Imperialists tighten their grip on the Sahara-Sahel
2013Christine Marie 2013-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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The two-month period of April-May 2013 will be re membered as marking a significant advance in the im perialist project in the Sahara-Sahel region of North ern Africa. On April 29, the UN authorized the deploy ment of 11,200 troops to Mali. Beginning on July 1, this large international force will function alongside the French troops remaining from the European inter vention begun in January and from the U.S. operations and drone bases in neighboring Niger.
On May 24, French Special Forces joined troops from Niger in attacking Islamist fighters who had claimed credit for suicide bombings in the part of Niger that is home to the French Areva uranium-mining com pound.
On May 15, a new U.S.-backed Nigerian military of fensive against the indigenous Islamic rebel group Boko Haram, in the north of Nigeria, resulted in hor rific civilian casualties. Military officials, whose opera tions in the northern areas of Nigeria that border Ni ger are conducted without media scrutiny, also sensa tionally announced the discovery of a Hezbollah arms cache and cell in the urban center of Kano.
Finally, France announced its “willingness” to pro vide troops to “secure” the border between Niger and Libya. Altogether, these initiatives are elements of the growing militarization of the Sahara-Sahel region, a militarization that has long been a goal of the impe rialist powers competing with China over the rich re sources of Africa.
In Mali, according to the Guardian newspaper, the military intervention has been accompanied by prom ises of $4.4 billion in aid “with strings attached.” The strings include demands that the Malian government “manage public resources” according to an economic roadmap developed by the European Union.
The details are not yet clear, but historically, Eu ropean aid to Mali has been tied to acquiescence to neoliberal privatization schemes that displaced small farmers and leased important agricultural lands to ex port-oriented agribusiness. In fact, before the French intervention, Malian peasants had been at the cen ter of organizing efforts by the international peasant movement, Via Campesina, against imperialist land grabs.
Malian agriculture was once productive enough to be eyed as the breadbasket for oil-rich but soil-poor Libya. But in recent years, hunger has become wide spread in the north of Mali, largely due to drought and desertification. France has done nothing to alleviate the food crisis. Unexploded mines and fighting are preventing farmers from working their fields. Seventy thousand residents of Gao are facing a cholera epi demic because broken pumps and electricity are not a priority for France or the United States.
The Nigerian military offensive against Boko Haram is exacerbating food shortages for the entire Sahel. The northern Nigerian grain trade typically supplies half of all the cereals consumed in the region. Sixtyfive percent of the farmers of the war-torn north of Nigeria have reportedly fled from their fields. ty mandated by the international financial community and the corruption of local elites unwilling to spread the wealth.
Anthropologist Caroline Ifeka states in the Con cerned Africa Scholars Bulletin: “The principal cause of growing youth militancy mobilising around ethnicity and Islamic reformism is the ruling class’s failure to ‘share’ the ‘dividends of democracy’—e.g. rental in comes from ‘traditional’ community owned strategic resources as oil, gas, gold, bauxite, uranium, water.”
Unfortunately for Nigerians and the rest of the re gion, Europe, the U.S., and local elites have been able to use the emergence of Boko Haram and other Islam ic forces to fortify the claim that trans-Saharan-Sahel military operations anchored with French, U.S., and UN troops will somehow bring security and democ racy to the farmers and poor of the region.
In fact, both France and the U.S. are really concerned about being in the best competitive position vis-a-vis their imperialist rivals. Anyone paying attention to the January invasion of Mali learned about Malian gold and Nigérien uranium. Nigeria, until its recent displacement by Angola, was number three on the U.S. list of countries supplying petroleum imports.
Antiwar activists eager to push back U.S. government aggression around the world learned more about the stakes and background of these recent outrages by attending the United National Antiwar Coalition panel at the Left Forum in New York City on June 8. The speakers included Patrick Bond, professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Margaret Kimberly of the Black Agenda Report; Abayomi Azikiwe of the Pan-African Newswire; and Virginia Defender leader Ana Edwards, who visited Mali at the time of the invasion.
UNAC hoped that the panel would be one of many efforts this year to focus the attention of activists against drones and U.S. military interventions abroad on the increasing war being waged for profit against African peoples. n