Morpheus
6th August 2003, 00:38
Taken from http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=60648
Short answer: the US is trying to replace the government
by Chekov Saturday, Aug 2 2003, 3:04pm
Long answer:
It is virtually impossible to find out what is really going on, who is pulling the strings and all that in somewhere like Liberia, because there are very few sources of current information. The international media is not interested until it reaches crisis and once that has happened, it is really too late to find out, they can't travel outside Monrovia and they only really report on the humanitarian crisis aspect of things. However, there are certain things that you can say for sure about Liberia that allow you to make a pretty good guess about what is going on.
Liberia was established, by the order of President Monroe (hence Monrovia) by a small number of slaves repatriated from the US after the abolition of slavery in the US. These ex-slaves were consciously established as a local ruling class to serve US interests. They quickly subjugated the tribes of the interior and practically recreated the slavery which they had come from, this time with them as the masters. Curiously enough, the fashions of late 19th century Southern US still survived until very recently among the Liberian elite. Rich folk live in plantation style mansions and wear top hats and waistcoats. Anyway, since the basis of their power was almost entirely external, their was no limits to their corruption, and Liberia has always been one of Africa's most messed up countries.
In the 1980's Charles Taylor seized power, after a saga of brutal feuds among the ruling class. Taylor is no more than a violent gangster, ruling the country like a godfather, but for a long time he was tolerated by the US since he was useful to them. For example he was one of the main conduits for illicit US aid to UNITA in Angola, in particular laundering their 'blood diamonds'. He was also a useful US bridgehead in a region where France's colonial hold is still strong.
Although there has long been a diamond industry in Liberia, in the 1990's there were discoveries of large deposits of kimberlite (a mineral which indicates the presence of diamonds) in the region along the border of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. When I was in the region in 2000, I met a de Beers geologist who had just finished a stint of exploration along the Guinea border. He had just bought an island off the coast of Mozambique and was retiring there - in his mid-30's!
Taylor let his gangster instincts go to his head and started getting way to uppity for his overlords' liking. In the late 1990's he backed Foday Sankoh's RUF guerillas in Sierra Leone, little more than a gang of diamond thieves, to the annoyance of the British and yanks. It wasn't until about 1999, after the intervention of Ecomog and south african mercenaries that the RUF were driven out of their diamond mines. Ecomog is essentially cover for the Nigerian military, the regional strong man, and also global capitalism's enforcer of choice in the region. At the same time Taylor was skirmishing with the Guineans along their border, again going after their diamond producing areas. In late 2000 a rebel army invaded Liberia from Guinea. Although this army claimed to be an independent body of Liberian exiles, everybody knew it was armed, trained and mobilised by the Guinean government, almost certainly taking orders from Paris.
Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was Taylor's meddling in the civil war that broke out in Cote D'Ivoire earlier this year. A rebellion broke out in the North of the coutry against Gbagbo's governent - a staunch french ally. The rebellion has, in my opinion, the backing of the US who have been long trying to wrest influence away from the French in this coutry which is effectively the capital of French West Africa. At a time when the rebels were advancing on Abidjan, Taylor screwed things up by backing a third force which invaded Cote D'Ivoire from the West and took the regional capital of Man.
The US has made it abundantly clear that they want Taylor out. In fact they openly state that the first precondition for peace in the country is Taylor's resignation and they refuse to even talk to him about a negotiated settlement. The invading force simply must be armed and financed from Washington, although the aid is probably funneled through Sierra Leone, Cote D'Ivoire and Guinea. The rebels are currently beseiging Monrovia where Taylor's loyalists are making their last stand. The US is playing its classic double game. On the one hand they do not want to get involved in any fighting so they are waiting until Taylor has been removed before they get directly involved. At the same time they are letting everybody know, in a clear but subtle way, that they are backing the rebellion. It is interesting to note that the rebels are copying UNITA's tactics in Angola - use terror to empty the countryside of people and make them all seek refuge in the city, in the hope that the resulting humanitarian crisis will cause the regime to collapse.
They have created this humanitarian catastrophe, in a calculated and scientific way, which they will do nothing to resolve. But at the same time they have started drumming it up in the media. This is paving the way for their intervention - but only when things have reached a favourable balance of power and the war has effectively been won. At this stage they will send in peacekeepers to safeguard their conquest of power, to make sure that the latest warlords don't go getting any big ideas, and to mop up any remaining resistance to their monopoly on diamond production. This will probably initially involve some US troops but they will cede the job of occupation to Ecomog. They don't want to have to deal with the unpopular side of being an occupying army. The Ecomog 'peacekeeping' troops in Sierra Leone were far from popular and suffered many losses, despite the fact that they had driven out the hated RUF. A UN report into their mission found that they had been involved in extensive diamond smuggling, rape, murder and all that other stuff that always goes with occupation. A notable aside is that the Indian general who produced the report was forced to resign immediately afterwards and no changes were made to the occupation. Peacekeepers in Liberia will doubtless do the same.
The story is horrific, but it is not atypical. In general this is what intervention and peacekeeping means. Peacekeepers can't be deployed against the wishes of the permanent members of the UN security council, who also happen to be the big imperialist powers. In general they are only employed to maintain the status quo once it has reached a balance favourable to the big powers. Humanitarian catastrophes are a favourite ploy, not only to justify intervention to the world, but to depose an unwanted ruler without actually having to fight against him and to decimate the society to such a point that not only will there be no resistance, but they will be welcomed with open arms.
So that is my opinion. It is quite possible that I am wrong in several important details, since I haven't been following the situation in West Africa too closely for the last year or so and th e information is from memory. However, I'd be very surprised indeed if the essence was other than what I have described.
Been doing a bit of readin' up on Liberia by Chekov Sunday, Aug 3 2003, 10:05pm
which, by the way, I'd recommend to some of you US flag wavers. Doesn't it make y'all feel a little uncomfortable blindly cheerleading the US, in a situation where you openly admit to knowing absolutely nothing about what's going on? I mean, even if somebody wrote an article criticising my mother, I'd try to investigate the claims before leaping to her defence! Do y'all really trust your government so much that you think that it's always doing good and you don't even have to bother finding out what it's up to?
Since I wrote the comment, Charles Taylor has announced that he is quiting, followed closely by the security council vote to "authorise a multi-national force"[Sunday Tribune]. "The United States pushed for the vote" and "US ambassador John Negroponte has said the Bush administration wants the force being assembled by...Ecowas to take the lead, with the United States providing support." Pretty much exactly what I predicted. Again I could be entirely wrong, I don't have enough information to be certain, but it's a pretty good indication when a theory is useful in predicting the future.
What's more I am interested to see that France abstained from the vote. They cited the ICC as the reason, but I'd say that imperial rivalry is a more likely explanation. Another interesting titbit that I saw was this, from an aid worker writing in the Tribune, "Almost everywhere we go people call out for food...how are they supposed to understand why the four aid agencies left in the country don't 'do' food? Even I don't quite get it, and I've been doing this work for years. ... shortage is not the issue. So what went wrong? simple really: they left all their eggs in one basket, at the port which is now controlled by the rebels. Strange really, when every other agency which had stocks in that part of town had moved a good portion of them to the other side of town in case of future attacks." To me it's not so strange, indeed it sounds very much like my description of a consciously manufactured humanitarian crisis. Just in case any of the flag wavers happen to go off and actually read something about Liberia (faint hope), I'll answer their objections in advance. Yes, the agencies responsible for the food distribution are from the UN (principally the WFP) but they effectively take orders from the US embassy in Liberia.
Then a few quotes from the human rights watch document linked above: "Although U.S. pressure on the Liberian government to address human rights abuses remained strong, the U.S. failed publicly to condemn both abuses by LURD rebels and the government of Guinea for providing logistical and some military support to LURD. The closest it came to doing so was in a March 1 statement by the U.S. ambassador in Monrovia condemning the renewed fighting in Liberia, and calling on the Liberian government to take steps to respect human rights and the rule of law. Although the statement stopped short of naming Guinea, the statement did call on 'all parties in the region to cease supporting any group that seeks political change through violence and to respect their neighbor's borders.'
The U.S. government's silence on LURD abuses and Guinea's support for LURD was particularly notable given that the U.S. government began a U.S.$3 million program to provide training and non-lethal equipment to the Guinean military in May 2002."
Again, very close indeed to my analysis above. The one point of error being that Guinea is acting as an agent of the US in Liberia, rather than of France. Makes more sense that way I suppose, and the Guinean government has long been the most difficult of France's charges in the region.
To answer Drbinoche's objection about the lack of M16s. When we say that country A arms country B, we don't mean that they put a load of weapons in a box and ship them off directly with a return to sender address! In general when you are supporting an armed faction in Africa you don't want to make it that obvious. To create an armed faction you need two things, money and a supply route. The money is trifling, with a few millions you can buy enough arms to destabilise most african regimes. The supply route is more difficult, you have to get a government in the region to launder the arms. This entails this third party buying them on the international market and covertly exporting them to their intended destination. In general the arms bought are always of the AK47/RPG variety, because they are cheap and readily available on the international market, regardless of the source of the money. Although the governments of the region are always scheming against each other and arming factions in each other's countries, this is almost always with the approval of one of the two big imperialist powers in the region, the US/UK or France. If you disobey them, you get ousted - a la Taylor.
Once you have the money and arms supply, it is very easy to start the insurrection. With unemployment (in terms of paid labour) running at 90% plus in most of West Africa, there are always a plentiful supply of recruits among the youth. Early teens are preferred as they make better killers, lacking the ability to contextualise their deeds.
If you are smart you will channel your money through an existing ethnic strong man, who will recruit exclusively from a particular 'tribe' and thus gain leverage from existing ethnic tension. If you are really smart, and rich, you will fund a few of them simultaneously as the chance of any particular strong man losing his way is quite high. If they become too corrupt they will not give a good return of suffering for your dollar, on the other hand the power may go to their heads and give them notions of independence.
To answer a couple of objections:
a) No this is not anti-americanism. For a start I'm talking about what the US government is doing. As you are all making abundantly clear, this is done with pretty much zero knowledge on the part of the population. In fact in Africa in general, but particularly West Africa, the French government has had a much worse effect, basically because they've had the chance. Whereas the US deliberately blocked any intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda, France eventually intervened to protect the remnants of the Interahamwe! Interestingly Giscard d'Estaing, the big EU man is personally complicit in some of their worst crimes. He used to go elephant hunting with Bokassa in the CAR - a name which even surpasses Amin in terms of depravity. Not that the US/UK aren't doing their best. UNITA has to have been one of the most brutal movements the world has ever seen to name but one of the horrors they have unleashed upon Africa.
b) I am not absolving Africans of blame. I am merely asking why this is happening. There are, of course, a large number of Africans deeply guilty. It really has nothing to do with race. Give me a country with a similar economic situation to Liberia, give me a few million and a supply route for arms and I'll destroy it. Doesn't matter where it is, doesn't matter what colour the people are, it's easy. History has shown, time and again, that, with power, you can manipulate situations so that people will do the most horrific things to each other. This does not absolve the immediate actors of blame. The various killers in Liberia are just as guilty as those complicit in the nazi regime were (incidentally a much higher proportion of the population than in Liberia). Although, as with the nazis, the greatest blame clearly lies with those who give plan everything and give the orders.
c) To refute Paul's argument, you only need to mention auschwitz, two world wars, the slave trade ... Actually, for somebody like Paul, probably the best refutation is a look in the mirror or listen to your own dumb arguments, no genetic superiority there, that's for sure!
d) Seanin's accusation of me being racist is hilarious. Seanin, I'd have thought that 'racist' was a compliment in your book. Well, you've found me out, I think blacks are superior to whites. For this reason I hate and pity myself, my family, most of my friends, my girlfriend and the vast majority of the Irish population. If only we were black, I repeat over and over.
Finally, I'd really love if some of you pro-US government 'no matter what it does', types went off and tried to refute some of these arguments. In places like Liberia they often don't bother to cover their tracks too well. They can rely on the deep racism of the media and establishment. In general most people just assume that this type of thing is 'just what Africans do'. Even among left-leaning types this type of thinking is endemic. It is very rare indeed for people to visit these region from the west, without being part of one of the complicit bodies. I was fortunate enough to spend a year or so in the region and was particularly shocked at what the NGOs are actually doing there. Read more at the link supplied.
related link: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/ac...nts/chekov.html (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/accounts/chekov.html)
Short answer: the US is trying to replace the government
by Chekov Saturday, Aug 2 2003, 3:04pm
Long answer:
It is virtually impossible to find out what is really going on, who is pulling the strings and all that in somewhere like Liberia, because there are very few sources of current information. The international media is not interested until it reaches crisis and once that has happened, it is really too late to find out, they can't travel outside Monrovia and they only really report on the humanitarian crisis aspect of things. However, there are certain things that you can say for sure about Liberia that allow you to make a pretty good guess about what is going on.
Liberia was established, by the order of President Monroe (hence Monrovia) by a small number of slaves repatriated from the US after the abolition of slavery in the US. These ex-slaves were consciously established as a local ruling class to serve US interests. They quickly subjugated the tribes of the interior and practically recreated the slavery which they had come from, this time with them as the masters. Curiously enough, the fashions of late 19th century Southern US still survived until very recently among the Liberian elite. Rich folk live in plantation style mansions and wear top hats and waistcoats. Anyway, since the basis of their power was almost entirely external, their was no limits to their corruption, and Liberia has always been one of Africa's most messed up countries.
In the 1980's Charles Taylor seized power, after a saga of brutal feuds among the ruling class. Taylor is no more than a violent gangster, ruling the country like a godfather, but for a long time he was tolerated by the US since he was useful to them. For example he was one of the main conduits for illicit US aid to UNITA in Angola, in particular laundering their 'blood diamonds'. He was also a useful US bridgehead in a region where France's colonial hold is still strong.
Although there has long been a diamond industry in Liberia, in the 1990's there were discoveries of large deposits of kimberlite (a mineral which indicates the presence of diamonds) in the region along the border of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. When I was in the region in 2000, I met a de Beers geologist who had just finished a stint of exploration along the Guinea border. He had just bought an island off the coast of Mozambique and was retiring there - in his mid-30's!
Taylor let his gangster instincts go to his head and started getting way to uppity for his overlords' liking. In the late 1990's he backed Foday Sankoh's RUF guerillas in Sierra Leone, little more than a gang of diamond thieves, to the annoyance of the British and yanks. It wasn't until about 1999, after the intervention of Ecomog and south african mercenaries that the RUF were driven out of their diamond mines. Ecomog is essentially cover for the Nigerian military, the regional strong man, and also global capitalism's enforcer of choice in the region. At the same time Taylor was skirmishing with the Guineans along their border, again going after their diamond producing areas. In late 2000 a rebel army invaded Liberia from Guinea. Although this army claimed to be an independent body of Liberian exiles, everybody knew it was armed, trained and mobilised by the Guinean government, almost certainly taking orders from Paris.
Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was Taylor's meddling in the civil war that broke out in Cote D'Ivoire earlier this year. A rebellion broke out in the North of the coutry against Gbagbo's governent - a staunch french ally. The rebellion has, in my opinion, the backing of the US who have been long trying to wrest influence away from the French in this coutry which is effectively the capital of French West Africa. At a time when the rebels were advancing on Abidjan, Taylor screwed things up by backing a third force which invaded Cote D'Ivoire from the West and took the regional capital of Man.
The US has made it abundantly clear that they want Taylor out. In fact they openly state that the first precondition for peace in the country is Taylor's resignation and they refuse to even talk to him about a negotiated settlement. The invading force simply must be armed and financed from Washington, although the aid is probably funneled through Sierra Leone, Cote D'Ivoire and Guinea. The rebels are currently beseiging Monrovia where Taylor's loyalists are making their last stand. The US is playing its classic double game. On the one hand they do not want to get involved in any fighting so they are waiting until Taylor has been removed before they get directly involved. At the same time they are letting everybody know, in a clear but subtle way, that they are backing the rebellion. It is interesting to note that the rebels are copying UNITA's tactics in Angola - use terror to empty the countryside of people and make them all seek refuge in the city, in the hope that the resulting humanitarian crisis will cause the regime to collapse.
They have created this humanitarian catastrophe, in a calculated and scientific way, which they will do nothing to resolve. But at the same time they have started drumming it up in the media. This is paving the way for their intervention - but only when things have reached a favourable balance of power and the war has effectively been won. At this stage they will send in peacekeepers to safeguard their conquest of power, to make sure that the latest warlords don't go getting any big ideas, and to mop up any remaining resistance to their monopoly on diamond production. This will probably initially involve some US troops but they will cede the job of occupation to Ecomog. They don't want to have to deal with the unpopular side of being an occupying army. The Ecomog 'peacekeeping' troops in Sierra Leone were far from popular and suffered many losses, despite the fact that they had driven out the hated RUF. A UN report into their mission found that they had been involved in extensive diamond smuggling, rape, murder and all that other stuff that always goes with occupation. A notable aside is that the Indian general who produced the report was forced to resign immediately afterwards and no changes were made to the occupation. Peacekeepers in Liberia will doubtless do the same.
The story is horrific, but it is not atypical. In general this is what intervention and peacekeeping means. Peacekeepers can't be deployed against the wishes of the permanent members of the UN security council, who also happen to be the big imperialist powers. In general they are only employed to maintain the status quo once it has reached a balance favourable to the big powers. Humanitarian catastrophes are a favourite ploy, not only to justify intervention to the world, but to depose an unwanted ruler without actually having to fight against him and to decimate the society to such a point that not only will there be no resistance, but they will be welcomed with open arms.
So that is my opinion. It is quite possible that I am wrong in several important details, since I haven't been following the situation in West Africa too closely for the last year or so and th e information is from memory. However, I'd be very surprised indeed if the essence was other than what I have described.
Been doing a bit of readin' up on Liberia by Chekov Sunday, Aug 3 2003, 10:05pm
which, by the way, I'd recommend to some of you US flag wavers. Doesn't it make y'all feel a little uncomfortable blindly cheerleading the US, in a situation where you openly admit to knowing absolutely nothing about what's going on? I mean, even if somebody wrote an article criticising my mother, I'd try to investigate the claims before leaping to her defence! Do y'all really trust your government so much that you think that it's always doing good and you don't even have to bother finding out what it's up to?
Since I wrote the comment, Charles Taylor has announced that he is quiting, followed closely by the security council vote to "authorise a multi-national force"[Sunday Tribune]. "The United States pushed for the vote" and "US ambassador John Negroponte has said the Bush administration wants the force being assembled by...Ecowas to take the lead, with the United States providing support." Pretty much exactly what I predicted. Again I could be entirely wrong, I don't have enough information to be certain, but it's a pretty good indication when a theory is useful in predicting the future.
What's more I am interested to see that France abstained from the vote. They cited the ICC as the reason, but I'd say that imperial rivalry is a more likely explanation. Another interesting titbit that I saw was this, from an aid worker writing in the Tribune, "Almost everywhere we go people call out for food...how are they supposed to understand why the four aid agencies left in the country don't 'do' food? Even I don't quite get it, and I've been doing this work for years. ... shortage is not the issue. So what went wrong? simple really: they left all their eggs in one basket, at the port which is now controlled by the rebels. Strange really, when every other agency which had stocks in that part of town had moved a good portion of them to the other side of town in case of future attacks." To me it's not so strange, indeed it sounds very much like my description of a consciously manufactured humanitarian crisis. Just in case any of the flag wavers happen to go off and actually read something about Liberia (faint hope), I'll answer their objections in advance. Yes, the agencies responsible for the food distribution are from the UN (principally the WFP) but they effectively take orders from the US embassy in Liberia.
Then a few quotes from the human rights watch document linked above: "Although U.S. pressure on the Liberian government to address human rights abuses remained strong, the U.S. failed publicly to condemn both abuses by LURD rebels and the government of Guinea for providing logistical and some military support to LURD. The closest it came to doing so was in a March 1 statement by the U.S. ambassador in Monrovia condemning the renewed fighting in Liberia, and calling on the Liberian government to take steps to respect human rights and the rule of law. Although the statement stopped short of naming Guinea, the statement did call on 'all parties in the region to cease supporting any group that seeks political change through violence and to respect their neighbor's borders.'
The U.S. government's silence on LURD abuses and Guinea's support for LURD was particularly notable given that the U.S. government began a U.S.$3 million program to provide training and non-lethal equipment to the Guinean military in May 2002."
Again, very close indeed to my analysis above. The one point of error being that Guinea is acting as an agent of the US in Liberia, rather than of France. Makes more sense that way I suppose, and the Guinean government has long been the most difficult of France's charges in the region.
To answer Drbinoche's objection about the lack of M16s. When we say that country A arms country B, we don't mean that they put a load of weapons in a box and ship them off directly with a return to sender address! In general when you are supporting an armed faction in Africa you don't want to make it that obvious. To create an armed faction you need two things, money and a supply route. The money is trifling, with a few millions you can buy enough arms to destabilise most african regimes. The supply route is more difficult, you have to get a government in the region to launder the arms. This entails this third party buying them on the international market and covertly exporting them to their intended destination. In general the arms bought are always of the AK47/RPG variety, because they are cheap and readily available on the international market, regardless of the source of the money. Although the governments of the region are always scheming against each other and arming factions in each other's countries, this is almost always with the approval of one of the two big imperialist powers in the region, the US/UK or France. If you disobey them, you get ousted - a la Taylor.
Once you have the money and arms supply, it is very easy to start the insurrection. With unemployment (in terms of paid labour) running at 90% plus in most of West Africa, there are always a plentiful supply of recruits among the youth. Early teens are preferred as they make better killers, lacking the ability to contextualise their deeds.
If you are smart you will channel your money through an existing ethnic strong man, who will recruit exclusively from a particular 'tribe' and thus gain leverage from existing ethnic tension. If you are really smart, and rich, you will fund a few of them simultaneously as the chance of any particular strong man losing his way is quite high. If they become too corrupt they will not give a good return of suffering for your dollar, on the other hand the power may go to their heads and give them notions of independence.
To answer a couple of objections:
a) No this is not anti-americanism. For a start I'm talking about what the US government is doing. As you are all making abundantly clear, this is done with pretty much zero knowledge on the part of the population. In fact in Africa in general, but particularly West Africa, the French government has had a much worse effect, basically because they've had the chance. Whereas the US deliberately blocked any intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda, France eventually intervened to protect the remnants of the Interahamwe! Interestingly Giscard d'Estaing, the big EU man is personally complicit in some of their worst crimes. He used to go elephant hunting with Bokassa in the CAR - a name which even surpasses Amin in terms of depravity. Not that the US/UK aren't doing their best. UNITA has to have been one of the most brutal movements the world has ever seen to name but one of the horrors they have unleashed upon Africa.
b) I am not absolving Africans of blame. I am merely asking why this is happening. There are, of course, a large number of Africans deeply guilty. It really has nothing to do with race. Give me a country with a similar economic situation to Liberia, give me a few million and a supply route for arms and I'll destroy it. Doesn't matter where it is, doesn't matter what colour the people are, it's easy. History has shown, time and again, that, with power, you can manipulate situations so that people will do the most horrific things to each other. This does not absolve the immediate actors of blame. The various killers in Liberia are just as guilty as those complicit in the nazi regime were (incidentally a much higher proportion of the population than in Liberia). Although, as with the nazis, the greatest blame clearly lies with those who give plan everything and give the orders.
c) To refute Paul's argument, you only need to mention auschwitz, two world wars, the slave trade ... Actually, for somebody like Paul, probably the best refutation is a look in the mirror or listen to your own dumb arguments, no genetic superiority there, that's for sure!
d) Seanin's accusation of me being racist is hilarious. Seanin, I'd have thought that 'racist' was a compliment in your book. Well, you've found me out, I think blacks are superior to whites. For this reason I hate and pity myself, my family, most of my friends, my girlfriend and the vast majority of the Irish population. If only we were black, I repeat over and over.
Finally, I'd really love if some of you pro-US government 'no matter what it does', types went off and tried to refute some of these arguments. In places like Liberia they often don't bother to cover their tracks too well. They can rely on the deep racism of the media and establishment. In general most people just assume that this type of thing is 'just what Africans do'. Even among left-leaning types this type of thinking is endemic. It is very rare indeed for people to visit these region from the west, without being part of one of the complicit bodies. I was fortunate enough to spend a year or so in the region and was particularly shocked at what the NGOs are actually doing there. Read more at the link supplied.
related link: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/ac...nts/chekov.html (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/accounts/chekov.html)