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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The revolution and the emancipation of women - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...83074

africa development international news governance pambazuka bank world us intervention burkina faso africom

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.
  • Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.
  • A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.
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  • Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.
  • The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.
Arabica Robusta

AFRICOM and the USA's Hidden Battle for Africa - 0 views

www.borglobe.com/11.html

news

shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The chief of the US African Command, General E. Ward, explained this in language more clear than that of any US politician when he stated that an Africa in which "African populations are able to provide for themselves, contribute to global economic development and are allowed access to markets in free, fair, and competitive ways, is good for America and the world..."
  • Pending legislation, "The Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act 2009," being pushed by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) would empower AFRICOM not only to give technical support but to physically go to war with the armed groups that both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo Forces have not been able to dislodge. Royce said:
  • The US Africa Command is now spending billions in training and arm supplies. It is expecting to spend nothing less than $20 billion in 2010, and this will benefit the armies of a very many repressive regimes.Take the case of Sudan. Openly, Western governments, including the US, have never been more critical of the regime in Khartoum, even accusing it of committing genocide in Darfur. The fact that the head of Sudan's intelligence agency, wanted by the International Criminal Court, was secretly jetted to the US by the CIA to discuss military interests in the Horn of Africa was one of the most disgusting acts of hypocrisy by the Bush administration.
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  • the IASPS [Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies] hosted a symposium in Houston, Texas, which was attended by government and oil industry representatives. An influential working group called the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG) co-chaired by IASPS researchers Barry Schutz and Paul Michael Wihbey, which has been largely responsible for driving American governmental policy concerning west African oil, emerged from the symposium... The document urges Congress and the Bush administration to encourage greater extraction of oil across Africa, and to declare the Gulf of Guinea 'a area of vital interest' to the US."We have now definitely entered the aggressive birth of AFRICOM.
  • The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AFRICOM providing the logisticsallowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis.
  • When the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project was put on the table in the prelude to AFRICOM's unveiling, the oil companies made sure of IMF and World Bank support. This was not because of lack of capital. These two institutions are the most reliable and effective discipliners of the African nations involved should they at any time violate the contract against the interest of the big oil companies involved in the project.
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