpetuate the organization.

Junaid Dockrat is a dentist in Johannesburg. Professionals—doctors, lawyers, engineers—tend to be involved in terrorist financing activities more so than their non-professional counterparts and often earn enough through legitimate means to fund terrorism, making it difficult to prevent by conventional anti-money laundering measures. Junaid Dockrat allegedly transferred $120,000 to Hamza Rabia, the now deceased al-Qaeda foreign operations chief, in March and April 2004 to facilitate the movement of South Africans to terrorist camps in Pakistan. The U.S. government also listed Dockrat as a majority co-owner of Sniper Africa, a purported hunting goods store that has been designated as a global terrorist entity [4]. Junaid could have acquired these funds through his legitimate employment as a medical professional and business owner. This illustrates a key challenge and distinction for why combating terrorist financing is difficult and different from traditional anti-money laundering measures. Terrorist financing is reverse money laundering. Terrorists dirty clean money, whereas money launderers and other criminals clean dirty money. Junaid's association with his more visible cousin, Farhad, likely caused Western intelligence services to identify him.

Farhad Dockrat is a Pretoria-based cleric also involved in terrorist financing and other support activities. The United States claims that he financed terrorism through a $62,900 gift he gave to the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan to be forwarded to al-Akhtar Trust, an al-Qaeda charity front. In addition, Farhad seems to be active in Salafi proselytizing networks. He heads the "lavish" Darus Salaam Mosque in Laudium, a nearby suburb, which is reportedly frequented by the Pakistani and Malavian communities (Daily Times, January 30). His son, Muaz, lectures in the adjoining Islamic college. In 2005, Farhad, Muaz and a student were detained for a number of weeks in Gambia where they were suspected of al-Qaeda membership. Dockrat claimed that he was unjustly held and insisted that he was on a religious mission across the region to exchange "Islamic educational techniques" [5]. Perhaps indicative of the effectiveness of these techniques, Farhad's former student, Zoubier Ismail, was detained with other South Africans during a raid on an al-Qaeda safehouse in Pakistan in late 2004.

One pattern that emerges is an apparent South African link to jihadi operatives, often of Pakistani descent, in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. Haroon Aswat, another prominent jihadi who was active in Pakistan, though born in Gujarat, India, was detained in Zambia traveling from Zimbabwe in late July 2005 after his phone number was found on all four of London's July 7, 2005 suicide bombers. He reportedly exchanged a flurry of phone calls with each of them while he was in South Africa in the days before the attack (The Times [London], July 31, 2005). Although not conclusive, the phone calls suggest an operational relationship between Aswat in South Africa and the suicide cell in London led by Mohammed Saddiq Khan, who undertook terrorist training in Pakistan with a group of other Britons.

Aswat has an extensive history of links and associations with al-Qaeda and the greater jihadi movement in and out of the United Kingdom and Pakistan and, later, the southern African region. In London in the 1990s, he was an assistant to Abu Hamza at the Finsbury Park Mosque. In 2002, the U.S. government prosecuted him for attempting to establish a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon. Apart from his possible involvement in 7/7, the United States recently linked Aswat to Mohammed al-Ghabra, a designated terrorist financier, facilitator and recruiter based in east London. In 2004, Aswat allegedly met al-Ghabra in Pakistan where al-Ghabra was engaged in extensive terrorist training. The United States also accuses al-Ghabra of recruiting and sending Britons to train and fight in Pakistan and Iraq. Aswat, al-Ghabra and al-Qaeda networks in Pakistan seem to have constituted a triangular link among training activities in Pakistan, financing activities in South Africa and operations and attacks in the United Kingdom.

The case of Abd al-Muhsin al-Libi further illustrates this trend of prominent al-Qaeda operatives using South Africa as a base for terrorist support infrastructures. Al-Libi, also known as Ibrahim Tantouche, emerged in South Africa in February 2004 when he was detained for holding a fake South African passport. Later that year, British security agencies found boxes of South African passports at the home of a suspected al-Qaeda member in Britain. The passports were legitimate passports, not fakes, indicating that they were obtained illegally through a South African government official (The Star [South Africa], July 28, 2004). There seems to be a good possibility that al-Libi acquired the fake passport through al-Qaeda support structures in South Africa.

Al-Libi previously directed the al-Qaeda terrorist financing fronts, the Afghan Support Committee and Revival of Islamic Society. Both operated under charity covers and diverted money to al-Qaeda that was raised for orphans who in reality were either dead or non-existent. Although his current whereabouts are not publicly known, as of November 2005 he was in South Africa, free and awaiting the outcome of a political asylum application.

Conclusion

While these terrorist activities give indication that southern Africa could offer sanctuaries for prominent jihadis to support or plot future terrorist attacks, these same events may also suggest that the U.S.-led efforts are resulting in tactical victories. Key sectors of the network seem to be emerging. Khalifa's appearance in Madagascar is worrying because it signifies that important terrorist financing mechanisms such as diamond trading may be available to high-profile al-Qaeda associates. Yet, at the same time, travel bans, asset freezes and the detainment of prominent operatives also suggest in each of the cases cited that important victories are being won.

Identifying and neutralizing terrorist support infrastructures are a critical part of any successful counter-terrorism strategy. The United States' announcement that the Pentagon will create an African Central Command in 2008, while explained at least in part by energy security and balancing China, may also indicate that the United States will continue to monitor and increasingly dismantle these jihadi support hubs and prevent them from proliferating further.

John Solomon is Head of Terrorism Research for World-Check, a provider of structured risk-related intelligence. He was formerly with the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive study, see Rem Korteweg and David Ehrhardt, Terrorist Black Holes: A Study into Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness, TNO Defense Security and Safety, 2006.
2. Report found at: http://www.meobservatory.com/news/2007/02/news2020607.htm.
3. South Africa exercised a veto in the Security Council to prevent UN designation, so only the U.S. designation applies at present. See also "UN links SA men to al-Qaeda," Sunday Times, January 21, 2007.
4. See U.S. Treasury press release: http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/hp230.htm.
5. For more information, see: http://molvi.blogspot.com/2005/10/missing-persons_08.html.

http://jamestown.org/news_details.php?news_id=226#

[Petronas]

Sudan / Chad (Country threat levels - 4/4): Chad claimed on 22 March 2007 that Sudanese warplanes have bombed the towns of Kariari and Gregui, located in the eastern region, killing several people. The Chadian government claims that Sudan has violated the non-aggression pact with Chad and that N’Djamena reserves the right "to use all available means to assure the defense of its territory." Chad and Sudan have accused each other of supporting rebel troops to fight against their respective governments for several years. The unrest in Sudan’s Darfur region is spilling over into Chad and Central African Republic.

http://www.asigroup.com/HOTSPOTS.asp

[Petronas]

Al-Qaeda in South Africa?
03/27/2007 - 18:12

South African and foreign intelligence agencies have been monitoring an alleged Islamist militant training camp at Greenbushes, Port Elizabeth, according to local press reports. One magazine has even published a report on the alleged training camp. The report—including photographs of the supposed training grounds—is the cover story in Molotov Cocktail, a magazine edited by James Sanders, author of a recently published history of South Africa‘s intelligence services. However, Port Elizabeth Muslim leader Samuel Panday on Monday dismissed the report, saying the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) was trying to increase its budget allocation through making claims of a military camp. "There is no such camp—it is all nonsense; rubbish," said Panday. (Mail & Guardian, March 27) Authorities have been seeing al-Qaeda connections lately from Xinkiang to Sri Lanka.

http://www.ww4report.com/node/3457

[Petronas]

Dakar Rally cancelled due to security threats
Friday January 4, 2008

The organisers of the Dakar Rally, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), have confirmed that the 2008 staging of the annual endurance event has been cancelled due to security threats to competitors. In a statement the race organisers highlighted several concerns. "Based on the current international political tension and the murder of four French tourists [in Mauritania] on December 28 linked to a branch of Al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb, but also and mainly the direct threats launched directly against the race by terrorist organisations, no other decision but the cancellation of the event could be taken. ASO condemns the terrorist menace that annihilates a year of hard work, engagement and passion for all the participants ... of the world's biggest off-road rally. The Dakar is a symbol and nothing can destroy symbols. The cancellation of the 2008 edition does not endanger the future of the Dakar."

French officials had warned against holding stages in Mauritania because of the ongoing terrorist threat following the deaths of the French nationals. A separate terrorist attack on a Mauritanian military base that left three soldiers dead further heightened fears over the threat posed to the rally's competitors.

It is the first time in the 30-year history of the race across the deserts of north Africa that it has been cancelled. The rally had been due to start in Lisbon tomorrow and finish in Dakar on January 20, and was set to hold stages in Mauritania between January 11 and January 19.

"ASO's first responsibility is to guarantee the safety of all: that of the populations in the countries visited, of the amateur and professional competitors, of the technical assistance personnel, of the journalists, partners and rally collaborators," said the organisers. "ASO therefore reaffirms that the choice of security is not, has never been and will never be a subject of compromise at the heart of the Dakar rally.

A spokesman for Mauritania's National Tourism Office had played down concerns before the ASO's decision. "It is a surprise," said Hamady Samb Ba. "It would deal a serious blow to the image of the country. Their concerns are unfounded."

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/motorsport/story/0,,2235449,00.html

[NYer]

Plot to kill the Queen foiled. (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23047652-2703,00.html)

http://www.thehelicon.com/AA/images/staches/mroctober.jpg

A plot by al-Qa'ida operatives to kill the Queen during a state visit to Uganda less than two months ago was foiled by security services.

The terrorists had planned to hide inside two broadcast vans owned by the Ugandan Broadcasting Corporation and then set off bombs during the Queen's visit to Kampala last November.

London's Sunday Express reported the vans were seized after a tip-off from intelligence agents.

As a result, the broadcaster was unable to transmit live pictures of key summit events, including the Queen's historic address to the Ugandan parliament on November 22.

The Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla travelled to the east African nation's capital for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, attended by more than 30 world leaders. Australia was represented by Richard Alston, the High Commissioner to London.

Uganda's Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda said several suspected terrorists were arrested.

[Petronas]

Al-Qaeda Sahara Network Spurs U.S. to Train Chad, Mali Forces
April 22, 2008 18:01 EDT

Bands of Islamist fighters, terrorist trainers and arms suppliers roaming the mountainous southern Sahara Desert are new targets in the U.S. war against al-Qaeda. The groups, originally linked to rebels fighting the government of Algeria, operate under the umbrella of Algeria- based al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, U.S. military officials say. AQIM has claimed responsibility for at least six attacks, including a failed attempt to assassinate Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, that have killed more than 100.

The war against AQIM is being led from the new headquarters of the U.S. Army's Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany, which is due to become fully operational this October with a staff of about 1,000. Africom will provide military aid and training to countries in the southern Sahara, an area known as the Sahel.

``The terror groups are constantly on the move; lots of weapons, lots of people cross these borders,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Randall Horton, a planner in Africom's Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans Sahara mission. ``We are working with our partner nations to address these security issues.''

Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger are taking part in the U.S.-sponsored military programs. Africom's mission is to train their forces to roust terrorists and also to control sparsely patrolled borders for arms traffic, drug smuggling and infiltration by violent organizations.

Empty Spaces

``The Sahel, with its vast empty spaces and highly permeable borders, could serve local and international terrorists both as a base for recruitment and training and as a conduit for the movement of personnel and material, much as Afghanistan had been for al-Qaeda in the late 1990s,'' said J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

The cross-border Sahel AQIM forces travel by Toyota Land Cruisers that rely on a network of underground fuel bunkers. They possess mortars, surface-to-air missiles and equipment needed to construct roadside bombs. The membership may be as low as 150, U.S. officials in Stuttgart say. About 500 more AQIM members are based in Algeria, which, like Morocco, Tunisia and Libya, is part of the Maghreb region.

They get help from nomadic tribes known as the Tuareg, a Berber ethnic group that is in combat with the government of Mali. Drug smuggling helps nourish the Sahel AQIM, say U.S. military officials who speak on condition of anonymity; they say that cocaine from Colombia passes through Venezuela and is sent to Burkina Faso in West Africa and then transported via Algeria and Morocco to Europe.

Europe

Europe is also an AQIM target. ``We are seeing increased collaboration between al-Qaeda and North African terrorist groups,'' the Africom commander, General William E. Ward, told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on March 13. ``Violent extremists here continue to coordinate activities and interact with networks in Europe.''

European Union leaders are increasingly alarmed over the terrorism potential along the 27-nation bloc's southern flank, just across the Mediterranean from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Gilles de Kerchove, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator, warns that sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a breeding ground for anti-Western radicalism.

Pointing to training camps in Mauritania, Mali and Niger, De Kerchove said in a Bloomberg Television interview April 16 that terrorism rooted in the Sahel region and in the Maghreb of northwestern Africa is a ``serious and growing concern for Europe.''

Attacks and Kidnappings

AQIM activities in the Sahel include attacks on army patrols, kidnappings of tourists, smuggling of arms and training of guerrillas and bombers, the officials in Stuttgart said. On Feb. 22, two Austrian tourists disappeared in southern Tunisia. The group claimed responsibility and demanded the release of one of its leaders, Abdel Rezak Al-Para, who has been jailed for life in Algeria.

Africom says the 2004 capture of Al-Para is an example of how U.S.-Sahel cooperation with partner countries can work: He was caught after a chase from Mali to Chad by Chadian troops helped by a U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane.

AQIM in Algeria said on March 3 that it had killed 20 Algerian soldiers in combat in the rugged northeast of the country. The Algerian government wouldn't comment on the claim.

Suicide Bomber

On Sept. 8, 2007, a suicide bomber tried to breach a security cordon as President Bouteflika was on the way to the town of Batna, Algerian Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said in a statement reported by the U.S.-funded Magharebia.com Web site. Police confronted the bomber, who set off his device, killing 22 bystanders. AQIM claimed responsibility.

Algeria, ruled by the secular National Liberation Front since independence from France in 1962, is a major target of the AQIM operatives, U.S. officials in Stuttgart said. The militants are largely combat fugitives from the country's 1992-1999 insurrection, which left 200,000 dead.

Algerian AQIM suicide bombers took responsibility for a December 2007 attack that blew up United Nations offices and a court building in Algiers, killing 41.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aA7a8hP8tIbg&refer=us