A-Infos (en) South Africa, An anarchist Journal Zabalaza: #7 - THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA by Michael Schmidt

AMERICA MUSCLES INTO “FRENCH TERRITORY”

Former colonial power France maintained the largest foreign military 
presence in Africa since most countries attained sovereignty in the 
1950s and 1960s. But France reduced its armed presence on the continent 
by two thirds at the end of the last century, though it continues to 
intervene in a muscular and controversial fashion. For example, under a 
1961 “mutual defence” pact, French forces were allowed to be permanently 
stationed in Ivory Coast: the 500-strong 43rd Marine Infantry Battalion 
is based at Port Bouet next to the Abidjan airport. When the civil war 
erupted there in September 2002, France added a “stabilisation force”, 
now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne, which was augmented in 
2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 
“peacekeepers” drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. In 
January this year, the United Nations extended the mandate of Operation 
Licorne until December.

But piggybacking off the French military presence in Africa are a series 
of new foreign military and policing initiatives by the United States 
and the European Union. It appears the US has devised a new Monroe 
Doctrine for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of 
US interventions in what it saw as its Latin American “back yard”).

Under the George W Bush regime’s “War on Terror” doctrine, the US has 
designated a swathe of territory that curves across the globe from 
Colombia and Venezuela in South America, through Africa’s Maghreb, 
Sahara and Sahel regions into the Middle East and Central Asia as the 
“arc of instability” where both real and supposed terrorists may find 
refuge and training.

In Africa, which falls under the US military’s European Command (EUCOM), 
the US has struck agreements with France to share its military bases. 
For example: there is now a US Marine Corps base in Djibouti at the 
French base of Camp Lemonier with more than 1,800 Marines stationed 
there, allegedly for “counter-terrorism” operations in the horn of 
Africa, the Middle East and East Africa - as well as controlling the Red 
Sea shipping lanes.

But the US presence involves more than piggybacking off French bases. In 
2003, US intelligence operatives began training spies for four unnamed 
North African countries - believed to be Morocco and Egypt and perhaps 
also Algeria and Tunisia.

It is also conducting training of the armed forces of countries such as 
Chad and in September last year, Bush told the United Nations Security 
Council that the US would, over the next five years, train 40,000 
“African peace-keepers” to “preserve justice and order in Africa”. The 
US Embassy in Pretoria said at the time that the US had already trained 
20,000 “peace-keepers” in 12 African countries in the use of “non-lethal 
equipment”.

And now, while the US is downscaling and dismantling military bases in 
Germany and South Korea, it is relocating these military resources to 
Africa and the Middle East in order to “combat terrorism” and “protect 
oil resources”.

In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, 
and São Tomé & Príncipe. These “jumping-off points” will station small 
permanent forces, but with the ability to launch major regional military 
adventures, according to the US-based Associated Press. An existing US 
base at Entebbe, Uganda, under the one-party regime of US ally Yoweri 
Museveni, already “covers” East Africa and the Great Lakes region. At 
Dakar in Senegal, the US is busy upgrading an airfield.

*SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE “WAR ON TERROR”*

Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts include Gabon, 
Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a “second 
Guantanamo” in the Indian Ocean where alleged terror suspects kidnapped 
in Africa, the Middle East or Asia can be detained and interrogated 
without trial: a detention camp, refuelling point and bomber base 
situated on the British-colonised Chagos Archipelago island of Diego 
Garcia, an island from which the indigenous inhabitants were forcibly 
removed to Mauritius.

In South Africa’s case, while it is unlikely there will ever be US bases 
established because the strength of the country’s military, the SANDF, 
makes that unnecessary, in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the 
US’s Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme 
which is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic 
(read: imperialist) objectives.

South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as its 13th African member, 
effectively joined the American “War on Terror”. ACOTA started life as a 
“humanitarian” programme run by EUCOM out of Stuttgart, Germany, in 
1996. After the 9-11 attacks, the Pentagon reorganised ACOTA and gave it 
more teeth.

Today, its makeup is more obviously aggressive rather than defensive. 
According to Pierre Abromovici, writing in the July 2004 edition of Le 
Monde Diplomatique about rumours that South Africa was preparing to sign 
ACOTA - a full year before it did so - “ACOTA includes offensive 
training, particularly for regular infantry units and small units 
modelled on special forces... In Washington, the talk is no longer of 
non-lethal weapons... the emphasis is on ‘offensive’ co-operation”.

The real nature of ACOTA is perhaps indicated by the career of the man 
heading it up, Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, “a Cuban exile who took part 
in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs,” Abromovici wrote. “He 
is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. 
During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defence Board, 
and, in the 1960s, he took part in clandestine operations against the 
Sandanistas. He was accused of involvement in drug-trafficking to fund 
arms sent to Central America” to prop up pro-Washington right-wing 
dictatorships.

Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent “anti-communist” - whether that means 
opposing rebellious States or popular insurrections. He also sits on the 
executive of a strange outfit within the US military called the 
Cuban-American Military council, which aims at installing itself as the 
government of Cuba should the US ever achieve a forcible “regime-change” 
there.

The career of the US ambassador who concluded the ACOTA pact with South 
Africa is also an indicator of US intentions. Jendayi Fraser, now Bush’s 
senior advisor on Africa, had no diplomatic experience. Instead, she 
once served as a politico-military planner with the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff in the Department of Defence and as senior director for African 
affairs at the National Security Council. According to Fraser’s online 
biography, she “worked on African security issues with the State 
Department’s international military education training programmes”.

*IS THERE A MURDEROUS “SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS”?*

Those programmes include the “Next Generation of African Military 
Leaders” officers’ course run by the shadowy African Centre for 
Strategic Studies, based in Washington, which has “chapters” in various 
African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a 
sort of “School of the Africas” similar to the infamous “School of the 
Americas” based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the 
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 
60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian 
dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel 
Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose 
regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous 
death-squad killers, right up to Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who 
staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002.

Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured 
hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically 
targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla 
units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of 
Nicaragua in 1980 and the “El Mozote” massacre of 767 villagers in 
Guatemala in 1981 were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the 
School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC 
down, is on an FBI “anti-terrorism” watch-list.

So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic 
Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch 
cannot confirm these fears. And there is more: we’ve all heard of the 
“Standby Force” being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of 
Africa’s authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, 
under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in 
Europe (which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia), the 
African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism.

The Centre is based in Algiers, Algeria, at the heart of a murderous 
regime that has itself “disappeared” some 3,000 people between 1992 and 
2003 (according to Amnesty International: equivalent to the Pinochet 
dictatorship in Chile, but ignored by the African left). The Centre’s 
director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a 
think-tank and trainer of “anti-terrorism” judges, but that it would 
also have teeth, providing training in “specific armed intervention” in 
support of the continent’s regimes.

Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based 
Institute for Security Studies, said, however, that only 10% of 
terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only 6% on state 
figures and institutions, though the latter were “focussed”. She warned 
that a major cause of African terrorism was “a growing void between 
government and security forces on the one hand and local communities on 
the other”. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are 
recruited into rebel armies, even though few of these offer any sort of 
real solution.

The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU’s Algiers Convention on 
Terrorism, which is notoriously vague on what defines terrorism, opening 
the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, 
civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the 
new counter-terrorism forces. It would be naïve to think that bourgeois 
democracy - which passed South Africa’s equally vaguely-defined 
Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related 
Activities Act into law last year - will protect the working class, 
peasantry and poor from state terrorism.

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web site link: http://www.zabalaza.net/index02.htm
pdf of  #7 - http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/sapams/zab07.pdf
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