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U.S. hands off Mali, U.S. out of Africa!
U.S. hands off Mali, U.S. out of Africa!
UN approved military intervention will have tremendous human cost
By Staff
Many people first heard about plans for U.S. intervention in the African country of Mali during the third Presidential debate in October. Republican candidate Mitt Romney clumsily tried to speak about Mali’s recent turmoil.
On Dec. 20, 2012, those plans continued to move forward. The UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for military invention in Mali. The resolution comes after nearly nine months of unrest in the landlocked West African country following a military coup d'état in Bamako, the capital.
For months, international human rights organizations warned about the human cost of military intervention in Mali. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in West Africa estimates that intervention will displace more than 300,000 Malians. Additionally, the 500,000 people living in northern Mali will face food insecurity, starvation and disease because of reduced access to aid.
While the UN resolution calls for an African-led military intervention under the guise of combating Islamist militants in the north, the actual architects of the intervention are the U.S. and France. The plan is meant to further U.S. plans for re-colonizing Africa. The U.S. is expanding AFRICOM, a U.S. regional command and military force. In 2001 the U.S. Central Command took over a large French military base located in Djibouti, and this became AFRICOM military headquarters in 2009. Djibouti is a small and very poor African state and former French colony, where a demi-brigade of the French Foreign Legion is still stationed today. As part of AFRICOM expansion, the U.S., with French help, is pressuring Algeria for military “basing rights”. This Algerian base will be used to launch attacks in Mali.
Mali is facing an internal rebellion in the north that began in January 2012. The roots of the rebellion in Mali lie in NATO's military assault on Libya in 2011. Under Qaddafi's government, Libya's tribes and ethnic minorities enjoyed relative autonomy and freedom. When NATO began its offensive against Libya, many of these ethnic minorities fought against the reactionary forces supported by the U.S., France and Britain.
One of the groups affected by NATO's assault in Libya was the Taureg people, who are a nomadic ethnic group located in Libya, Mali and other West African countries. Many Taureg militants fought to keep Libya independent of U.S. control, but left Libya once Gaddafi was brutalized and executed. After crossing through Niger and into Mali, they began fighting to demand greater power for their people and a Mali independent of U.S. or French dominance.
Shortly after the rebellion in Mali broke out, the Malian military overthrew President Amadou Toumani Touré in a coup d'état on March 21, 2012. Claiming that Touré was mismanaging the government response to the Taureg rebellion in the north, the military junta suspended the constitution and took control of the state.
Since that time, Islamist forces joined the conflict against the military junta. The most significant of these groups is Ansar Dine, an Islamist group based in northern Mali, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
The U.S. claims that military intervention is necessary to combat radical Islamist groups from taking control of Mali. In reality, the Malian government met directly with the two most significant rebel groups in the north on Dec. 4 to start a dialogue for resolving the crisis. Government officials met with Ansar Dine and the Taureg-led National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and formally agreed "on the respect for Mali's national unity and territorial integrity," and "on the rejection of any form of extremism and terrorism," according to the AFP. Delegates from the Malian government and the most important players are attempting to resolve the crisis internally, without U.S. and French-directed military intervention.
The U.S., France and Britain will train, supply and direct troops from Mali and neighboring African countries. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will spearhead the intervention. ECOWAS is chaired by Côte d'Ivoire President Alassane Ouattara, a puppet of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2011, the French military launched an offensive against Côte d'Ivoire to remove then-President Laurent Gbagbo and install Ouattara as a puppet. The military intervention by ECOWAS will include significant forces from both Côte d'Ivoire and Libya, both with governments installed by France and the U.S.
The U.S., France and Britain increasingly intervene in Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. Meanwhile, the U.S. looks to erect new military bases for their military forces of AFRICOM. Having lost some their foothold on the continent due to the national liberation movements of the 20th century, the U.S., France and Britain are deliberately working to recolonize Africa.
Military intervention in Mali does not receive the same coverage by the corporate media in the U.S. as aggression towards Iran and Syria. However, anti-war and international solidarity activists should stand resolutely against U.S. intervention in Mali's affairs, whether through AFRICOM or neighboring puppet governments.
U.S. Hands Off Mali!
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I didn't even hear that the UN approved such a move. I fear though it will be hard to reason with people on this count- they've been steeped in the news about what the nuts in the north have been doing with their religious law, repressing people and destroying shrines, so this can seem to be a humanitarian intervention.
Hope to reproduce the 1993 Somalia.
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What a terrible piece of faux journalism.
Interesting that Fight Back! News/FRSO-FB finally decided to write anything about this. For much of the conflict now, they couldn't be bothered to weigh in with their analysis. Now, all of a sudden, it's a topic worth discussing because there may be intervention. Of course, they are utter clueless as to what is really going on in Mali. Then again, this is the same so-called "socialist" organization who defends China on a regular basis.
Tell the class about how the Americans are backing the islamists while helping bomb them.
This *is* the damndest thing -- to me it points to the *basest* geopolitical sinkhole, where the contradictions of nation-based, neocolonialist logic and realities are nakedly manifested, with Orwellian results.
Here's from a parallel thread on the topic:
Or maybe the US isn't backing the rebels.
Stop the French military intervention in Mali! No to Algerian cooperation!
Friday 18 January 2013
This statement was issued by the National Secretariat of the PST (Algerian section of the Fourth International) on January 17, 2013.
After the Ivorian episode in 2010, the French military intervention in Mali, with its colonialist overtones, is above all an expression of France’s determination to regain its “African garden”, which is being gnawed away at by China and other powers, in a context of a major economic crisis of the capitalist system on a world scale.
The “terrorist” alibi of Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq is being used again by Holland, who tells us with a straight face that “France has no political or economic objectives” in its Mali campaign, and that its Rafales and its armada, without witnesses and without visual evidence, “are in the service of freedom”, alongside troops from Ecowas countries where there is no freedom. This “altruism” of France clearly reminds us of its “civilising mission” in the nineteenth century, of which the Algerian people was a victim during the long colonial night.
But the Algerian regime, whose eyes are riveted on the 2014 presidential elections, has eventually yielded to imperialist pressure. Mr Bouteflika has authorized French bombers to use our airspace and ordered the closure of the border. This unacceptable about-face in the Algerian position seriously contradicts the historical fight of our country for emancipation and the dignity of peoples. At a time when we are still celebrating the 50th anniversary of our independence, the about-turn of the Algerian regime, which is cooperating with France in its warlike enterprise, is the expression of a political turning point that reduces national sovereignty and locks Algeria into an unholy alliance of colonial reconquest.
Like the uprisings of the peoples in the Arab countries and even in Europe, the Malian crisis has its roots on the one hand in the economic and social disaster caused by liberalism, imposed by the imperialist powers and institutions, and on the other hand in the dictatorial regimes which act as guarantors of their interests.
The Malian people, whether in the North or the South, needs development, dignity and prosperity and not bombs and servitude. It is for the people of Mali to drive out a few armed Islamist gangs which want to impose their laws. It is for the people of Mali to freely decide its future.
Stop the French and imperialist intervention in Mali!
No to the colonial war in Mali!
No to the opening of Algerian air space to the French bombers!
Solidarity with the Malian people and the refugees!
For a political solution guaranteeing democratic rights and development to all the components of the Malian people!
Riiiight. Next you'll have us believe that the CIA didn't support Bin Laden in Afghanistan and that Hamas wasn't created by the Israelis.
The imperative driving the renewed Western interest in Africa is, of course the race to secure the continent’s vast wealth. But intervention breeds intervention. Mali is probably only the beginning and there's no telling how this will end.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
It's interesting that this intervention is actually happening. There was strong opposition to it within the political elites of all interested and involved states. I think ECOWAS are actually, despite a genuine desire to suppress any "Salafism" or Tuareg successionism, only intervening quite reluctantly. None of them want to turn themselves into targets or encourage similar movements within their own borders, which intervention, seen as aggression, may well encourage. France is keen to be involved but this too may be strategically misled, causing a strong nationalist backlash against the presence of former colonial masters. The US, whilst desperate for the movement in the north to be crushed, is never going to involve itself militarily; it simply can't afford to. They've all been wanting Algeria to do their dirty work for them. Algeria is very reluctant since it has a large Tuareg population in the South which it has thus far just about managed to restrain politically. Recent events in Algeria may well change things, though I can't really say how - could go either way, but escalation one way or another is likely I suppose.
So the situation we have is one where all these states want something done, but few are willing or able to do much about it. This has the potential for a proper big-ass shitstorm, to become a sort of new Afghanistan if it isn't resolved quickly and resolutely.
"It is slaves, struggling to throw off their chains, who unleash the movement whereby history abolishes masters." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." - Karl Marx
"What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation." - Gilles Dauvé
You're probably referring to that article posted by Overture in another thread.
If you bothered to read it, you'd see the thesis presented. That being that the Algerian secret service, DRS I think, was actually involved in infiltration and even formation of islamist groups and responsible for all kinds of atrocities during the Algerian "Dirty War". The thesis is that these opratives are also behind the formation of the two islamist groups now active in Northern Mali with the purpose of destabilizing the region and weakening the Touareg movement for independent Azawad. Something which they were successful at. The part with intervention comes in with the author arguing that these operatives would be pulled out, while the rank-and-file islamist fundamentalists would of course be left to be bombed into pieces.
If you checked out some evidence and arguments presented in the article, you might not have considered this interpretation so far fetched.
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“The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.” Friedrich Engels
"The proletariat is its struggle; and its struggles have to this day not led it beyond class society, but deeper into it." Friends of the Classless Society
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Notice I used the present tense. So according to your logic, the US controls Al-Qaida and the Israelis control Hamas, because they either supported their predecessors or set them up at one time? Does this change the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian resistance, or the objectively anti-neocolonial struggle of the north Mali rebels? Did Germany control the Bolshevicks because Lenin rode a train, or did the US want a communist Cuba because it supported Castro against Batista in the later stages of the revolution? Or maybe the US overthrew its own puppet state back in 2001, ostensibly to get rid of Al-Qaida there?
This is assuming the US actually had any hand in setting up AQIM, which isn't the Tuareg Ansar Dine.
what's that quote...'imperialist's have no permanent friends, and no permanent enemies. only permanent interests'. bomb 'terrorists' in pakistan and then support similar 'freedom fighters' in syria and then bomb similar ones again in Mali.
[FONT=Arial]"Can a brother get a little peace?
There's war in the streets
and a war in the middle east.
Instead of a war on poverty,
they got a war on drugs
so the police can bother me"[/FONT]
I love how much you took what he said out of context. When did he say the US currently controls Al-Qaida and that Israel controls Hamas? I surely can't seem to find where Khad said this at all.
The US did back & train Bin Laden. Khad did not say they still currently support & train his organisation. Even if we accept that "Al-Qaida" actually exists in the way the US claims it does - an assertion which I would dispute (their explanation for the supposed "global terror network" cites connections that are ambiguous and barely hold up, at best) that they were responsible for its origins in the 80s does not mean they still currently control them.Originally Posted by AntiNihilisT
Khad did not say what you are claiming he said. You said that.
Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice. -George Jackson
There is no such thing as an innocent bystander. -Abbie Hoffman
Khad merely pointed out that Hamas was initially set up by agents of Israeli intelligence in order to counter the influence of the secularist PLO. Yazman explained the Bin Laden part.
