By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: September 4, 2011
TRIPOLI, Libya — As rebel leaders pleaded with their fighters to avoid taking revenge against “brother Libyans,” many rebels were turning their wrath against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, imprisoning hundreds for the crime of fighting as “mercenaries” for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi without any evidence except the color of their skin.
Many witnesses have said that when Colonel Qaddafi first lost control of Tripoli in the earliest days of the revolt, experienced units of dark-skinned fighters apparently from other African countries arrived in the city to help subdue it again. Since Western journalists began arriving in the city a few days later, however, they have found no evidence of such foreign mercenaries.
Still, in a country with a long history of racist violence, it has become an article of faith among supporters of the Libyan rebels that African mercenaries pervaded the loyalists’ ranks. And since Colonel Qaddafi’s fall from power, the hunting down of people suspected of being mercenaries has become a major preoccupation.
Human rights advocates say the rebels’ scapegoating of blacks here follows a similar campaign that ultimately included lynchings after rebels took control of the eastern city of Benghazi more than six months ago. The recent roundup of Africans, though, comes at a delicate moment when the new provisional government is trying to establish its credibility. Its treatment of the detainees is emerging as a pivotal test of both the provisional government’s commitment to the rule of law and its ability to control its thousands of loosely organized fighters. And it is also hoping to entice back the thousands of foreign workers needed to help Libya rebuild.
Many Tripoli residents — including some local rebel leaders — now often use the Arabic word for “mercenaries” or “foreign fighters” as a catchall term to refer to any member of the city’s large underclass of African migrant workers. Makeshift rebel jails around the city have been holding African migrants segregated in fetid, sweltering pens for as long as two weeks on charges that their captors often acknowledge to be little more than suspicion. The migrants far outnumber Libyan prisoners, in part because rebels say they have allowed many Libyan Qaddafi supporters to return to their homes if they are willing to surrender their weapons.
The detentions reflect “a deep-seated racism and anti-African sentiment in Libyan society,” said Peter Bouckaert, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who visited several jails. “It is very clear to us that most of those detained were not soldiers and have never held a gun in their life.”
In a dimly lighted concrete hangar housing about 300 glassy-eyed, dark-skinned captives in one neighborhood, several said they were as young as 16. In a reopened police station nearby, rebels were holding Mohamed Amidu Suleiman, a 62-year-old migrant from Niger, on allegations of witchcraft. To back up the charges, they produced a long loop of beads they said they had found in his possession.
He was held in a segregated cell with about 20 other prisoners, all African migrants but one. “We have no water in the bathroom!” one prisoner shouted to a guard. “Neither do we!” the guard replied. Most of the city has been without running water to bathe, flush toilets or wash clothes since a breakdown in the water delivery system around the time that Colonel Qaddafi fled. But the stench, and fear, of the migrants was so acute that guards handed visitors hospital masks before they entered their cell.
Outside the migrants’ cage, a similar number of Libyan prisoners occupy a less crowded network of rooms. Osama el-Zawi, 40, a former customs officer in charge of the jail, said his officers had allowed most of the Libyan Qaddafi supporters from the area to go home. “We all know each other,” he said. “They don’t pose any kind of threat to us now. They are ashamed to go out in the streets.”
But the “foreign fighters,” he said, were more dangerous. “Most of them deny they were doing it,” he said, “but we found some of them with weapons.”
A guard chimed in: “If we release the mercenaries, the people in the street will hurt them.”
In the crowded prison hangar, in the Tajura neighborhood, the rebel commander Abdou Shafi Hassan, 34, said they were holding only a few dozen Libyans — local informers and prisoners of war — but kept hundreds of Africans in the segregated pen. On a recent evening, the Libyan captives could be seen rolling up mats after evening prayers in an outdoor courtyard just a short distance from where the Africans lay on the concrete floor in the dark.
Several said they had been picked up walking in the streets or in their homes, without weapons, and some said they were dark-skinned Libyans from the country’s southern region. “We don’t know why we are here,” said Abdel Karim Mohamed, 29.
A guard — El Araby Abu el-Meida, a 35-year-old mechanical engineer before he took up arms in the rebellion — almost seemed to apologize for the conditions. “We are all civilians, and we don’t have experience running prisons,” he said.
Most of the prisoners were migrant farm workers, he said. “I have a Sudanese worker on my farm and I would not catch him,” he said, adding that if an expected “investigator” concluded that the other black prisoners were not mercenaries they would be released.
In recent days, the provisional government has started the effort to centralize the processing and detention of prisoners. Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the Tripoli military council, said that as recently as Wednesday he had extended his protection to a group of 10 African workers who had come to his headquarters seeking refuge.
“We don’t agree with arresting people just because they’re black,” he said. “We understand the problem, but we’re still in a battle area.”
Mohamed Benrasali, a member of the provisional government’s Tripoli stabilization team, acknowledged the problem but said it would “sort itself out,” as it had in his hometown, Misurata.
“People are afraid of the dark-skinned people, so they are all suspect,” Mr. Benrasali said, noting that residents had also rounded up dark-skinned migrants in Misurata after the rebels took control. He said he had advised the Tripoli officials to set up a system to release any migrants who could find Libyans to vouch for them.
With thousands of semi-independent rebel fighters still roaming the streets for any hidden threats, though, controlling the impulse to round up migrants may not be easy.
Outside a former Qaddafi intelligence building, rebels held two dark-skinned captives at knifepoint, bound together at the feet with arms tied behind their backs, lying in a pile of garbage, covered with flies. Their captors said they had been found in a taxi with ammunition and money. The terrified prisoners, 22-year-olds from Mali, initially said they had no involvement in the Qaddafi militias and then, as a captor held a knife near their heads, they began supplying the story of forced induction into the Qaddafi forces that they appeared to think was wanted.
Nearby, armed fighters stood over about a dozen other migrants squatting against a fence. Their captors were drilling them at gunpoint in rebel chants like “God is Great” and “Free Libya!”
Rod Nordland contributed reporting.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia
Jeremy Scahill (The Nation Magazine)
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.
As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.
The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”
According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA is reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who are regarded by US officials as corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting. Prisoners, they said, are not allowed outside. Many have developed rashes and scratch themselves incessantly. Some have been detained for a year or more. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned against walls rocking.
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents. Once in custody, according to the senior Somali intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees are freely interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” said the Somali intelligence official in describing the policy of allowing foreign agents, including from the CIA, to interrogate prisoners. The Americans, according to the Somali official, operate unilaterally in the country, while the French agents are embedded within the African Union force known as AMISOM.
Among the men believed to be held in the secret underground prison is Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, a 25- or 26-year-old Kenyan citizen who disappeared from the congested Somali slum of Eastleigh in Nairobi around July 2009. After he went missing, Hassan’s family retained Mbugua Mureithi, a well-known Kenyan human rights lawyer, who filed a habeas petition on his behalf. The Kenyan government responded that Hassan was not being held in Kenya and said it had no knowledge of his whereabouts. His fate remained a mystery until this spring, when another man who had been held in the Mogadishu prison contacted Clara Gutteridge, a veteran human rights investigator with the British legal organization Reprieve, and told her he had met Hassan in the prison. Hassan, he said, had told him how Kenyan police had knocked down his door, snatched him and taken him to a secret location in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan had said, he was rendered to Mogadishu.
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore. The plane lands and touches the sea. They took me to this prison, where I have been up to now. I have been here for one year, seven months. I have been interrogated so many times. Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day. New faces show up. They have nothing on me. I have never seen a lawyer, never seen an outsider. Only other prisoners, interrogators, guards. Here there is no court or tribunal.’”
After meeting the man who had spoken with Hassan in the underground prison, Gutteridge began working with Hassan’s Kenyan lawyers to determine his whereabouts. She says he has never been charged or brought before a court. “Hassan’s abduction from Nairobi and rendition to a secret prison in Somalia bears all the hallmarks of a classic US rendition operation,” she says. The US official interviewed for this article denied the CIA had rendered Hassan but said, “The United States provided information which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the street.” Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have documented that Kenyan security and intelligence forces have facilitated scores of renditions for the US and other governments, including eighty-five people rendered to Somalia in 2007 alone. Gutteridge says the director of the Mogadishu prison told one of her sources that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence suggesting he was the “right-hand man” of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, at the time a leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa. Nabhan, a Kenyan citizen of Yemeni descent, was among the top suspects sought for questioning by US authorities over his alleged role in the coordinated 2002 attacks on a tourist hotel and an Israeli aircraft in Mombasa, Kenya, and possible links to the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
An intelligence report leaked by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorist Police Unit in October 2010 alleged that Hassan, a “former personal assistant to Nabhan…was injured while fighting near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” The authenticity of the report cannot be independently confirmed, though Hassan did have a leg amputated below the knee, according to his former fellow prisoner in Mogadishu.
Two months after Hassan was allegedly rendered to the secret Mogadishu prison, Nabhan, the man believed to be his Al Qaeda boss, was killed in the first known targeted killing operation in Somalia authorized by President Obama. On September 14, 2009, a team from the elite US counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), took off by helicopters from a US Navy ship off Somalia’s coast and penetrated Somali airspace. In broad daylight, in an operation code-named Celestial Balance, they gunned down Nabhan’s convoy from the air. JSOC troops then landed and collected at least two of the bodies, including Nabhan’s.
Hassan’s lawyers are preparing to file a habeas petition on his behalf in US courts. “Hassan’s case suggests that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo Bay in central Mogadishu,” his legal team asserted in a statement to The Nation. “Mr. Hassan must be given the opportunity to challenge both his rendition and continued detention as a matter of urgency. The US must urgently confirm exactly what has been done to Mr. Hassan, why he is being held, and when he will be given a fair hearing.”
Gutteridge, who has worked extensively tracking the disappearances of terror suspects in Kenya, was deported from Kenya on May 11.
The underground prison where Hassan is allegedly being held is housed in the same building once occupied by Somalia’s infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the military regime of Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. The former prisoner who met Hassan there said he saw an old NSS sign outside. During Barre’s regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which sits behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state’s apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “The Hole.”
“The bunker is there, and that’s where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” says Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a Somali analyst who has researched the Shabab and Somali security forces. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.” Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the French.” The US official said that US agents’ “debriefing” prisoners in the facility has “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali agents.
Some prisoners, like Hassan, were allegedly rendered from Nairobi, while in other cases, according to Aynte, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in contact with the leadership of Al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a [commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people. Catch them, interrogate them.”
* * *
In the eighteen years since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu, US policy on Somalia has been marked by neglect, miscalculation and failed attempts to use warlords to build indigenous counterterrorism capacity, many of which have backfired dramatically. At times, largely because of abuses committed by Somali militias the CIA has supported, US policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups, including the Shabab. Many Somalis viewed the Islamic movement known as the Islamic Courts Union, which defeated the CIA’s warlords in Mogadishu in 2006, as a stabilizing, albeit ruthless, force. The ICU was dismantled in a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007. Over the years, a series of weak Somali administrations have been recognized by the United States and other powers as Somalia’s legitimate government. Ironically, its current president is a former leader of the ICU.
Today, Somali government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force. Much of the rest of the city is under the control of the Shabab or warlords. Outgunned, the Shabab has increasingly relied on the linchpins of asymmetric warfare—suicide bombings, roadside bombs and targeted assassinations. The militant group has repeatedly shown that it can strike deep in the heart of its enemies’ territory. On June 9, in one of its most spectacular suicide attacks to date, the Shabab assassinated the Somali government’s minister of interior affairs and national security, Abdishakur Sheikh Hassan Farah, who was attacked in his residence by his niece. The girl, whom the minister was putting through university, blew herself up and fatally wounded her uncle. He died hours later in the hospital. Farah was the fifth Somali minister killed by the Shabab in the past two years and the seventeenth official assassinated since 2006. Among the suicide bombers the Shabab has deployed were at least three US citizens of Somali descent; at least seven other Americans have died fighting alongside the Shabab, a fact that has not gone unnoticed in Washington or Mogadishu.
During his confirmation hearings in June to become the head of the US Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral William McRaven said, “From my standpoint as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard” at Somalia. McRaven said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United States will have to increase its use of drones as well as on-the-ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the enablers,” McRaven declared. The expanding US counterterrorism program in Mogadishu appears to be part of that effort.
In an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu, Abdulkadir Moallin Noor, the minister of state for the presidency, confirmed that US agents “are working with our intelligence” and “giving them training.” Regarding the US counterterrorism effort, Noor said bluntly, “We need more; otherwise, the terrorists will take over the country.”
It is unclear how much control, if any, Somalia’s internationally recognized president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has over this counterterrorism force or if he is even fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence agents “do not bother to be in touch with the political leadership of the country. And that says a lot about the intentions,” says Aynte. “Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States. You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA seems to be doing it across the country.”
While the Somali officials interviewed for this story said the CIA is the lead US agency on the Mogadishu counterterrorism program, they also indicated that US military intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official responded, “We don’t know. They don’t tell us.”
In April Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man the United States alleged had links to the Shabab, was captured by JSOC forces in the Gulf of Aden. He was held incommunicado on a US Navy vessel for more than two months; in July he was transferred to New York and indicted on terrorism charges. Warsame’s case ignited a legal debate over the Obama administration’s policies on capturing and detaining terror suspects, particularly in light of the widening counterterrorism campaigns in Somalia and Yemen.
On June 23 the United States reportedly carried out a drone strike against alleged Shabab members near Kismayo, 300 miles from the Somali capital. As with the Nabhan operation, a JSOC team swooped in on helicopters and reportedly snatched the bodies of those killed and wounded. The men were taken to an undisclosed location. On July 6 three more US strikes reportedly targeted Shabab training camps in the same area. Somali analysts warned that if the US bombings cause civilian deaths, as they have in the past, they could increase support for the Shabab. Asked in an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu if US drone strikes strengthen or weaken his government, President Sharif replied, “Both at the same time. For our sovereignty, it’s not good to attack a sovereign country. That’s the negative part. The positive part is you’re targeting individuals who are criminals.”
A week after the June 23 strike, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, described an emerging US strategy that would focus not on “deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” Brennan singled out the Shabab, saying, “From the territory it controls in Somalia, Al Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United States,” adding, “We cannot and we will not let down our guard. We will continue to pummel Al Qaeda and its ilk.”
While the United States appears to be ratcheting up both its rhetoric and its drone strikes against the Shabab, it has thus far been able to strike only in rural areas outside Mogadishu. These operations have been isolated and infrequent, and Somali analysts say they have failed to disrupt the Shabab’s core leadership, particularly in Mogadishu.
In a series of interviews in Mogadishu, several of the country’s recognized leaders, including President Sharif, called on the US government to quickly and dramatically increase its assistance to the Somali military in the form of training, equipment and weapons. Moreover, they argue that without viable civilian institutions, Somalia will remain ripe for terrorist groups that can further destabilize not only Somalia but the region. “I believe that the US should help the Somalis to establish a government that protects civilians and its people,” Sharif said.
In the battle against the Shabab, the United States does not, in fact, appear to have cast its lot with the Somali government. The emerging US strategy on Somalia—borne out in stated policy, expanded covert presence and funding plans—is two-pronged: On the one hand, the CIA is training, paying and at times directing Somali intelligence agents who are not firmly under the control of the Somali government, while JSOC conducts unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge of the government; on the other, the Pentagon is increasing its support for and arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military forces.
A draft of a defense spending bill approved in late June by the Senate Armed Services Committee would authorize more than $75 million in US counterterrorism assistance aimed at fighting the Shabab and Al Qaeda in Somalia. The bill, however, did not authorize additional funding for Somalia’s military, as the country’s leaders have repeatedly asked. Instead, the aid package would dramatically increase US arming and financing of AMISOM’s forces, particularly from Uganda and Burundi, as well as the militaries of Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia. The Somali military, the committee asserted, is unable to “exercise control of its territory.”
That makes it all the more ironic that perhaps the greatest tactical victory won in recent years in Somalia was delivered not by AMISOM, the CIA or JSOC but by members of a Somali militia fighting as part of the government’s chaotic local military. And it was a pure accident.
Late in the evening on June 7, a man whose South African passport identified him as Daniel Robinson was in the passenger seat of a Toyota SUV driving on the outskirts of Mogadishu when his driver, a Kenyan national, missed a turn and headed straight toward a checkpoint manned by Somali forces. A firefight broke out, and the two men inside the car were killed. The Somali forces promptly looted the laptops, cellphones, documents, weapons and $40,000 in cash they found in the car, according to the senior Somali intelligence official.
Upon discovering that the men were foreigners, the Somali NSA launched an investigation and recovered the items that had been looted. “There was a lot of English and Arabic stuff, papers,” recalls the Somali intelligence official, containing “very tactical stuff” that appeared to be linked to Al Qaeda, including “two senior people communicating.” The Somali agents “realized it was an important man” and informed the CIA in Mogadishu. The men’s bodies were taken to the NSA. The Americans took DNA samples and fingerprints and flew them to Nairobi for processing.
Within hours, the United States confirmed that Robinson was in fact Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a top leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa and its chief liaison with the Shabab. Fazul, a twenty-year veteran of Al Qaeda, had been indicted by the United States for his alleged role in the 1998 US Embassy bombings and was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list. A JSOC attempt to kill him in a January 2007 airstrike resulted in the deaths of at least seventy nomads in rural Somalia, and he had been underground ever since. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Fazul’s death “a significant blow to Al Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents.”
At its facilities in Mogadishu, the CIA and its Somali NSA agents continue to pore over the materials recovered from Fazul’s car, which served as a mobile headquarters. Some deleted and encrypted files were recovered and decoded by US agents. The senior Somali intelligence official said that the intelligence may prove more valuable on a tactical level than the cache found in Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan, especially in light of the increasing US focus on East Africa. The Americans, he said, were “unbelievably grateful”; he hopes it means they will take Somalia’s forces more seriously and provide more support.
But the United States continues to wage its campaign against the Shabab primarily by funding the AMISOM forces, which are not conducting their mission with anything resembling surgical precision. Instead, over the past several months the AMISOM forces in Mogadishu have waged a merciless campaign of indiscriminate shelling of Shabab areas, some of which are heavily populated by civilians. While AMISOM regularly puts out press releases boasting of gains against the Shabab and the retaking of territory, the reality paints a far more complicated picture.
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only have the Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas; the civilians that once resided there have been cleared too. On several occasions in late June, AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where whole neighborhoods are totally abandoned. Houses lie in ruins and animals wander aimlessly, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies have been hastily buried in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in one former Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just meters from a new government checkpoint.
In late June the Pentagon approved plans to send $45 million worth of military equipment to Uganda and Burundi, the two major forces in the AMISOM operation. Among the new items are four small Raven surveillance drones, night-vision and communications equipment and other surveillance gear, all of which augur a more targeted campaign. Combined with the attempt to build an indigenous counterterrorism force at the Somali NSA, a new US counterterrorism strategy is emerging.
But according to the senior Somali intelligence official, who works directly with the US agents, the CIA-led program in Mogadishu has brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,” says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled territory since.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.
As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.
The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”
According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA is reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who are regarded by US officials as corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting. Prisoners, they said, are not allowed outside. Many have developed rashes and scratch themselves incessantly. Some have been detained for a year or more. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned against walls rocking.
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents. Once in custody, according to the senior Somali intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees are freely interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” said the Somali intelligence official in describing the policy of allowing foreign agents, including from the CIA, to interrogate prisoners. The Americans, according to the Somali official, operate unilaterally in the country, while the French agents are embedded within the African Union force known as AMISOM.
Among the men believed to be held in the secret underground prison is Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, a 25- or 26-year-old Kenyan citizen who disappeared from the congested Somali slum of Eastleigh in Nairobi around July 2009. After he went missing, Hassan’s family retained Mbugua Mureithi, a well-known Kenyan human rights lawyer, who filed a habeas petition on his behalf. The Kenyan government responded that Hassan was not being held in Kenya and said it had no knowledge of his whereabouts. His fate remained a mystery until this spring, when another man who had been held in the Mogadishu prison contacted Clara Gutteridge, a veteran human rights investigator with the British legal organization Reprieve, and told her he had met Hassan in the prison. Hassan, he said, had told him how Kenyan police had knocked down his door, snatched him and taken him to a secret location in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan had said, he was rendered to Mogadishu.
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore. The plane lands and touches the sea. They took me to this prison, where I have been up to now. I have been here for one year, seven months. I have been interrogated so many times. Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day. New faces show up. They have nothing on me. I have never seen a lawyer, never seen an outsider. Only other prisoners, interrogators, guards. Here there is no court or tribunal.’”
After meeting the man who had spoken with Hassan in the underground prison, Gutteridge began working with Hassan’s Kenyan lawyers to determine his whereabouts. She says he has never been charged or brought before a court. “Hassan’s abduction from Nairobi and rendition to a secret prison in Somalia bears all the hallmarks of a classic US rendition operation,” she says. The US official interviewed for this article denied the CIA had rendered Hassan but said, “The United States provided information which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the street.” Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have documented that Kenyan security and intelligence forces have facilitated scores of renditions for the US and other governments, including eighty-five people rendered to Somalia in 2007 alone. Gutteridge says the director of the Mogadishu prison told one of her sources that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence suggesting he was the “right-hand man” of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, at the time a leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa. Nabhan, a Kenyan citizen of Yemeni descent, was among the top suspects sought for questioning by US authorities over his alleged role in the coordinated 2002 attacks on a tourist hotel and an Israeli aircraft in Mombasa, Kenya, and possible links to the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
An intelligence report leaked by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorist Police Unit in October 2010 alleged that Hassan, a “former personal assistant to Nabhan…was injured while fighting near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” The authenticity of the report cannot be independently confirmed, though Hassan did have a leg amputated below the knee, according to his former fellow prisoner in Mogadishu.
Two months after Hassan was allegedly rendered to the secret Mogadishu prison, Nabhan, the man believed to be his Al Qaeda boss, was killed in the first known targeted killing operation in Somalia authorized by President Obama. On September 14, 2009, a team from the elite US counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), took off by helicopters from a US Navy ship off Somalia’s coast and penetrated Somali airspace. In broad daylight, in an operation code-named Celestial Balance, they gunned down Nabhan’s convoy from the air. JSOC troops then landed and collected at least two of the bodies, including Nabhan’s.
Hassan’s lawyers are preparing to file a habeas petition on his behalf in US courts. “Hassan’s case suggests that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo Bay in central Mogadishu,” his legal team asserted in a statement to The Nation. “Mr. Hassan must be given the opportunity to challenge both his rendition and continued detention as a matter of urgency. The US must urgently confirm exactly what has been done to Mr. Hassan, why he is being held, and when he will be given a fair hearing.”
Gutteridge, who has worked extensively tracking the disappearances of terror suspects in Kenya, was deported from Kenya on May 11.
The underground prison where Hassan is allegedly being held is housed in the same building once occupied by Somalia’s infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the military regime of Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. The former prisoner who met Hassan there said he saw an old NSS sign outside. During Barre’s regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which sits behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state’s apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “The Hole.”
“The bunker is there, and that’s where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” says Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a Somali analyst who has researched the Shabab and Somali security forces. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.” Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the French.” The US official said that US agents’ “debriefing” prisoners in the facility has “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali agents.
Some prisoners, like Hassan, were allegedly rendered from Nairobi, while in other cases, according to Aynte, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in contact with the leadership of Al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a [commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people. Catch them, interrogate them.”
* * *
In the eighteen years since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu, US policy on Somalia has been marked by neglect, miscalculation and failed attempts to use warlords to build indigenous counterterrorism capacity, many of which have backfired dramatically. At times, largely because of abuses committed by Somali militias the CIA has supported, US policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups, including the Shabab. Many Somalis viewed the Islamic movement known as the Islamic Courts Union, which defeated the CIA’s warlords in Mogadishu in 2006, as a stabilizing, albeit ruthless, force. The ICU was dismantled in a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007. Over the years, a series of weak Somali administrations have been recognized by the United States and other powers as Somalia’s legitimate government. Ironically, its current president is a former leader of the ICU.
Today, Somali government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force. Much of the rest of the city is under the control of the Shabab or warlords. Outgunned, the Shabab has increasingly relied on the linchpins of asymmetric warfare—suicide bombings, roadside bombs and targeted assassinations. The militant group has repeatedly shown that it can strike deep in the heart of its enemies’ territory. On June 9, in one of its most spectacular suicide attacks to date, the Shabab assassinated the Somali government’s minister of interior affairs and national security, Abdishakur Sheikh Hassan Farah, who was attacked in his residence by his niece. The girl, whom the minister was putting through university, blew herself up and fatally wounded her uncle. He died hours later in the hospital. Farah was the fifth Somali minister killed by the Shabab in the past two years and the seventeenth official assassinated since 2006. Among the suicide bombers the Shabab has deployed were at least three US citizens of Somali descent; at least seven other Americans have died fighting alongside the Shabab, a fact that has not gone unnoticed in Washington or Mogadishu.
During his confirmation hearings in June to become the head of the US Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral William McRaven said, “From my standpoint as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard” at Somalia. McRaven said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United States will have to increase its use of drones as well as on-the-ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the enablers,” McRaven declared. The expanding US counterterrorism program in Mogadishu appears to be part of that effort.
In an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu, Abdulkadir Moallin Noor, the minister of state for the presidency, confirmed that US agents “are working with our intelligence” and “giving them training.” Regarding the US counterterrorism effort, Noor said bluntly, “We need more; otherwise, the terrorists will take over the country.”
It is unclear how much control, if any, Somalia’s internationally recognized president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has over this counterterrorism force or if he is even fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence agents “do not bother to be in touch with the political leadership of the country. And that says a lot about the intentions,” says Aynte. “Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States. You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA seems to be doing it across the country.”
While the Somali officials interviewed for this story said the CIA is the lead US agency on the Mogadishu counterterrorism program, they also indicated that US military intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official responded, “We don’t know. They don’t tell us.”
In April Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man the United States alleged had links to the Shabab, was captured by JSOC forces in the Gulf of Aden. He was held incommunicado on a US Navy vessel for more than two months; in July he was transferred to New York and indicted on terrorism charges. Warsame’s case ignited a legal debate over the Obama administration’s policies on capturing and detaining terror suspects, particularly in light of the widening counterterrorism campaigns in Somalia and Yemen.
On June 23 the United States reportedly carried out a drone strike against alleged Shabab members near Kismayo, 300 miles from the Somali capital. As with the Nabhan operation, a JSOC team swooped in on helicopters and reportedly snatched the bodies of those killed and wounded. The men were taken to an undisclosed location. On July 6 three more US strikes reportedly targeted Shabab training camps in the same area. Somali analysts warned that if the US bombings cause civilian deaths, as they have in the past, they could increase support for the Shabab. Asked in an interview with The Nation in Mogadishu if US drone strikes strengthen or weaken his government, President Sharif replied, “Both at the same time. For our sovereignty, it’s not good to attack a sovereign country. That’s the negative part. The positive part is you’re targeting individuals who are criminals.”
A week after the June 23 strike, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, described an emerging US strategy that would focus not on “deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” Brennan singled out the Shabab, saying, “From the territory it controls in Somalia, Al Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United States,” adding, “We cannot and we will not let down our guard. We will continue to pummel Al Qaeda and its ilk.”
While the United States appears to be ratcheting up both its rhetoric and its drone strikes against the Shabab, it has thus far been able to strike only in rural areas outside Mogadishu. These operations have been isolated and infrequent, and Somali analysts say they have failed to disrupt the Shabab’s core leadership, particularly in Mogadishu.
In a series of interviews in Mogadishu, several of the country’s recognized leaders, including President Sharif, called on the US government to quickly and dramatically increase its assistance to the Somali military in the form of training, equipment and weapons. Moreover, they argue that without viable civilian institutions, Somalia will remain ripe for terrorist groups that can further destabilize not only Somalia but the region. “I believe that the US should help the Somalis to establish a government that protects civilians and its people,” Sharif said.
In the battle against the Shabab, the United States does not, in fact, appear to have cast its lot with the Somali government. The emerging US strategy on Somalia—borne out in stated policy, expanded covert presence and funding plans—is two-pronged: On the one hand, the CIA is training, paying and at times directing Somali intelligence agents who are not firmly under the control of the Somali government, while JSOC conducts unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge of the government; on the other, the Pentagon is increasing its support for and arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military forces.
A draft of a defense spending bill approved in late June by the Senate Armed Services Committee would authorize more than $75 million in US counterterrorism assistance aimed at fighting the Shabab and Al Qaeda in Somalia. The bill, however, did not authorize additional funding for Somalia’s military, as the country’s leaders have repeatedly asked. Instead, the aid package would dramatically increase US arming and financing of AMISOM’s forces, particularly from Uganda and Burundi, as well as the militaries of Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia. The Somali military, the committee asserted, is unable to “exercise control of its territory.”
That makes it all the more ironic that perhaps the greatest tactical victory won in recent years in Somalia was delivered not by AMISOM, the CIA or JSOC but by members of a Somali militia fighting as part of the government’s chaotic local military. And it was a pure accident.
Late in the evening on June 7, a man whose South African passport identified him as Daniel Robinson was in the passenger seat of a Toyota SUV driving on the outskirts of Mogadishu when his driver, a Kenyan national, missed a turn and headed straight toward a checkpoint manned by Somali forces. A firefight broke out, and the two men inside the car were killed. The Somali forces promptly looted the laptops, cellphones, documents, weapons and $40,000 in cash they found in the car, according to the senior Somali intelligence official.
Upon discovering that the men were foreigners, the Somali NSA launched an investigation and recovered the items that had been looted. “There was a lot of English and Arabic stuff, papers,” recalls the Somali intelligence official, containing “very tactical stuff” that appeared to be linked to Al Qaeda, including “two senior people communicating.” The Somali agents “realized it was an important man” and informed the CIA in Mogadishu. The men’s bodies were taken to the NSA. The Americans took DNA samples and fingerprints and flew them to Nairobi for processing.
Within hours, the United States confirmed that Robinson was in fact Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a top leader of Al Qaeda in East Africa and its chief liaison with the Shabab. Fazul, a twenty-year veteran of Al Qaeda, had been indicted by the United States for his alleged role in the 1998 US Embassy bombings and was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list. A JSOC attempt to kill him in a January 2007 airstrike resulted in the deaths of at least seventy nomads in rural Somalia, and he had been underground ever since. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Fazul’s death “a significant blow to Al Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents.”
At its facilities in Mogadishu, the CIA and its Somali NSA agents continue to pore over the materials recovered from Fazul’s car, which served as a mobile headquarters. Some deleted and encrypted files were recovered and decoded by US agents. The senior Somali intelligence official said that the intelligence may prove more valuable on a tactical level than the cache found in Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan, especially in light of the increasing US focus on East Africa. The Americans, he said, were “unbelievably grateful”; he hopes it means they will take Somalia’s forces more seriously and provide more support.
But the United States continues to wage its campaign against the Shabab primarily by funding the AMISOM forces, which are not conducting their mission with anything resembling surgical precision. Instead, over the past several months the AMISOM forces in Mogadishu have waged a merciless campaign of indiscriminate shelling of Shabab areas, some of which are heavily populated by civilians. While AMISOM regularly puts out press releases boasting of gains against the Shabab and the retaking of territory, the reality paints a far more complicated picture.
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only have the Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas; the civilians that once resided there have been cleared too. On several occasions in late June, AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where whole neighborhoods are totally abandoned. Houses lie in ruins and animals wander aimlessly, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies have been hastily buried in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in one former Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just meters from a new government checkpoint.
In late June the Pentagon approved plans to send $45 million worth of military equipment to Uganda and Burundi, the two major forces in the AMISOM operation. Among the new items are four small Raven surveillance drones, night-vision and communications equipment and other surveillance gear, all of which augur a more targeted campaign. Combined with the attempt to build an indigenous counterterrorism force at the Somali NSA, a new US counterterrorism strategy is emerging.
But according to the senior Somali intelligence official, who works directly with the US agents, the CIA-led program in Mogadishu has brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,” says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled territory since.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Uganda and Burundi to get US drones to fight Islamists
BBC NEWS
The US is supplying drone aircrafts to Uganda and Burundi to help them fight Islamist militants in Somalia, its defence officials have told the BBC.
The four drones will be part of a $45m (£28m) military aid package aid to the two countries.
Uganda and Burundi contribute the 9,000 troops to an African peace force in Somalia battling Islamists that control much of the country.
The US sees Somalia as an al-Qaeda haven in East Africa.
Air strikes
The US military command for Africa (Africom) confirmed to the BBC that the Pentagon plan was to strengthen Uganda's and Burundi's counter-terrorism capabilities.
The military aid is to include body armour, night-vision gear, communications and surveillance systems.
The al-Shabab Islamist group, which has links to al-Qaeda, control large swathes of southern and central Somalia, including parts of the capital, Mogadishu.
Analysts say Somalia's weak interim government relies heavily on the African Union peacekeepers to stave off the threat posed by al-Shabab.
There have been US air strikes on al-Shabab in the past, and a US special operations team killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the most senior leaders of al-Qaeda's East Africa cell, inside Somalia in 2009.
The US has a military base in neighbouring Djibouti where some 3,000 US troops, as well as armour, aircraft and drones are based.
Somalia has been without an effective central government since the fall of Siad Bare in 1991.
The US is supplying drone aircrafts to Uganda and Burundi to help them fight Islamist militants in Somalia, its defence officials have told the BBC.
The four drones will be part of a $45m (£28m) military aid package aid to the two countries.
Uganda and Burundi contribute the 9,000 troops to an African peace force in Somalia battling Islamists that control much of the country.
The US sees Somalia as an al-Qaeda haven in East Africa.
Air strikes
The US military command for Africa (Africom) confirmed to the BBC that the Pentagon plan was to strengthen Uganda's and Burundi's counter-terrorism capabilities.
The military aid is to include body armour, night-vision gear, communications and surveillance systems.
The al-Shabab Islamist group, which has links to al-Qaeda, control large swathes of southern and central Somalia, including parts of the capital, Mogadishu.
Analysts say Somalia's weak interim government relies heavily on the African Union peacekeepers to stave off the threat posed by al-Shabab.
There have been US air strikes on al-Shabab in the past, and a US special operations team killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the most senior leaders of al-Qaeda's East Africa cell, inside Somalia in 2009.
The US has a military base in neighbouring Djibouti where some 3,000 US troops, as well as armour, aircraft and drones are based.
Somalia has been without an effective central government since the fall of Siad Bare in 1991.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Taxicab Takeover: DC Drivers Organize to Defend Jobs
By BRIAN TIERNEY
Amid the sweltering humidity at dusk in Washington, D.C., taxicab drivers line up their cars at a Sunoco gas station on the corner of 15th and U Street. The mostly African immigrant drivers circulate flyers among each other, discussing the fate of their jobs and making arguments about the need to organize.
One driver pulls in and drops off a petition.
"I got more signatures," he says. He points to one of them. "This guy, he's been driving for 28 years. And this one – 30 years driving."
After talking for a few minutes, the young Ethiopian driver grabs some more flyers and pulls out of the station.
For the past month, this has been the scene at several gas stations and other taxicab hubs throughout the district where drivers have been coming together everyday to organize against a proposed restructuring of the city's cab industry.
The flyers they carry urge other cabbies and passengers to call their representatives on the city council and to speak out against plans to transform the D.C. taxicab market from an open and largely driver-run industry into what would essentially amount to a cartel system. Such changes would codify the domination of a few owners of the largest cab companies and leave over 4,000 drivers jobless.
The new system that has been proposed in the city council would involve the sale of "medallions" to cab drivers and companies who meet certain qualifications. Owning a medallion, which would increase in value over time, would be obligatory for anyone operating a cab in the city.
Further compounding the threat posed to drivers by this new system are attempts by the interim chair of the D.C. Taxicab Commission (DCTC), Dena Reed, to rewrite the existing framework that oversees the industry. Reed has proposed changes to that framework – known as Title 31 – that will confer more authority to hack inspectors, require drivers to buy a new vehicle every five years, and allow inspectors to suspend or revoke drivers' licenses for minor infractions such as having over- or under-inflated tires.
A coalition of cab drivers and companies has been formed under the leadership of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers to resist these abuses and defend the drivers' jobs. The association includes 16 different driver-owned companies and associations representing over 4,000 drivers.
"We drivers need to organize ourselves and work together to stop the attacks on our industry," says Haimanot Bizuayehu, a driver and elected board member of the Small Business Association. "If we do not start fighting and let these attacks continue, it will be just a matter of time before we lose our small business."
But the attacks they face are formidable.
A medallion is a metal plate attached to a vehicle that allows it to operate as a taxi. Medallions have existed in many cities since the 1930s. Washington D.C. is one of the few cities in the nation that does not operate under this system.
A medallion system would force thousands of drivers to either work for a big company or join the unemployment line. While there are currently over 10,000 licensed cab drivers in D.C., the medallion bill will cut that amount in half, limiting the number of medallions to just 4,000 and unnecessarily imposing a scarcity that will drive up fares. According to an analysis produced last year by D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi, cities with medallions have fares that are 25 percent higher than cities without medallions.
Proponents say the new system would raise standards for drivers and vehicles, bringing in a more modern fleet of cars and a more reliable, professional service. The regulations would end the "laissez faire free for all" system that exists now.
But for drivers, the new changes constitute a serious threat to their livelihoods. It will, as the Washington Post argued in an editorial, result in "windfall profits for a small group of people; an overall decline in service with longer waits and higher fares; and a system open to corruption."
Indeed, the medallion bill has been fixed to benefit a few large companies who are also underwriting its passage into law. The regulations allow a few longtime and politically-connected kingpin players to solidify their control over much of the cab industry in D.C.
In city after city, the introduction of medallions has benefited a small group of drivers and owners at the expense of both drivers and riders.
In the 1930s, New York City sold medallions for $10. Today a medallion in the Big Apple costs up to $700,000. In Boston, medallions cost around $400,000. For established cab companies, the new system proposed for D.C. would have prices start at $250 while newer drivers would pay up to $10,000. Once the medallions are in place, prices would shoot up, leading to a significant rise in fares and making it financially prohibitive for aspirant independent drivers to enter the industry.
The flyers being picked up by drivers at the gas station on U Street warn D.C. residents and visitors that medallions could lead to a doubling of fares as greedy corporations would lobby the city to raise rates in order to expand profits.
And the medallion system would further gentrify the city's cab service. An op-ed article by Sam Staley in the Washington Post points out that with fewer cabs on the road, drivers will prioritize fares that bring in the highest returns, focusing particularly on runs to the airport and serving wealthier riders in Capitol Hill neighborhoods and along K Street.
"The biggest losers in this system…are likely to be outer neighborhoods such as lower-income sections of Southeast and Northwest," Staley argues. "With substantially fewer taxis available to meet demand, drivers will pick the most lucrative routes."
Given that the medallion system would compel drivers to fork over thousands of dollars annually to lease from large corporations with medallions, the pressure on drivers to zero-in on higher fares is inevitable. On average, cab drivers in D.C. earn a wage of roughly $32,000 per year. Clearly, a huge proportion of drivers would be priced out of the medallion system, forced to either work for the larger companies if they qualify or file for unemployment.
On top of all of these problems, the medallion bill would further empower hack inspectors who routinely harass drivers with abusive and arbitrary scrutiny, issuing tickets for the most insignificant "violations."
For further evidence of what the medallion system would do to the industry, one need only look as far as the forces that are pushing the changes into law.
According to one reporter writing for the Washington City Paper, "[most drivers say] there's one driving force behind the bill: Jerry Schaeffer, the city's taxi king, who owns more than a dozen cab companies, sells cabbies insurance, and owns a whole lot of District land."
It is widely believed that Schaeffer hired lobbyist and former councilmember John Ray to write the medallion bill in order to seize control over as much of the industry as possible. Ray claims he represents a coalition of cab owners and drivers, but many insist that his principle client is Schaeffer. And Harry Thomas, the councilman who introduced the medallion bill, also has close ties to Ray who has represented Thomas in a separate matter involving the misuse of public funds obtained by the councilman's non-profit.
While Schaeffer denies that he is leading the charge in the quest to impose medallions, cab company owner Mohammad Momen, who is part of Ray's coalition, openly told the same City Paper reporter that "everybody knows it's a Jerry Schaeffer bill."
One of the ways the medallions would be set up to benefit the large established cab companies in D.C. is with a seniority component written into the legislation. The city would give priority to longtime cab drivers who are district residents with clean driving records. In effect, it's a provision that rigs the bill in favor of large owners like Schaeffer.
The seniority scheme also may be an attempt to exploit racial tensions that sometimes exist between the older African American drivers and the large number of newer immigrant drivers from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria and elsewhere. One of the bills co-sponsors is councilmember and former mayor Marion Barry. When dozens of drivers assembled at a press conference in March to protest the medallion bill, Barry lambasted the drivers and revealed the xenophobic and racist motivations that are at least partly to blame for the attack on D.C. cab drivers.
"For those of you who are not from America, we welcome you, but we do things just a little differently here," Barry said to the drivers. "We're not going to make an ass of ourselves out here in public [by protesting]. Everybody get that?... Not in America [are] we doing that… We're not going to look like fools out here."
Beyond the obvious offensiveness of his remarks, Barry's deprecation of protest is a little ironic coming from a political figure who first cut his teeth as a leading activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
In any case, there are in fact many older African American drivers who are also opposed to the medallions because of the other restrictions that would push many of them out of the industry as well. One such driver is Nathan Price, who is a board member of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers.
The more immediate threat that the drivers organized within the Small Business Association have to contend with is the attempt by the DC Taxicab Commission to change Chapters 6 and 8 of Title 31, the legal regime that governs the cab industry. Under the proposed changes, a driver could be fined up to $1,000 by abusive hack inspectors if their tires are over- or under-inflated. Plus, the changes would force drivers to buy a new vehicle every five years, which means many would have to purchase a new car before their old one is paid off.
Dena Reed, Interim Chair of the DCTC, is pushing these changes and is doing so in the most undemocratic way she can. In the only public hearing that Reed held on the Title 31 changes, signs posted on the wall read, "No television cameras. No video taping. No audio taping." She claimed the ban on recording what was supposed to be a public meeting was due to concerns that it would somehow be "disruptive."
In May, when drivers in the Small Business Association tried to submit 900 petition signatures to the DCTC in opposition to the Title 31 changes, the drivers were forced out and locked out of the commission's Anacostia office. Later, Reed referred to the group of drivers submitting their petition as "a mob."
During the mayoral election last fall, drivers placed their hopes on the challenger, then-Council Chair Vincent Gray, who appeared to be more receptive to drivers' concerns than the much-maligned incumbent, Adrian Fenty.
"We're not looking to drive people out of business in the District of Columbia," Mayor Gray said recently on the subject of medallions. But Gray has yet to fulfill his promise to drivers that he would appoint a more driver-friendly chair to head the DCTC.
Faced with the dual threat of the medallions and the rewriting of Title 31, drivers in the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers organized a rally on June 1st in front of city hall. Some 200 drivers assembled to demand an end to the attacks on cab drivers in the city.
Bizuayehu from the Small Business Association believes actions like this demonstrate that the association can be a powerful force of advocacy on behalf of drivers.
"The goal of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers is to form one strong association which will have all taxicab drivers as its dues-paying members," says Bizuayehu. "The association will advocate for taxicab drivers and will vigorously work to protect their individual rights and the industry from monopolization."
Still, some drivers say they also need a union to protect them from hack inspectors and to represent their interests in negotiations with the DCTC.
Pete Tucker, a local activist and independent journalist who's been involved in the cab struggle and covering it extensively on his radio show at TheFightBack.org, says that while a union is certainly needed, the more pressing issue right now is resisting the changes to Title 31 – which could be decided on in the next few weeks – and the medallion bill which could be voted on before the city council's summer recess. Tucker also pointed to the Small Business Association as being a potential precursor to a drivers' union in the future.
In the meantime, Bizuayehu and the other drivers are focused on fighting for their very livelihoods. For them, the medallion bill is a clear case of government intervention on the side of big business.
And even as they organize against changes to the existing system, drivers have plenty of grievances with the status quo – such as the role played by hack inspectors and the fact that drivers have no representation on the DCTC in spite of a law which states that the commission should include three industry representatives.
At a time when the number of jobless and underemployed workers in the country continues to hover just below 30 million, D.C. is considering a deal that would throw thousands more onto the unemployment rolls – all in the name of shifting more local cab industry control into the hands of a few wealthy owners.
Both cabbies and the people they transport must organize and stand firmly opposed to this plutocratic plot against the jobs and dignity of thousands of drivers.
Brian Tierney is a labor journalist in Washington, DC. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches, where this article first appeared.
Amid the sweltering humidity at dusk in Washington, D.C., taxicab drivers line up their cars at a Sunoco gas station on the corner of 15th and U Street. The mostly African immigrant drivers circulate flyers among each other, discussing the fate of their jobs and making arguments about the need to organize.
One driver pulls in and drops off a petition.
"I got more signatures," he says. He points to one of them. "This guy, he's been driving for 28 years. And this one – 30 years driving."
After talking for a few minutes, the young Ethiopian driver grabs some more flyers and pulls out of the station.
For the past month, this has been the scene at several gas stations and other taxicab hubs throughout the district where drivers have been coming together everyday to organize against a proposed restructuring of the city's cab industry.
The flyers they carry urge other cabbies and passengers to call their representatives on the city council and to speak out against plans to transform the D.C. taxicab market from an open and largely driver-run industry into what would essentially amount to a cartel system. Such changes would codify the domination of a few owners of the largest cab companies and leave over 4,000 drivers jobless.
The new system that has been proposed in the city council would involve the sale of "medallions" to cab drivers and companies who meet certain qualifications. Owning a medallion, which would increase in value over time, would be obligatory for anyone operating a cab in the city.
Further compounding the threat posed to drivers by this new system are attempts by the interim chair of the D.C. Taxicab Commission (DCTC), Dena Reed, to rewrite the existing framework that oversees the industry. Reed has proposed changes to that framework – known as Title 31 – that will confer more authority to hack inspectors, require drivers to buy a new vehicle every five years, and allow inspectors to suspend or revoke drivers' licenses for minor infractions such as having over- or under-inflated tires.
A coalition of cab drivers and companies has been formed under the leadership of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers to resist these abuses and defend the drivers' jobs. The association includes 16 different driver-owned companies and associations representing over 4,000 drivers.
"We drivers need to organize ourselves and work together to stop the attacks on our industry," says Haimanot Bizuayehu, a driver and elected board member of the Small Business Association. "If we do not start fighting and let these attacks continue, it will be just a matter of time before we lose our small business."
But the attacks they face are formidable.
A medallion is a metal plate attached to a vehicle that allows it to operate as a taxi. Medallions have existed in many cities since the 1930s. Washington D.C. is one of the few cities in the nation that does not operate under this system.
A medallion system would force thousands of drivers to either work for a big company or join the unemployment line. While there are currently over 10,000 licensed cab drivers in D.C., the medallion bill will cut that amount in half, limiting the number of medallions to just 4,000 and unnecessarily imposing a scarcity that will drive up fares. According to an analysis produced last year by D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi, cities with medallions have fares that are 25 percent higher than cities without medallions.
Proponents say the new system would raise standards for drivers and vehicles, bringing in a more modern fleet of cars and a more reliable, professional service. The regulations would end the "laissez faire free for all" system that exists now.
But for drivers, the new changes constitute a serious threat to their livelihoods. It will, as the Washington Post argued in an editorial, result in "windfall profits for a small group of people; an overall decline in service with longer waits and higher fares; and a system open to corruption."
Indeed, the medallion bill has been fixed to benefit a few large companies who are also underwriting its passage into law. The regulations allow a few longtime and politically-connected kingpin players to solidify their control over much of the cab industry in D.C.
In city after city, the introduction of medallions has benefited a small group of drivers and owners at the expense of both drivers and riders.
In the 1930s, New York City sold medallions for $10. Today a medallion in the Big Apple costs up to $700,000. In Boston, medallions cost around $400,000. For established cab companies, the new system proposed for D.C. would have prices start at $250 while newer drivers would pay up to $10,000. Once the medallions are in place, prices would shoot up, leading to a significant rise in fares and making it financially prohibitive for aspirant independent drivers to enter the industry.
The flyers being picked up by drivers at the gas station on U Street warn D.C. residents and visitors that medallions could lead to a doubling of fares as greedy corporations would lobby the city to raise rates in order to expand profits.
And the medallion system would further gentrify the city's cab service. An op-ed article by Sam Staley in the Washington Post points out that with fewer cabs on the road, drivers will prioritize fares that bring in the highest returns, focusing particularly on runs to the airport and serving wealthier riders in Capitol Hill neighborhoods and along K Street.
"The biggest losers in this system…are likely to be outer neighborhoods such as lower-income sections of Southeast and Northwest," Staley argues. "With substantially fewer taxis available to meet demand, drivers will pick the most lucrative routes."
Given that the medallion system would compel drivers to fork over thousands of dollars annually to lease from large corporations with medallions, the pressure on drivers to zero-in on higher fares is inevitable. On average, cab drivers in D.C. earn a wage of roughly $32,000 per year. Clearly, a huge proportion of drivers would be priced out of the medallion system, forced to either work for the larger companies if they qualify or file for unemployment.
On top of all of these problems, the medallion bill would further empower hack inspectors who routinely harass drivers with abusive and arbitrary scrutiny, issuing tickets for the most insignificant "violations."
For further evidence of what the medallion system would do to the industry, one need only look as far as the forces that are pushing the changes into law.
According to one reporter writing for the Washington City Paper, "[most drivers say] there's one driving force behind the bill: Jerry Schaeffer, the city's taxi king, who owns more than a dozen cab companies, sells cabbies insurance, and owns a whole lot of District land."
It is widely believed that Schaeffer hired lobbyist and former councilmember John Ray to write the medallion bill in order to seize control over as much of the industry as possible. Ray claims he represents a coalition of cab owners and drivers, but many insist that his principle client is Schaeffer. And Harry Thomas, the councilman who introduced the medallion bill, also has close ties to Ray who has represented Thomas in a separate matter involving the misuse of public funds obtained by the councilman's non-profit.
While Schaeffer denies that he is leading the charge in the quest to impose medallions, cab company owner Mohammad Momen, who is part of Ray's coalition, openly told the same City Paper reporter that "everybody knows it's a Jerry Schaeffer bill."
One of the ways the medallions would be set up to benefit the large established cab companies in D.C. is with a seniority component written into the legislation. The city would give priority to longtime cab drivers who are district residents with clean driving records. In effect, it's a provision that rigs the bill in favor of large owners like Schaeffer.
The seniority scheme also may be an attempt to exploit racial tensions that sometimes exist between the older African American drivers and the large number of newer immigrant drivers from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria and elsewhere. One of the bills co-sponsors is councilmember and former mayor Marion Barry. When dozens of drivers assembled at a press conference in March to protest the medallion bill, Barry lambasted the drivers and revealed the xenophobic and racist motivations that are at least partly to blame for the attack on D.C. cab drivers.
"For those of you who are not from America, we welcome you, but we do things just a little differently here," Barry said to the drivers. "We're not going to make an ass of ourselves out here in public [by protesting]. Everybody get that?... Not in America [are] we doing that… We're not going to look like fools out here."
Beyond the obvious offensiveness of his remarks, Barry's deprecation of protest is a little ironic coming from a political figure who first cut his teeth as a leading activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
In any case, there are in fact many older African American drivers who are also opposed to the medallions because of the other restrictions that would push many of them out of the industry as well. One such driver is Nathan Price, who is a board member of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers.
The more immediate threat that the drivers organized within the Small Business Association have to contend with is the attempt by the DC Taxicab Commission to change Chapters 6 and 8 of Title 31, the legal regime that governs the cab industry. Under the proposed changes, a driver could be fined up to $1,000 by abusive hack inspectors if their tires are over- or under-inflated. Plus, the changes would force drivers to buy a new vehicle every five years, which means many would have to purchase a new car before their old one is paid off.
Dena Reed, Interim Chair of the DCTC, is pushing these changes and is doing so in the most undemocratic way she can. In the only public hearing that Reed held on the Title 31 changes, signs posted on the wall read, "No television cameras. No video taping. No audio taping." She claimed the ban on recording what was supposed to be a public meeting was due to concerns that it would somehow be "disruptive."
In May, when drivers in the Small Business Association tried to submit 900 petition signatures to the DCTC in opposition to the Title 31 changes, the drivers were forced out and locked out of the commission's Anacostia office. Later, Reed referred to the group of drivers submitting their petition as "a mob."
During the mayoral election last fall, drivers placed their hopes on the challenger, then-Council Chair Vincent Gray, who appeared to be more receptive to drivers' concerns than the much-maligned incumbent, Adrian Fenty.
"We're not looking to drive people out of business in the District of Columbia," Mayor Gray said recently on the subject of medallions. But Gray has yet to fulfill his promise to drivers that he would appoint a more driver-friendly chair to head the DCTC.
Faced with the dual threat of the medallions and the rewriting of Title 31, drivers in the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers organized a rally on June 1st in front of city hall. Some 200 drivers assembled to demand an end to the attacks on cab drivers in the city.
Bizuayehu from the Small Business Association believes actions like this demonstrate that the association can be a powerful force of advocacy on behalf of drivers.
"The goal of the Small Business Association of D.C. Taxicab Drivers is to form one strong association which will have all taxicab drivers as its dues-paying members," says Bizuayehu. "The association will advocate for taxicab drivers and will vigorously work to protect their individual rights and the industry from monopolization."
Still, some drivers say they also need a union to protect them from hack inspectors and to represent their interests in negotiations with the DCTC.
Pete Tucker, a local activist and independent journalist who's been involved in the cab struggle and covering it extensively on his radio show at TheFightBack.org, says that while a union is certainly needed, the more pressing issue right now is resisting the changes to Title 31 – which could be decided on in the next few weeks – and the medallion bill which could be voted on before the city council's summer recess. Tucker also pointed to the Small Business Association as being a potential precursor to a drivers' union in the future.
In the meantime, Bizuayehu and the other drivers are focused on fighting for their very livelihoods. For them, the medallion bill is a clear case of government intervention on the side of big business.
And even as they organize against changes to the existing system, drivers have plenty of grievances with the status quo – such as the role played by hack inspectors and the fact that drivers have no representation on the DCTC in spite of a law which states that the commission should include three industry representatives.
At a time when the number of jobless and underemployed workers in the country continues to hover just below 30 million, D.C. is considering a deal that would throw thousands more onto the unemployment rolls – all in the name of shifting more local cab industry control into the hands of a few wealthy owners.
Both cabbies and the people they transport must organize and stand firmly opposed to this plutocratic plot against the jobs and dignity of thousands of drivers.
Brian Tierney is a labor journalist in Washington, DC. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches, where this article first appeared.
Monday, May 23, 2011
India starts trade talks with African countries in effort to rival China
David Smith in Johannesburg
Monday 23 May 2011 16.29 BST
The Indian prime minister arrives in Ethiopia to bolster economic and political links in a new 'scramble for Africa'
India's prime minister and dozens of business leaders began trade talks in Ethiopia on Monday as the Asian giant strives to catch up with China in what has been dubbed "the new scramble for Africa".
Manmohan Singh received a red-carpet welcome as he led a delegation to the India-Africa summit in Addis Ababa, aiming to trumpet historical and cultural links with the continent in an effort to emerge from Beijing's shadow.
"The India-Africa partnership rests on three pillars of capacity building and skill transfer, trade and infrastructure development," said Singh at the start of the six-day trip to Ethiopia and Tanzania. "Africa is emerging as a new growth pole of the world, while India is on a path of sustained and rapid economic development." The trade meeting is to be attended by 15 African leaders. On its fringes was an India show comprising business seminars, cultural projects and a trade exhibition.
Bilateral India-Africa trade has grown from about £620m in 2001 to £28.5bn in 2010. India's commerce and industry minister, Anand Sharma, hopes it will reach £43bn by 2012. Some 250 Indian companies have invested, mainly in telecommunications and chemical and mining companies.
But India remains about a decade behind its Asian rival. China says its two-way trade stands at £75bn, a 43.5% increase on the previous year, and up from just £620m in 1992. It has built roads, bridges, railways and power stations in return for access to markets and resources.
Brahma Chellaney, professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, told Reuters: "India is massively playing catch-up to China in Africa, and only in recent years is it trying to engage the continent in a serious way. But it is trying to build political and economic ties, and position itself as different to China, which has acquired the image of being a new imperial power."
The fierce competition between the pair for resources, minerals and food to fuel their turbo-charged economies has been likened by commentators to the so-called scramble for Africa among European countries in the 19th century.
India is especially focused on energy. The country imports 70% of its oil and has turned to new suppliers such as Nigeria, Sudan and Angola to reduce its dependence on the Middle East. It also needs uranium for its ambitious civil nuclear programme.
India is also looking to Africa to expand its diplomatic influence, especially its bid for a seat on an expanded UN security council. Defence ties with African states bordering the Indian Ocean could boost the fight against terrorism and piracy.
India's wooing of Africa includes aid, technology and education, such as a new centre in Uganda to train businesses about global markets, a diamond processing facility in Botswana, and assistance to cotton farmers in four of the continent's poorest countries.
Officials in New Delhi stress that India's links with Africa are centuries old, bolstered by trade across the Indian Ocean and a million-strong Indian diaspora across Africa. Thousands of Africans have earned degrees from Indian universities and technological institutes on scholarships funded by the Indian government.
Shyamal Gupta of the Confederation of Indian Industry told Associated Press: "India is interested in Africa not just because of its resources. It is also actively participating in the economic development of Africa."
But, like China before it, India has been criticised for turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and corruption. Its state-owned oil company has invested in Sudanese oil, and New Delhi avoided criticising the Khartoum government at the height of the Darfur crisis.
Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at the London-based thinktank Chatham House, which produced a report on India's engagement in Africa, said: "India has enjoyed less western scrutiny over its Africa policy than China. India's concern over Chinese expansion is acute and ever present. Its anxieties are not restricted to economic competition, but extend to security matters as well.
Monday 23 May 2011 16.29 BST
The Indian prime minister arrives in Ethiopia to bolster economic and political links in a new 'scramble for Africa'
India's prime minister and dozens of business leaders began trade talks in Ethiopia on Monday as the Asian giant strives to catch up with China in what has been dubbed "the new scramble for Africa".
Manmohan Singh received a red-carpet welcome as he led a delegation to the India-Africa summit in Addis Ababa, aiming to trumpet historical and cultural links with the continent in an effort to emerge from Beijing's shadow.
"The India-Africa partnership rests on three pillars of capacity building and skill transfer, trade and infrastructure development," said Singh at the start of the six-day trip to Ethiopia and Tanzania. "Africa is emerging as a new growth pole of the world, while India is on a path of sustained and rapid economic development." The trade meeting is to be attended by 15 African leaders. On its fringes was an India show comprising business seminars, cultural projects and a trade exhibition.
Bilateral India-Africa trade has grown from about £620m in 2001 to £28.5bn in 2010. India's commerce and industry minister, Anand Sharma, hopes it will reach £43bn by 2012. Some 250 Indian companies have invested, mainly in telecommunications and chemical and mining companies.
But India remains about a decade behind its Asian rival. China says its two-way trade stands at £75bn, a 43.5% increase on the previous year, and up from just £620m in 1992. It has built roads, bridges, railways and power stations in return for access to markets and resources.
Brahma Chellaney, professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, told Reuters: "India is massively playing catch-up to China in Africa, and only in recent years is it trying to engage the continent in a serious way. But it is trying to build political and economic ties, and position itself as different to China, which has acquired the image of being a new imperial power."
The fierce competition between the pair for resources, minerals and food to fuel their turbo-charged economies has been likened by commentators to the so-called scramble for Africa among European countries in the 19th century.
India is especially focused on energy. The country imports 70% of its oil and has turned to new suppliers such as Nigeria, Sudan and Angola to reduce its dependence on the Middle East. It also needs uranium for its ambitious civil nuclear programme.
India is also looking to Africa to expand its diplomatic influence, especially its bid for a seat on an expanded UN security council. Defence ties with African states bordering the Indian Ocean could boost the fight against terrorism and piracy.
India's wooing of Africa includes aid, technology and education, such as a new centre in Uganda to train businesses about global markets, a diamond processing facility in Botswana, and assistance to cotton farmers in four of the continent's poorest countries.
Officials in New Delhi stress that India's links with Africa are centuries old, bolstered by trade across the Indian Ocean and a million-strong Indian diaspora across Africa. Thousands of Africans have earned degrees from Indian universities and technological institutes on scholarships funded by the Indian government.
Shyamal Gupta of the Confederation of Indian Industry told Associated Press: "India is interested in Africa not just because of its resources. It is also actively participating in the economic development of Africa."
But, like China before it, India has been criticised for turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and corruption. Its state-owned oil company has invested in Sudanese oil, and New Delhi avoided criticising the Khartoum government at the height of the Darfur crisis.
Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at the London-based thinktank Chatham House, which produced a report on India's engagement in Africa, said: "India has enjoyed less western scrutiny over its Africa policy than China. India's concern over Chinese expansion is acute and ever present. Its anxieties are not restricted to economic competition, but extend to security matters as well.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
U.S. to Extend Haitians’ Post-Quake Immigration Status
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: May 17, 2011
Haitians who received a special American immigration status after last year’s earthquake will be allowed an additional year and a half to live and work in the United States while their country struggles to recover, the Obama administration announced on Tuesday.
The special designation, called temporary protected status, had been available to Haitians who had lived continuously in the United States since Jan. 12, 2010, the date of the earthquake. Under this new extension, Haitians who arrived in the country as late as Jan. 12, 2011, and had lived here continuously since then will be eligible to apply.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said in a statement that she was expanding and extending the program out of concern that Haitian immigrants’ “personal safety would be endangered by returning to Haiti.”
But Homeland Security Department officials said they would continue to deport Haitians who had been convicted of violent crimes or were repeat offenders and had also been ordered removed by an immigration judge. Deportations of Haitians were suspended after the earthquake but resumed in January. After a two-month pause after a deportee died of choleralike symptoms shortly after arriving in Haiti, immigration officials once again resumed the deportations in April.
The extension will not be granted to people who have been convicted of a felony or at least two misdemeanors. It will expire on Jan. 22, 2013, officials said.
About 48,000 Haitians living in the United States have secured temporary protected status since the earthquake, and an estimated 10,000 more would be eligible under the extension, officials said Tuesday, adding that application guidelines would be issued this week.
Immigrant advocates who had lobbied for the extension applauded the decision, though some also urged the administration to halt all deportations.
Published: May 17, 2011
Haitians who received a special American immigration status after last year’s earthquake will be allowed an additional year and a half to live and work in the United States while their country struggles to recover, the Obama administration announced on Tuesday.
The special designation, called temporary protected status, had been available to Haitians who had lived continuously in the United States since Jan. 12, 2010, the date of the earthquake. Under this new extension, Haitians who arrived in the country as late as Jan. 12, 2011, and had lived here continuously since then will be eligible to apply.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said in a statement that she was expanding and extending the program out of concern that Haitian immigrants’ “personal safety would be endangered by returning to Haiti.”
But Homeland Security Department officials said they would continue to deport Haitians who had been convicted of violent crimes or were repeat offenders and had also been ordered removed by an immigration judge. Deportations of Haitians were suspended after the earthquake but resumed in January. After a two-month pause after a deportee died of choleralike symptoms shortly after arriving in Haiti, immigration officials once again resumed the deportations in April.
The extension will not be granted to people who have been convicted of a felony or at least two misdemeanors. It will expire on Jan. 22, 2013, officials said.
About 48,000 Haitians living in the United States have secured temporary protected status since the earthquake, and an estimated 10,000 more would be eligible under the extension, officials said Tuesday, adding that application guidelines would be issued this week.
Immigrant advocates who had lobbied for the extension applauded the decision, though some also urged the administration to halt all deportations.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
AFRICOM's Libyan Expedition
How War Will Change the Command's Role on the Continent
May 9, 2011
By JONATHAN STEVENSON
(Professor of Strategic Studies at the U.S. Naval War College and co-chair of its Africa Regional Studies Group.)
Until Operation Odyssey Dawn began in Libya on March 19, U.S. Africa Command -- the United States’ newest combatant command, established in October 2008 -- was largely untested. There was reason to worry that AFRICOM, which would lead the operation, was too green, and its mandate too soft, for it to perform up to U.S. standards.
Yet in launching the U.S. intervention in Libya, AFRICOM, led by its commander, General Carter Ham, acquitted itself well. On the first day of the operation, it coordinated the combat operations of 11 American warships and dozens of aircraft, fired 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and delivered 45 Joint Direct Attack Munitions to ground targets. By March 23, AFRICOM-led coalition forces had steadily expanded the no-fly zone from northwest Libya and parts of central Libya to the entire coastline. And on March 26, AFRICOM began coordinating operations to destroy armored vehicles, effectively (if not with specific intent) providing close air support to rebel forces. AFRICOM lost only one aircraft -- an F-15 fighter that crashed on March 22 due to a mechanical malfunction -- and suffered no fatalities.
There was, however, political backlash to AFRICOM’s active fighting role in the conflict. Although the three African non-permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda -- had acquiesced to UN Resolution 1973, the bill that green-lighted the intervention, the African Union unequivocally opposed it. After the campaign began, the AU even tried to arrange a cease-fire, under which Libyan leader Muammar al Qaddafi would have opened channels for humanitarian aid and undertaken negotiations with the rebels but would also have been allowed to stay in power.
Qaddafi, of course, had been the driving force behind the creation of the AU, in 2002 (an effort he hoped would revitalize his geopolitical relevance). Many African leaders, from relatively enlightened ones such as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to incorrigible rogues like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, could well view Operation Odyssey Dawn as a harbinger of new liberal interventionism in Africa, and AFRICOM as its principal instrument and a potential threat to regime security. Now, especially if NATO and the Obama administration eventually use ground troops to ensure Qaddafi’s ouster, as retired U.S. Army General James M. Dubik suggested it should in an April 25 New York Times op-ed, AFRICOM will have a hard time reestablishing its bona fides with African governments, which were fairly tenuous even before the Libyan intervention.
AFRICOM was created for relatively banal bureaucratic and planning reasons -- to bring U.S. military activities in Africa, which had been inefficiently divided among three existing commands (European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command), under a single one. But an awkward Pentagon rollout seemed to suggest that it would entail increasing the number of U.S. bases in the region and an intensification of military activity there. In particular, in 2007, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Ryan Henry, noted that the Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five 'regional integration teams' scattered around the continent,” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO.” These remarks planted suspicions among African officials of the United States’ “militarization” and “recolonization” of the continent.
That perception seemed to jibe with the United States’ unabashed interests: ensuring physical and diplomatic access to African oil and gas, containing growing Islamic radicalization, and forestalling terrorist attacks on the United States -- the threat of which loomed larger as al Qaeda established a franchise in North Africa (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and Somalia’s al Qaeda–linked al Shabab became increasingly aggressive.
Until Operation Odyssey Dawn, however, AFRICOM had managed to ease Africa’s fears. The Pentagon located the command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany -- electing to end increasingly fraught efforts to find a continental headquarters -- and AFRICOM’s biggest sustained military effort had been the benign Africa Partnership Station, a group of U.S. Navy ships dispatched for six months of the year to train African maritime forces. Its kinetic actions were limited to scattered counterterrorism efforts in Somalia. Even U.S. naval measures to thwart proliferation and Somali piracy, Africa’s most conspicuous international security problem in recent years, were assigned to the battle-tested Central Command (CENTCOM).
The command’s sole ground presence in Africa was the 2,000 troop-strong Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in Djibouti, which operated in permissive countries and through multilateral channels, and therefore constituted more of a diplomatic asset than a military one. And much of AFRICOM’s time was spent providing technical and financial support to cooperative governments and helping to coordinate training for the AU’s five regional Africa Standby Brigades -- which are intended eventually to become the continent’s peacekeeping and intervention forces. Though fitful, these efforts have borne fruit. They culminated in a two-week peacekeeping simulation held in October 2010 in Addis Ababa, which involved African security forces, AFRICOM, and European military forces. Retired Nigerian Major General Samaila Iliya, co-director of the exercise, acknowledged the urgent need for the Africa Standby Force and deemed the exercise a success.
Although regaining African countries’ trust will be difficult, it is not impossible. In Africa as in Washington, the intervention in Libya is increasingly interpreted as signifying the Obama administration’s shift from a realist foreign policy to a more idealist and interventionist one. And France’s significant military involvement in Cote D’Ivoire in April, after Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to step down from power when he lost re-election triggered a bloody civil war, would tend to bolster African fears of neocolonialism. But influential members of Obama’s foreign-policy team -- including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (and his likely successor, current CIA Director Leon Panetta), national security adviser Thomas Donilon, and deputy national security adviser John Brennan -- still favor a realist approach. The administration should signal through White House and State Department policy statements that future humanitarian intervention is highly contingent on particular diplomatic, military, and humanitarian circumstances, and that the Libyan intervention constitutes neither the beginning of a trend nor a firm precedent. Secretary Gates struck the right tone during an April 8 visit to Iraq, when he said, referring to the broad political support for the Libya intervention, that “it's hard for me to imagine those kinds of circumstances being replicated anyplace else.”
Together with its post-Somalia reluctance to intervene in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States’ firm resistance to any impulse to deploy even military advisers on the ground in Libya may also provide at least partial reassurance to African governments. More broadly, AFRICOM can minimize turbulence in its relationships with them by reverting after the Libya operation to its training and support function -- and executing that better than ever. A larger budget would be required. Ramped up AFRICOM-assisted military exercises and planning programs would communicate a commitment to steady operational partnership. So would funding a long-term self-assessment of AFRICOM’s programs -- something that a recent Government Accountability Office study found that AFRICOM especially needed in order to serve the needs of its African partners. Moving AFRICOM’s headquarters from Germany to Georgia or South Carolina, as the Pentagon has planned, might also reinforce a healthy sense of distance among Africans. In word as well as in deed, the idea should be to cast the Libyan operation not as a mistake but as an exception.
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Home > Snapshot > AFRICOM's Libyan Expedition
Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com)
May 9, 2011
By JONATHAN STEVENSON
(Professor of Strategic Studies at the U.S. Naval War College and co-chair of its Africa Regional Studies Group.)
Until Operation Odyssey Dawn began in Libya on March 19, U.S. Africa Command -- the United States’ newest combatant command, established in October 2008 -- was largely untested. There was reason to worry that AFRICOM, which would lead the operation, was too green, and its mandate too soft, for it to perform up to U.S. standards.
Yet in launching the U.S. intervention in Libya, AFRICOM, led by its commander, General Carter Ham, acquitted itself well. On the first day of the operation, it coordinated the combat operations of 11 American warships and dozens of aircraft, fired 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and delivered 45 Joint Direct Attack Munitions to ground targets. By March 23, AFRICOM-led coalition forces had steadily expanded the no-fly zone from northwest Libya and parts of central Libya to the entire coastline. And on March 26, AFRICOM began coordinating operations to destroy armored vehicles, effectively (if not with specific intent) providing close air support to rebel forces. AFRICOM lost only one aircraft -- an F-15 fighter that crashed on March 22 due to a mechanical malfunction -- and suffered no fatalities.
There was, however, political backlash to AFRICOM’s active fighting role in the conflict. Although the three African non-permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda -- had acquiesced to UN Resolution 1973, the bill that green-lighted the intervention, the African Union unequivocally opposed it. After the campaign began, the AU even tried to arrange a cease-fire, under which Libyan leader Muammar al Qaddafi would have opened channels for humanitarian aid and undertaken negotiations with the rebels but would also have been allowed to stay in power.
Qaddafi, of course, had been the driving force behind the creation of the AU, in 2002 (an effort he hoped would revitalize his geopolitical relevance). Many African leaders, from relatively enlightened ones such as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to incorrigible rogues like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, could well view Operation Odyssey Dawn as a harbinger of new liberal interventionism in Africa, and AFRICOM as its principal instrument and a potential threat to regime security. Now, especially if NATO and the Obama administration eventually use ground troops to ensure Qaddafi’s ouster, as retired U.S. Army General James M. Dubik suggested it should in an April 25 New York Times op-ed, AFRICOM will have a hard time reestablishing its bona fides with African governments, which were fairly tenuous even before the Libyan intervention.
AFRICOM was created for relatively banal bureaucratic and planning reasons -- to bring U.S. military activities in Africa, which had been inefficiently divided among three existing commands (European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command), under a single one. But an awkward Pentagon rollout seemed to suggest that it would entail increasing the number of U.S. bases in the region and an intensification of military activity there. In particular, in 2007, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Ryan Henry, noted that the Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five 'regional integration teams' scattered around the continent,” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO.” These remarks planted suspicions among African officials of the United States’ “militarization” and “recolonization” of the continent.
That perception seemed to jibe with the United States’ unabashed interests: ensuring physical and diplomatic access to African oil and gas, containing growing Islamic radicalization, and forestalling terrorist attacks on the United States -- the threat of which loomed larger as al Qaeda established a franchise in North Africa (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and Somalia’s al Qaeda–linked al Shabab became increasingly aggressive.
Until Operation Odyssey Dawn, however, AFRICOM had managed to ease Africa’s fears. The Pentagon located the command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany -- electing to end increasingly fraught efforts to find a continental headquarters -- and AFRICOM’s biggest sustained military effort had been the benign Africa Partnership Station, a group of U.S. Navy ships dispatched for six months of the year to train African maritime forces. Its kinetic actions were limited to scattered counterterrorism efforts in Somalia. Even U.S. naval measures to thwart proliferation and Somali piracy, Africa’s most conspicuous international security problem in recent years, were assigned to the battle-tested Central Command (CENTCOM).
The command’s sole ground presence in Africa was the 2,000 troop-strong Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in Djibouti, which operated in permissive countries and through multilateral channels, and therefore constituted more of a diplomatic asset than a military one. And much of AFRICOM’s time was spent providing technical and financial support to cooperative governments and helping to coordinate training for the AU’s five regional Africa Standby Brigades -- which are intended eventually to become the continent’s peacekeeping and intervention forces. Though fitful, these efforts have borne fruit. They culminated in a two-week peacekeeping simulation held in October 2010 in Addis Ababa, which involved African security forces, AFRICOM, and European military forces. Retired Nigerian Major General Samaila Iliya, co-director of the exercise, acknowledged the urgent need for the Africa Standby Force and deemed the exercise a success.
Although regaining African countries’ trust will be difficult, it is not impossible. In Africa as in Washington, the intervention in Libya is increasingly interpreted as signifying the Obama administration’s shift from a realist foreign policy to a more idealist and interventionist one. And France’s significant military involvement in Cote D’Ivoire in April, after Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to step down from power when he lost re-election triggered a bloody civil war, would tend to bolster African fears of neocolonialism. But influential members of Obama’s foreign-policy team -- including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (and his likely successor, current CIA Director Leon Panetta), national security adviser Thomas Donilon, and deputy national security adviser John Brennan -- still favor a realist approach. The administration should signal through White House and State Department policy statements that future humanitarian intervention is highly contingent on particular diplomatic, military, and humanitarian circumstances, and that the Libyan intervention constitutes neither the beginning of a trend nor a firm precedent. Secretary Gates struck the right tone during an April 8 visit to Iraq, when he said, referring to the broad political support for the Libya intervention, that “it's hard for me to imagine those kinds of circumstances being replicated anyplace else.”
Together with its post-Somalia reluctance to intervene in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States’ firm resistance to any impulse to deploy even military advisers on the ground in Libya may also provide at least partial reassurance to African governments. More broadly, AFRICOM can minimize turbulence in its relationships with them by reverting after the Libya operation to its training and support function -- and executing that better than ever. A larger budget would be required. Ramped up AFRICOM-assisted military exercises and planning programs would communicate a commitment to steady operational partnership. So would funding a long-term self-assessment of AFRICOM’s programs -- something that a recent Government Accountability Office study found that AFRICOM especially needed in order to serve the needs of its African partners. Moving AFRICOM’s headquarters from Germany to Georgia or South Carolina, as the Pentagon has planned, might also reinforce a healthy sense of distance among Africans. In word as well as in deed, the idea should be to cast the Libyan operation not as a mistake but as an exception.
Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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Published on Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com)
Friday, May 6, 2011
The African 'Star Wars'
It is the Pentagon's Africom versus China's web of investments - the ultimate prize: Africa's natural resources.
Pepe Escobar
26 Apr 2011 13:54
From energy wars to water wars, the 21st century will be determined by a fierce battle for the world's remaining natural resources. The chessboard is global. The stakes are tremendous. Most battles will be invisible. All will be crucial.
In resource-rich Africa, a complex subplot of the New Great Game in Eurasia is already in effect. It's all about three major intertwined developments:
1) The coming of age of the African Union (AU) in the early 2000s.
2) China's investment offencive in Africa throughout the 2000s.
3) The onset of the Pentagon's African Command (Africom) in 2007.
Beijing clearly sees that the Anglo-French-American bombing of Libya – apart from its myriad geopolitical implications – has risked billions of dollars in Chinese investments, not to mention forcing the (smooth) evacuation of more than 35,000 Chinese working across the country.
And crucially, depending on the outcome – as in renegotiated energy contracts by a pliable, pro-Western government – it may also seriously jeopardise Chinese oil imports (3 per cent of total Chinese imports in 2010).
No wonder the China Military, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) newspaper, as well as sectors in academia, are now openly arguing that China needs to drop Deng Xiaoping's "low-profile" policy and bet on a sprawling armed forces to defend its strategic interests worldwide (these assets already total over $1.2 trillion).
Now compare it with a close examination of Africom's strategy, which reveals as the proverbial hidden agenda the energy angle and a determined push to isolate China from northern Africa.
One report titled "China's New Security Strategy in Africa" actually betrays the Pentagon's fear of the PLA eventually sending troops to Africa to protect Chinese interests.
It won't happen in Libya. It's not about to happen in Sudan. But further on down the road, all bets are off.
Meddle is our middle name
The Pentagon has in fact been meddling in Africa's affairs for more than half a century. According to a 2010 US Congressional Research Service study, this happened no less than 46 times before the current Libya civil war.
Among other exploits, the Pentagon invested in a botched large-scale invasion of Somalia and backed the infamous, genocide-related Rwanda regime.
The Bill Clinton administration raised hell in Liberia, Gabon, Congo and Sierra Leone, bombed Sudan, and sent "advisers" to Ethiopia to back dodgy clients grabbing a piece of Somalia (by the way, Somalia has been at war for 20 years).
The September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), conceived by the Bush administration, is explicit; Africa is a "strategic priority in fighting terrorism".
Yet, the never-say-die "war on terror" is a sideshow in the Pentagon's vast militarisation agenda, which favours client regimes, setting up military bases, and training of mercenaries – "cooperative partnerships" in Pentagon newspeak.
Africom has some sort of military "partnership" – bilateral agreements – with most of Africa's 53 countries, not to mention fuzzy multilateral schemes such as West African Standby Force and Africa Partnership Station.
American warships have dropped by virtually every African nation except for those bordering the Mediterranean.
The exceptions: Ivory Coast, Sudan, Eritrea and Libya. Ivory Coast is now in the bag. So is South Sudan. Libya may be next. The only ones left to be incorporated to Africom will be Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
Africom's reputation has not been exactly sterling – as the Tunisian and Egyptian chapters of the great 2011 Arab Revolt caught it totally by surprise. These "partners", after all, were essential for surveillance of the southern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
Libya for its part presented juicy possibilities: an easily demonised dictator; a pliable post-Gaddafi puppet regime; a crucial military base for Africom; loads of excellent cheap oil; and the possibility of throwing China out of Libya.
Under the Obama administration, Africom thus started its first African war. In the words of its commander, General Carter Ham, "we completed a complex, short-notice, operational mission in Libya and… transferred that mission to NATO."
And that leads us to the next step. Africom will share all its African "assets" with NATO. Africom and NATO are in fact one – the Pentagon is a many-headed hydra after all.
Beijing for its part sees right through it; the Mediterranean as a NATO lake (neocolonialism is back especially, via France and Britain); Africa militarised by Africom; and Chinese interests at high risk.
The lure of ChinAfrica
One of the last crucial stages of globalisation - what we may call "ChinAfrica" – established itself almost in silence and invisibility, at least for Western eyes.
In the past decade, Africa became China's new Far West. The epic tale of masses of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs discovering big empty virgin spaces, and wild mixed emotions from exoticism to rejection, racism to outright adventure, grips anyone's imagination.
Individual Chinese have pierced the collective unconscious of Africa, they have made Africans dream – while China the great power proved it could conjure miracles far away from its shores.
For Africa, this "opposites attract" syndrome was a great boost after the 1960s decolonisation – and the horrid mess that followed it.
China repaved roads and railroads, built dams in Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, equipped the whole of Africa with fibre optics, opened hospitals and orphanages, and – just before Tahrir Square – was about to aid Egypt to relaunch its civilian nuclear programme.
The white man in Africa has been, most of the time, arrogant and condescending. The Chinese, humble, courageous, efficient and discreet.
China will soon become Africa's largest trading partner – ahead of France and the UK – and its top source of foreign investment. It's telling that the best the West could come up with to counteract this geopolitical earthquake was to go the militarised way.
The external Chinese model of trade, aid and investment – not to mention the internal Chinese model of large-scale, state-led investments in infrastructure – made Africa forget about the West while boosting the strategic importance of Africa in the global economy.
Why would an African government rely on the ideology-based "adjustments" of IMF and the World Bank when China attaches no political conditions and respects sovereignty – for Beijing, the most important principle of international law? On top of it, China carries no colonial historical baggage in Africa.
Essentially, large swathes of Africa have rejected the West's trademark shock therapy, and embraced China.
Western elites, predictably, were not amused. Beijing now clearly sees that in the wider context of the New Great Game in Eurasia, the Pentagon has now positioned itself to conduct a remixed Cold War with China all across Africa – using every trick in the book from obscure "partnerships" to engineered chaos.
The leadership in Beijing is silently observing the waters. For the moment, the Little Helmsman Deng's "crossing the river while feeling the stones" holds.
The Pentagon better wise up. The best Beijing may offer is to help Africa to fulfil its destiny. In the eyes of Africans themselves, that certainly beats any Tomahawk.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times (www.atimes.com). His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Pepe Escobar
26 Apr 2011 13:54
From energy wars to water wars, the 21st century will be determined by a fierce battle for the world's remaining natural resources. The chessboard is global. The stakes are tremendous. Most battles will be invisible. All will be crucial.
In resource-rich Africa, a complex subplot of the New Great Game in Eurasia is already in effect. It's all about three major intertwined developments:
1) The coming of age of the African Union (AU) in the early 2000s.
2) China's investment offencive in Africa throughout the 2000s.
3) The onset of the Pentagon's African Command (Africom) in 2007.
Beijing clearly sees that the Anglo-French-American bombing of Libya – apart from its myriad geopolitical implications – has risked billions of dollars in Chinese investments, not to mention forcing the (smooth) evacuation of more than 35,000 Chinese working across the country.
And crucially, depending on the outcome – as in renegotiated energy contracts by a pliable, pro-Western government – it may also seriously jeopardise Chinese oil imports (3 per cent of total Chinese imports in 2010).
No wonder the China Military, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) newspaper, as well as sectors in academia, are now openly arguing that China needs to drop Deng Xiaoping's "low-profile" policy and bet on a sprawling armed forces to defend its strategic interests worldwide (these assets already total over $1.2 trillion).
Now compare it with a close examination of Africom's strategy, which reveals as the proverbial hidden agenda the energy angle and a determined push to isolate China from northern Africa.
One report titled "China's New Security Strategy in Africa" actually betrays the Pentagon's fear of the PLA eventually sending troops to Africa to protect Chinese interests.
It won't happen in Libya. It's not about to happen in Sudan. But further on down the road, all bets are off.
Meddle is our middle name
The Pentagon has in fact been meddling in Africa's affairs for more than half a century. According to a 2010 US Congressional Research Service study, this happened no less than 46 times before the current Libya civil war.
Among other exploits, the Pentagon invested in a botched large-scale invasion of Somalia and backed the infamous, genocide-related Rwanda regime.
The Bill Clinton administration raised hell in Liberia, Gabon, Congo and Sierra Leone, bombed Sudan, and sent "advisers" to Ethiopia to back dodgy clients grabbing a piece of Somalia (by the way, Somalia has been at war for 20 years).
The September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), conceived by the Bush administration, is explicit; Africa is a "strategic priority in fighting terrorism".
Yet, the never-say-die "war on terror" is a sideshow in the Pentagon's vast militarisation agenda, which favours client regimes, setting up military bases, and training of mercenaries – "cooperative partnerships" in Pentagon newspeak.
Africom has some sort of military "partnership" – bilateral agreements – with most of Africa's 53 countries, not to mention fuzzy multilateral schemes such as West African Standby Force and Africa Partnership Station.
American warships have dropped by virtually every African nation except for those bordering the Mediterranean.
The exceptions: Ivory Coast, Sudan, Eritrea and Libya. Ivory Coast is now in the bag. So is South Sudan. Libya may be next. The only ones left to be incorporated to Africom will be Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
Africom's reputation has not been exactly sterling – as the Tunisian and Egyptian chapters of the great 2011 Arab Revolt caught it totally by surprise. These "partners", after all, were essential for surveillance of the southern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
Libya for its part presented juicy possibilities: an easily demonised dictator; a pliable post-Gaddafi puppet regime; a crucial military base for Africom; loads of excellent cheap oil; and the possibility of throwing China out of Libya.
Under the Obama administration, Africom thus started its first African war. In the words of its commander, General Carter Ham, "we completed a complex, short-notice, operational mission in Libya and… transferred that mission to NATO."
And that leads us to the next step. Africom will share all its African "assets" with NATO. Africom and NATO are in fact one – the Pentagon is a many-headed hydra after all.
Beijing for its part sees right through it; the Mediterranean as a NATO lake (neocolonialism is back especially, via France and Britain); Africa militarised by Africom; and Chinese interests at high risk.
The lure of ChinAfrica
One of the last crucial stages of globalisation - what we may call "ChinAfrica" – established itself almost in silence and invisibility, at least for Western eyes.
In the past decade, Africa became China's new Far West. The epic tale of masses of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs discovering big empty virgin spaces, and wild mixed emotions from exoticism to rejection, racism to outright adventure, grips anyone's imagination.
Individual Chinese have pierced the collective unconscious of Africa, they have made Africans dream – while China the great power proved it could conjure miracles far away from its shores.
For Africa, this "opposites attract" syndrome was a great boost after the 1960s decolonisation – and the horrid mess that followed it.
China repaved roads and railroads, built dams in Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, equipped the whole of Africa with fibre optics, opened hospitals and orphanages, and – just before Tahrir Square – was about to aid Egypt to relaunch its civilian nuclear programme.
The white man in Africa has been, most of the time, arrogant and condescending. The Chinese, humble, courageous, efficient and discreet.
China will soon become Africa's largest trading partner – ahead of France and the UK – and its top source of foreign investment. It's telling that the best the West could come up with to counteract this geopolitical earthquake was to go the militarised way.
The external Chinese model of trade, aid and investment – not to mention the internal Chinese model of large-scale, state-led investments in infrastructure – made Africa forget about the West while boosting the strategic importance of Africa in the global economy.
Why would an African government rely on the ideology-based "adjustments" of IMF and the World Bank when China attaches no political conditions and respects sovereignty – for Beijing, the most important principle of international law? On top of it, China carries no colonial historical baggage in Africa.
Essentially, large swathes of Africa have rejected the West's trademark shock therapy, and embraced China.
Western elites, predictably, were not amused. Beijing now clearly sees that in the wider context of the New Great Game in Eurasia, the Pentagon has now positioned itself to conduct a remixed Cold War with China all across Africa – using every trick in the book from obscure "partnerships" to engineered chaos.
The leadership in Beijing is silently observing the waters. For the moment, the Little Helmsman Deng's "crossing the river while feeling the stones" holds.
The Pentagon better wise up. The best Beijing may offer is to help Africa to fulfil its destiny. In the eyes of Africans themselves, that certainly beats any Tomahawk.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times (www.atimes.com). His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Deportation Halted for Some Students as Lawmakers Seek New Policy
By JULIA PRESTON
April 26, 2011
Olga Zanella, a Mexican-born college student in Texas, should have started months ago trying to figure out how she could make a life in Mexico, since American immigration authorities were working resolutely to deport her there.
But Ms. Zanella, 20, could not bring herself to make plans. She was paralyzed by fear of a violent country she could not remember, where she had no close family.
Ms. Zanella, who has been living illegally in the United States since her parents brought her here when she was 5, had been trying to fight her deportation for more than two years. She was pulled over by the local police in February 2009 as she was driving in her hometown, Irving, Tex., and did not have a driver’s license. The police handed her over to immigration agents.
Her case looked bleak, but in recent days everything changed. Last Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Dallas summoned Ms. Zanella and told her she could remain in this country, under the agency’s supervision, if she stayed in school and out of trouble.
Encouraged by the surprising turnaround, Ms. Zanella’s parents and two siblings, who also had been living in the United States illegally, presented papers late Monday to ICE, as the agency is known, turning themselves in and requesting some form of legal immigration status.
“It’s an opportunity we are going to take,” Ms. Zanella said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “It’s better than being in the shadows.”
The about-face by ICE in Ms. Zanella’s case is an example of the kind of action Democratic lawmakers and Latino and immigrant groups have been demanding from the Obama administration to slow deportations of illegal immigrants who have not been convicted of crimes. In particular, pressure is increasing on President Obama to offer protection from deportation to illegal immigrant college students who might have been eligible for legal status under a bill in Congress known as the Dream Act.
In an April 13 letter, the top two Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada and Richard Durbin of Illinois, asked the president to suspend deportations for those students. But short of that, the senators asked Mr. Obama to set guidelines by which those students could come forward individually to ask to be spared deportation and to obtain some authorization to remain in the United States. The letter was signed by 20 other Senate Democrats. The Dream Act passed the House but failed in the Senate in December.
Homeland Security officials have said their focus is increasingly on removing immigrants who are convicted criminals. That, in fact, is what an ICE official told Ms. Zanella in explaining the new decision in her case.
The agent said ICE “was supposed to be concentrating on criminals, not on Dream students,” said Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas businessman who advocates for immigrants and made it his cause to prevent Ms. Zanella from being deported. Mr. Isenberg’s challenges to ICE had kept Ms. Zanella in the country even after the final date for her deportation in February.
“As long as I do well in school and stay out of trouble, I will be out of trouble with ICE,” Ms. Zanella said she was told. She has to report to ICE every month.
ICE officials declined to comment on the case, citing privacy policies.
ICE officials in central Florida recently invited immigration lawyers to bring forward illegal immigrants facing deportation who did not have criminal records, offering provisional authorization for them to remain here and work legally.
On Tuesday, immigration authorities suspended the deportation of Mariano Cardoso, 23, a Mexican student at Capital Community College in Connecticut, according to Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, who had pressed Mr. Cardoso’s cause. ICE’s decision ended a two-year battle against deportation for Mr. Cardoso.
But nationwide the administration’s deportations policy remains confused and erratically implemented, immigration lawyers said, with many students and immigrants without criminal records being deported.
“The administration needs to make it clear to the public and to the rank and file within ICE that it has a firm and clear policy of enforcing the law within its priorities and discouraging going after cases that are not within its priorities,” said Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But that is just not happening consistently.”
Ms. Zanella is studying at North Lake College in Irving to become a dentist. The police in Irving never explained why they stopped her and never issued any traffic ticket, Mr. Isenberg said.
ICE agents made no promises to Ms. Zanella’s family. Her father, José Victor Zanella, said: “We are ready to trust in the system.”
April 26, 2011
Olga Zanella, a Mexican-born college student in Texas, should have started months ago trying to figure out how she could make a life in Mexico, since American immigration authorities were working resolutely to deport her there.
But Ms. Zanella, 20, could not bring herself to make plans. She was paralyzed by fear of a violent country she could not remember, where she had no close family.
Ms. Zanella, who has been living illegally in the United States since her parents brought her here when she was 5, had been trying to fight her deportation for more than two years. She was pulled over by the local police in February 2009 as she was driving in her hometown, Irving, Tex., and did not have a driver’s license. The police handed her over to immigration agents.
Her case looked bleak, but in recent days everything changed. Last Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Dallas summoned Ms. Zanella and told her she could remain in this country, under the agency’s supervision, if she stayed in school and out of trouble.
Encouraged by the surprising turnaround, Ms. Zanella’s parents and two siblings, who also had been living in the United States illegally, presented papers late Monday to ICE, as the agency is known, turning themselves in and requesting some form of legal immigration status.
“It’s an opportunity we are going to take,” Ms. Zanella said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “It’s better than being in the shadows.”
The about-face by ICE in Ms. Zanella’s case is an example of the kind of action Democratic lawmakers and Latino and immigrant groups have been demanding from the Obama administration to slow deportations of illegal immigrants who have not been convicted of crimes. In particular, pressure is increasing on President Obama to offer protection from deportation to illegal immigrant college students who might have been eligible for legal status under a bill in Congress known as the Dream Act.
In an April 13 letter, the top two Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada and Richard Durbin of Illinois, asked the president to suspend deportations for those students. But short of that, the senators asked Mr. Obama to set guidelines by which those students could come forward individually to ask to be spared deportation and to obtain some authorization to remain in the United States. The letter was signed by 20 other Senate Democrats. The Dream Act passed the House but failed in the Senate in December.
Homeland Security officials have said their focus is increasingly on removing immigrants who are convicted criminals. That, in fact, is what an ICE official told Ms. Zanella in explaining the new decision in her case.
The agent said ICE “was supposed to be concentrating on criminals, not on Dream students,” said Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas businessman who advocates for immigrants and made it his cause to prevent Ms. Zanella from being deported. Mr. Isenberg’s challenges to ICE had kept Ms. Zanella in the country even after the final date for her deportation in February.
“As long as I do well in school and stay out of trouble, I will be out of trouble with ICE,” Ms. Zanella said she was told. She has to report to ICE every month.
ICE officials declined to comment on the case, citing privacy policies.
ICE officials in central Florida recently invited immigration lawyers to bring forward illegal immigrants facing deportation who did not have criminal records, offering provisional authorization for them to remain here and work legally.
On Tuesday, immigration authorities suspended the deportation of Mariano Cardoso, 23, a Mexican student at Capital Community College in Connecticut, according to Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, who had pressed Mr. Cardoso’s cause. ICE’s decision ended a two-year battle against deportation for Mr. Cardoso.
But nationwide the administration’s deportations policy remains confused and erratically implemented, immigration lawyers said, with many students and immigrants without criminal records being deported.
“The administration needs to make it clear to the public and to the rank and file within ICE that it has a firm and clear policy of enforcing the law within its priorities and discouraging going after cases that are not within its priorities,” said Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But that is just not happening consistently.”
Ms. Zanella is studying at North Lake College in Irving to become a dentist. The police in Irving never explained why they stopped her and never issued any traffic ticket, Mr. Isenberg said.
ICE agents made no promises to Ms. Zanella’s family. Her father, José Victor Zanella, said: “We are ready to trust in the system.”
French and Italian Leaders Seek Tighter Controls on Migration
By RACHEL DONADIO and ALAN COWELL
April 26, 2011
ROME — Facing a surge in undocumented migrants from North Africa, the leaders of France and Italy on Tuesday called for changes in the Schengen Agreement, which grants free passage across national frontiers in most of Western Europe.
The appeal, in a joint letter to the president of the European Commission, represented a remarkable request to change a pact that has become one of the European Union’s hallmark agreements. Under the treaty, which dates from 1985, 25 European Union member nations dismantled border controls for their own citizens and citizens of other countries.
Analysts said it was highly unlikely that the European Union would revise the agreement, and many said the joint request appeared to be aimed more at reducing political tensions between and within the two countries.
The looser borders have begun to pose problems of illegal immigration, as immigrants who arrive in one European Union member state can travel freely to others. The joint request reflected the severity of the migration crisis — in practical terms as well as for Italy and France’s domestic politics, in which anti-immigrant parties have substantial influence.
“Neither of us wants to deny Schengen, but in exceptional circumstances, we think there should be variations to the Schengen treaty,” Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said at a joint news conference here with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, after weeks of tensions.
“We want Schengen to work, and to make sure that it works, it has to be reformed,” Mr. Sarkozy added.
In a joint letter to José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, the two leaders called on the European Union to “examine the possibility of temporarily establishing internal border controls in the case of exceptional difficulties in handling common external borders, on the basis of conditions to be defined in the future.”
France and Italy also called on the European Union to broaden the role of its border agency, Frontex, to allow it to repatriate illegal immigrants, and to “redefine” Europe’s regulations for immigrants from third countries. Under current regulations, the European country where immigrants first arrive is responsible for determining their status.
Faced with the likelihood of a wave of immigrants arriving in Europe from Libya, they also called for a common European Union policy on those seeking political asylum. Each country currently has its own standards.
In recent weeks, Italy has been reluctant to become involved in the intervention championed by France to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from Libya, a former Italian colony. France has been reluctant to admit third-country immigrants from Italy — most of them from Tunisia, which historically has had close ties to France.
Italy infuriated France by issuing some Tunisians travel papers allowing them to leave Italy for France, which has tried to block them at its borders with Italy.
Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, and Alan Cowell from London.
April 26, 2011
ROME — Facing a surge in undocumented migrants from North Africa, the leaders of France and Italy on Tuesday called for changes in the Schengen Agreement, which grants free passage across national frontiers in most of Western Europe.
The appeal, in a joint letter to the president of the European Commission, represented a remarkable request to change a pact that has become one of the European Union’s hallmark agreements. Under the treaty, which dates from 1985, 25 European Union member nations dismantled border controls for their own citizens and citizens of other countries.
Analysts said it was highly unlikely that the European Union would revise the agreement, and many said the joint request appeared to be aimed more at reducing political tensions between and within the two countries.
The looser borders have begun to pose problems of illegal immigration, as immigrants who arrive in one European Union member state can travel freely to others. The joint request reflected the severity of the migration crisis — in practical terms as well as for Italy and France’s domestic politics, in which anti-immigrant parties have substantial influence.
“Neither of us wants to deny Schengen, but in exceptional circumstances, we think there should be variations to the Schengen treaty,” Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said at a joint news conference here with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, after weeks of tensions.
“We want Schengen to work, and to make sure that it works, it has to be reformed,” Mr. Sarkozy added.
In a joint letter to José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, the two leaders called on the European Union to “examine the possibility of temporarily establishing internal border controls in the case of exceptional difficulties in handling common external borders, on the basis of conditions to be defined in the future.”
France and Italy also called on the European Union to broaden the role of its border agency, Frontex, to allow it to repatriate illegal immigrants, and to “redefine” Europe’s regulations for immigrants from third countries. Under current regulations, the European country where immigrants first arrive is responsible for determining their status.
Faced with the likelihood of a wave of immigrants arriving in Europe from Libya, they also called for a common European Union policy on those seeking political asylum. Each country currently has its own standards.
In recent weeks, Italy has been reluctant to become involved in the intervention championed by France to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from Libya, a former Italian colony. France has been reluctant to admit third-country immigrants from Italy — most of them from Tunisia, which historically has had close ties to France.
Italy infuriated France by issuing some Tunisians travel papers allowing them to leave Italy for France, which has tried to block them at its borders with Italy.
Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, and Alan Cowell from London.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
India’s African diaspora risks being left out in the new scheme of things
By LEE MWITI
Friday, February 11 2011 at 18:52
Set deep in south Delhi is a park named for the red-flowered Gulmohar tree and which provides the location for Gumolhar Park Journalists Colony, a tranquil neighbourhood associated with the capital’s more affluent residents.
House Number 47 would pass for any of the tens of old-style Hindu villas in the estate originally established for journalists in the 1970s, only that its upper storey is home to a unique venture that seeks to reconnect the widely disseminated Indian diaspora.
A private online portal, the People of Indian Origin (PIO) TV studios are rather cramped and give off a whiff that is both sipid and musty in nature, perhaps an apt reminder of the chasm that has for decades existed between India and its 30 million-strong diaspora, and which it is now scrambling to redress.
“Every day we get about 3,000 hits or more, but during all these big events like the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or overseas PBD’s, we get about 70,000—80,000 [hits],” said the manager of the Indian operation of the family-run outlet, Kuldeep Yadav.
The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas—Non-Resident Indian Day—is India’s best known move towards reconnecting with its diaspora. Held annually around January 9—a date the marks Mahatma Ghandi’s return from South Africa—the jamboree has in recent years sought to celebrate the achievements of its diaspora.
New Delhi’s arm-length treatment of its diaspora had been partly informed by a need to avoid being seen as interfering with sovereign ties, but also by the fact that most of its relatives are fiercely proud of their African roots.
Political influence
But the success of the diaspora in North America and western Europe where they now yield immense economic and political influence has awakened the country to the potential benefits of a community whose gross income is worth an estimated $1 trillion, and who send home more money than any other country.
But as India seeks to delicately re-engage with Africa, its three million-strong diaspora on the continent are unwittingly caught in the middle with ironically the same historical links it trumpets playing against it.
Friday, February 11 2011 at 18:52
Set deep in south Delhi is a park named for the red-flowered Gulmohar tree and which provides the location for Gumolhar Park Journalists Colony, a tranquil neighbourhood associated with the capital’s more affluent residents.
House Number 47 would pass for any of the tens of old-style Hindu villas in the estate originally established for journalists in the 1970s, only that its upper storey is home to a unique venture that seeks to reconnect the widely disseminated Indian diaspora.
A private online portal, the People of Indian Origin (PIO) TV studios are rather cramped and give off a whiff that is both sipid and musty in nature, perhaps an apt reminder of the chasm that has for decades existed between India and its 30 million-strong diaspora, and which it is now scrambling to redress.
“Every day we get about 3,000 hits or more, but during all these big events like the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or overseas PBD’s, we get about 70,000—80,000 [hits],” said the manager of the Indian operation of the family-run outlet, Kuldeep Yadav.
The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas—Non-Resident Indian Day—is India’s best known move towards reconnecting with its diaspora. Held annually around January 9—a date the marks Mahatma Ghandi’s return from South Africa—the jamboree has in recent years sought to celebrate the achievements of its diaspora.
New Delhi’s arm-length treatment of its diaspora had been partly informed by a need to avoid being seen as interfering with sovereign ties, but also by the fact that most of its relatives are fiercely proud of their African roots.
Political influence
But the success of the diaspora in North America and western Europe where they now yield immense economic and political influence has awakened the country to the potential benefits of a community whose gross income is worth an estimated $1 trillion, and who send home more money than any other country.
But as India seeks to delicately re-engage with Africa, its three million-strong diaspora on the continent are unwittingly caught in the middle with ironically the same historical links it trumpets playing against it.
28 homosexual Jamaicans gain political asylum victory in US
By theGrio
1:47 PM on 02/15/2011
In an unprecedented victory, 28 homosexual Jamaicans, who were persecuted due to their sexual orientation, have gained political asylum in the United States. The success of their claims reflects the degree of of persecution suffered by homosexuals in Jamaica.
Since 2007, Great Britain, the former colonial power which introduced the island's sodomy laws, has granted asylum to at least five Jamaicans on the grounds that their lives were in danger due to their sexual orientation.
The individuals were assisted by Immigration Equality, a network of pro-bono attorneys which strives to secure asylum for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders, because they were persecuted in their country as a result of their sexual orientation, gender identity or HIV-status.
The Immigration Equality spokesperson said:
"By offering them a safe haven, the United States is not only saving their lives, but benefiting from the talent, skills and service these asylees bring to our country. We are proud and honored to help them begin life anew here in their adopted homeland."
The organization is reported to have 97 additional cases filed in 2010 and several filed previously that are awaiting review.
Renowned largely for its music, culture and reputation as one of the most-favored Caribbean travel destinations, the island is also infamous for its intolerance and unbridled violence against homosexuals. Homosexuality, known throughout the Caribbean as "buggering," remains a criminal offense in Jamaica and is punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
1:47 PM on 02/15/2011
In an unprecedented victory, 28 homosexual Jamaicans, who were persecuted due to their sexual orientation, have gained political asylum in the United States. The success of their claims reflects the degree of of persecution suffered by homosexuals in Jamaica.
Since 2007, Great Britain, the former colonial power which introduced the island's sodomy laws, has granted asylum to at least five Jamaicans on the grounds that their lives were in danger due to their sexual orientation.
The individuals were assisted by Immigration Equality, a network of pro-bono attorneys which strives to secure asylum for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders, because they were persecuted in their country as a result of their sexual orientation, gender identity or HIV-status.
The Immigration Equality spokesperson said:
"By offering them a safe haven, the United States is not only saving their lives, but benefiting from the talent, skills and service these asylees bring to our country. We are proud and honored to help them begin life anew here in their adopted homeland."
The organization is reported to have 97 additional cases filed in 2010 and several filed previously that are awaiting review.
Renowned largely for its music, culture and reputation as one of the most-favored Caribbean travel destinations, the island is also infamous for its intolerance and unbridled violence against homosexuals. Homosexuality, known throughout the Caribbean as "buggering," remains a criminal offense in Jamaica and is punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
Bedouin Smugglers Abuse Africans Held for Ransom, Israel Group Says
February 15, 2011
By DINA KRAFT
TEL AVIV — About 1,000 African migrants trying to cross the Sinai Desert from Egypt into Israel have been systematically beaten, raped and held captive for ransom in the past year by the Bedouin smugglers they hired to help them make the journey, an Israeli advocacy organization said Tuesday.
Testimony collected by the Hotline for Migrant Workers in a new report depicts a network of torture camps in the northern reaches of the desert where the migrants, mostly Eritrean, are sometimes held for months in abusive conditions, while their Bedouin captors press their families abroad to send thousands of dollars in ransom money.
“I was a virgin when I arrived in the desert,” said a 21-year-old Eritrean woman cited in the report, who was held for six months. “During the first few times that I was raped, I cried and resisted, but that didn’t help. They wouldn’t leave me alone. After that I stopped resisting. Only when the $2,800 arrived did the smugglers unchain me.”
In their accounts in the report and in person, the migrants recall a pattern of abuse, including gang rapes and beatings with electric rods and heavy sticks. Often, they said, they were shackled together in groups as their armed captors kept them under guard. At one of the camps, captives were given T-shirts with numbers printed on them and were referred to by those numbers.
Physical torture typically accompanied the captors’ extortion calls, usually by satellite phone.
“The most painful moments were when they called my family as they beat me and I cried out,” said Avraham Asmara, a 25-year-old Eritrean man who was held for a month before escaping and crossing the border three weeks ago. “I was always thinking about what my family was thinking and feeling when they heard me like this.”
At a news conference, Mr. Asmara said he had paid $3,000 to his smugglers to take him across the desert, but was taken captive. His family members in Eritrea sold their home and belongings to send his captors $8,000 of the $10,000 ransom they demanded, he said.
There is concern among Israeli human rights officials that the upheaval in Egypt will make it even more difficult to crack down on the kidnappings, which they say started last year. The Bedouins and Egyptian authorities have had tense relations for years, with the Bedouins complaining of discrimination and harsh treatment. The vast, sparsely populated Sinai Desert has long been something of a lawless no man’s land.
Reut Michaeli, executive director of the Tel Aviv-based Hotline for Migrant Workers, voiced concern that when the migrants, including women pregnant from rape, do make it across the border to Israel, they are not provided state-financed medical treatment.
The group Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, which runs a clinic here for migrants, referred 165 women for abortions in 2010 and suspects that about half were raped while in Sinai, according to its report in December.
According to official estimates, about 33,000 Africans, most of them migrant workers seeking better economic prospects but some of them refugees from war in Sudan, have crossed into Israel from Egypt since 2005, setting off a national debate about how to handle the influx. The number rose to about 13,600 last year from fewer than 4,900 in 2009, according to Israeli Parliament figures.
Male migrants who were held captive told of being beaten when they tried to protect the women, and there are also reports that men were raped.
Musa Naiem, 35, from Sudan said the camp where he was held, in sight of a Bedouin village, was a fenced-in pen with three rooms covered by a cloth roof. He and others slept outside in the sand and had no toilets or showers.
Mr. Asmara said he liberated himself and his fellow captives with a handcuff key secretly recovered from the captors by a woman who had been raped. On a day the smugglers were in another room, he unlocked himself and the others. Together they overwhelmed and disarmed their captors and fled into the desert.
It turned out they were only a half-hour’s walk from the Israeli border.
Pulling the small silver key from his wallet, Mr. Asmara turned it in his hand and said: “This is for me to remember. This is the key that helped 50 people find freedom from hell.”
By DINA KRAFT
TEL AVIV — About 1,000 African migrants trying to cross the Sinai Desert from Egypt into Israel have been systematically beaten, raped and held captive for ransom in the past year by the Bedouin smugglers they hired to help them make the journey, an Israeli advocacy organization said Tuesday.
Testimony collected by the Hotline for Migrant Workers in a new report depicts a network of torture camps in the northern reaches of the desert where the migrants, mostly Eritrean, are sometimes held for months in abusive conditions, while their Bedouin captors press their families abroad to send thousands of dollars in ransom money.
“I was a virgin when I arrived in the desert,” said a 21-year-old Eritrean woman cited in the report, who was held for six months. “During the first few times that I was raped, I cried and resisted, but that didn’t help. They wouldn’t leave me alone. After that I stopped resisting. Only when the $2,800 arrived did the smugglers unchain me.”
In their accounts in the report and in person, the migrants recall a pattern of abuse, including gang rapes and beatings with electric rods and heavy sticks. Often, they said, they were shackled together in groups as their armed captors kept them under guard. At one of the camps, captives were given T-shirts with numbers printed on them and were referred to by those numbers.
Physical torture typically accompanied the captors’ extortion calls, usually by satellite phone.
“The most painful moments were when they called my family as they beat me and I cried out,” said Avraham Asmara, a 25-year-old Eritrean man who was held for a month before escaping and crossing the border three weeks ago. “I was always thinking about what my family was thinking and feeling when they heard me like this.”
At a news conference, Mr. Asmara said he had paid $3,000 to his smugglers to take him across the desert, but was taken captive. His family members in Eritrea sold their home and belongings to send his captors $8,000 of the $10,000 ransom they demanded, he said.
There is concern among Israeli human rights officials that the upheaval in Egypt will make it even more difficult to crack down on the kidnappings, which they say started last year. The Bedouins and Egyptian authorities have had tense relations for years, with the Bedouins complaining of discrimination and harsh treatment. The vast, sparsely populated Sinai Desert has long been something of a lawless no man’s land.
Reut Michaeli, executive director of the Tel Aviv-based Hotline for Migrant Workers, voiced concern that when the migrants, including women pregnant from rape, do make it across the border to Israel, they are not provided state-financed medical treatment.
The group Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, which runs a clinic here for migrants, referred 165 women for abortions in 2010 and suspects that about half were raped while in Sinai, according to its report in December.
According to official estimates, about 33,000 Africans, most of them migrant workers seeking better economic prospects but some of them refugees from war in Sudan, have crossed into Israel from Egypt since 2005, setting off a national debate about how to handle the influx. The number rose to about 13,600 last year from fewer than 4,900 in 2009, according to Israeli Parliament figures.
Male migrants who were held captive told of being beaten when they tried to protect the women, and there are also reports that men were raped.
Musa Naiem, 35, from Sudan said the camp where he was held, in sight of a Bedouin village, was a fenced-in pen with three rooms covered by a cloth roof. He and others slept outside in the sand and had no toilets or showers.
Mr. Asmara said he liberated himself and his fellow captives with a handcuff key secretly recovered from the captors by a woman who had been raped. On a day the smugglers were in another room, he unlocked himself and the others. Together they overwhelmed and disarmed their captors and fled into the desert.
It turned out they were only a half-hour’s walk from the Israeli border.
Pulling the small silver key from his wallet, Mr. Asmara turned it in his hand and said: “This is for me to remember. This is the key that helped 50 people find freedom from hell.”
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
African Refugees in Egypt Sit Out the Protests
By Ashley Bates
Mon Jan. 31, 2011
olitical and socio-economic backgrounds take to the Egyptian streets, African migrants from Sudan and elsewhere are holing up inside their homes. I called a few of them to find out why.
"I don't know any Sudanese who are participating," said Abdel Raheem, a 28-year-old Sudanese Cairo resident. "I saw on the news that people are being arrested. For someone who's not Egyptian, this would be really bad."
S.H., a Somali refugee in Cairo who asked that only his initials be used, agreed. "I'm not in a position to speak for the whole Somali community, but I have called some of my close friends, and everyone is staying home and watching the situation closely," he told me. "They wouldn't be safe."
An estimated 2-3 million migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers now live in Egypt—and they have good reason to fear the Egyptian authorities. The last time they banded together to gain greater freedoms, they were rewarded with lethal suppression.
In late September 2005, approximately 3,000 mostly Sudanese migrants and their supporters set up a makeshift tent camp outside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees building in Cairo. For three months, they called on the UNHCR to resettle them in other countries. They also protested their frequent harassment and imprisonment by the Egyptian police, and demanded access to public schools and health care, as well as the right to work legally in Egypt.
On December 30, 2005, the Mubarak government crushed this peaceful sit-in demonstration. About 4,000 Egyptian police encircled the camp, fired water cannons into the crowd, dragged women by their hair, and beat people indiscriminately, according to media reports. More than 2,000 protesters were arrested and at least 27 migrants, including one toddler, were killed in what the Egyptian Interior Ministry alleged was a "stampede." Only after the aggressive intervention of the UNHCR and human rights organizations did the Mubarak government rescind its plans to deport 645 of the detained people as "illegal immigrants."
The Mubarak government's repression of African migrants has escalated ever since. According to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report, Egyptian border authorities implemented a policy of "shoot-to-stop" in the remote border zones. In a two-year period, thirty-three Israel-bound migrants—including young children—were shot and killed by Egyptian security forces.
In addition to their well-founded fears of being killed, arrested, or deported, migrants are also avoiding participation in this week's pro-democracy demonstrations because they feel no sense of "Egyptian" identity. Egyptian civilians have ostracized them with racist names like "samara" meaning black, "funga monga" meaning monkey, or "abit" meaning slave.
"The protests are a sacrifice for the Egyptian people—it's not for us. It's not our nation." Abdel Raheem said.
While refugees hope that the protests will bring a new government that is more sympathetic to their plight, they harbor grave concerns that, in the short term, Egypt will descend into chaos.
"I think the refugees are not excited about the protests," said S.H., a Somali refugee who cautiously ventured outside on Sunday to watch the demonstrations from a safe distance. "Refugees are running from turmoil and unrest. They came here for protection."
He added sadly, "[Refugees] know what can happen when things get out of control."
Mon Jan. 31, 2011
olitical and socio-economic backgrounds take to the Egyptian streets, African migrants from Sudan and elsewhere are holing up inside their homes. I called a few of them to find out why.
"I don't know any Sudanese who are participating," said Abdel Raheem, a 28-year-old Sudanese Cairo resident. "I saw on the news that people are being arrested. For someone who's not Egyptian, this would be really bad."
S.H., a Somali refugee in Cairo who asked that only his initials be used, agreed. "I'm not in a position to speak for the whole Somali community, but I have called some of my close friends, and everyone is staying home and watching the situation closely," he told me. "They wouldn't be safe."
An estimated 2-3 million migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers now live in Egypt—and they have good reason to fear the Egyptian authorities. The last time they banded together to gain greater freedoms, they were rewarded with lethal suppression.
In late September 2005, approximately 3,000 mostly Sudanese migrants and their supporters set up a makeshift tent camp outside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees building in Cairo. For three months, they called on the UNHCR to resettle them in other countries. They also protested their frequent harassment and imprisonment by the Egyptian police, and demanded access to public schools and health care, as well as the right to work legally in Egypt.
On December 30, 2005, the Mubarak government crushed this peaceful sit-in demonstration. About 4,000 Egyptian police encircled the camp, fired water cannons into the crowd, dragged women by their hair, and beat people indiscriminately, according to media reports. More than 2,000 protesters were arrested and at least 27 migrants, including one toddler, were killed in what the Egyptian Interior Ministry alleged was a "stampede." Only after the aggressive intervention of the UNHCR and human rights organizations did the Mubarak government rescind its plans to deport 645 of the detained people as "illegal immigrants."
The Mubarak government's repression of African migrants has escalated ever since. According to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report, Egyptian border authorities implemented a policy of "shoot-to-stop" in the remote border zones. In a two-year period, thirty-three Israel-bound migrants—including young children—were shot and killed by Egyptian security forces.
In addition to their well-founded fears of being killed, arrested, or deported, migrants are also avoiding participation in this week's pro-democracy demonstrations because they feel no sense of "Egyptian" identity. Egyptian civilians have ostracized them with racist names like "samara" meaning black, "funga monga" meaning monkey, or "abit" meaning slave.
"The protests are a sacrifice for the Egyptian people—it's not for us. It's not our nation." Abdel Raheem said.
While refugees hope that the protests will bring a new government that is more sympathetic to their plight, they harbor grave concerns that, in the short term, Egypt will descend into chaos.
"I think the refugees are not excited about the protests," said S.H., a Somali refugee who cautiously ventured outside on Sunday to watch the demonstrations from a safe distance. "Refugees are running from turmoil and unrest. They came here for protection."
He added sadly, "[Refugees] know what can happen when things get out of control."
Tighten US-Africa Link
FRANCIS KORNEGAY
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
Jan 31 2011 18:08
American President Barack Obama is expected to focus more on Africa in 2011. This comes none too soon. Africa has become a competitive terrain as emerging powers accelerate their economic diplomacies on a continent considered the "last frontier" for trade and investment opportunities in the West-to-East shift in global economic momentum.
The unfinished business of Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama's reaching out to the Muslim world and re-engaging with neglected vital interests in East Asia inevitably pushed Africa on to the back burner. The "Great Recession" reinforced his domestic focus and interrelated with his administration's initial Asia-Pacific emphasis. Yet, simultaneously, Obama's opening move saw Asia as Sinocentric and meant acknowledging the rise of emerging powers and regions. The orchestrated emergence of the G20 (including South Africa), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's opening foray into the continent and Obama's symbolic visit to Ghana, including his "tough love" remarks for Africa's leaders, seemed a harbinger of things to come.
Meanwhile, having assembled an expert Africa team under Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the administration's main concerns were crisis-managing Darfur and the north-south Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, reviewing prospects for reassembling the Humpty Dumpty of Somalia and keeping a nervous eye on unsettling developments in Kenya and Nigeria. As Obama surveys the horizon leading up to 2012, many of the early initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and the Hindu Kush have settled into a pattern of engagement, even if not satisfactory resolution. The same goes for closely interrelated areas of strategic interest: the Russian "reset" agenda and navigating ambivalent transatlantic ties including the troubled eurozone. This leaves two areas devoid of Washington's strategic attention: Latin America (and the Caribbean, save for Haiti) and last, but not least, Africa.
In the Americas much depends on Obama's relations with the Dilma Roussef administration in Brazil and how the cautious relaxation of restrictions on a post-Castro Cuba is navigated. Closer to home, there is the urgency of cross-border management of relations with a Mexico battling a drug cartel insurgency, plus an immigration challenge that has made Arizona a flashpoint of violent reaction. But the penultimate test for Obama, is going to be the extent to which he charts a new course in Africa.
Opening a new chapter in US-African relations will not be simple. Overall, relations between the US and Africa are already on a good footing -- complacently and boringly so. The end of white rule in Southern Africa mainly accounts for this. As such, US-Africa policy is a non-controversial terrain of bipartisan consensus. But it is also by and large in a holding pattern, devoid of strategic vision.
As Africa becomes the focus of competitive economic strategies from traditional and emerging powers alike, the Obama administration's challenge will be to break out of this holding pattern into something more dynamic. This is a challenge for African leaders too. How will they exploit the fact that the world's lone superpower (in relative decline though it is) is led by "one of their own", with roots in the continent? The fact that Obama is of Kenyan descent ought to suggest a broader strategic vision converging with a pan-African strategic impetus. The unfolding East African Community (EAC) integration project could result in the five-nation bloc becoming Africa's first regionally integrated political federation, but this seems as yet unregistered on Washington's radar.
The vision of converging US and African agendas on the continent should be one of regional and continental integration. Unless Obama can, in consultation with Africa's leaders, grasp this, his exhortations about African leadership, responsibility and democratic good governance amounts to little for a continent that must overcome its fragmentation. In practical terms this means revisiting the Southern African Development Community-US Forum or initiating a forum for the US and the Southern African Customs Union. This could lead to new trade agreements. In West Africa, it means establishing an Economic Community of West African States-US forum with a sense of urgency informed by the likely break-up of Côte d'Ivoire, a case of "elite sovereignty" defying "popular sovereignty". Unlike in Southern Africa, there are already structured relations between Ecowas and Africom (as with the African Union as well).
Friends if the SADC
Then there is the break-up looming at the eastern end of the Sudano-Sahelian geocultural fault line. South Sudan has just concluded its self-determination referendum. An EAC-US forum could explore South Sudan's joining EAC. Such a prospect could also offer Somaliland an integrationist option while guiding the Somali region into a greater East African federated community.
The break-up of Sudan and, possibly, Côte d'Ivoire means that Africa may see more fragmentation on the road to integration. But both crises present opportunities for exercising the pan-African imagination. Rather than South Sudan and/or north and south Côte d'Ivoire being recognised as fully sovereign states, their respective regional economic communities could integrate them as self-governing autonomous areas, accelerating regional integration.
Then there is the African diaspora. There is no reason why there should not be a "Friends of Ecowas" among West African immigrants in the US, or equivalent "Friends of the EAC" and "Friends of SADC" in their respective diasporic communities. African Americans could boost their African interests through such constituency-building structures. The US is one of the major African diaspora states.
In short, the creative possibilities emanating from a joint US-African integration project are endless. The US must reposition itself as the strategic partner of a continent that will eventually outstrip both China and India in population. If Obama fails to place US-African relations on a more dynamic footing it is difficult to imagine anyone coming after him who will.
Francis A Kornegay is a research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
Jan 31 2011 18:08
American President Barack Obama is expected to focus more on Africa in 2011. This comes none too soon. Africa has become a competitive terrain as emerging powers accelerate their economic diplomacies on a continent considered the "last frontier" for trade and investment opportunities in the West-to-East shift in global economic momentum.
The unfinished business of Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama's reaching out to the Muslim world and re-engaging with neglected vital interests in East Asia inevitably pushed Africa on to the back burner. The "Great Recession" reinforced his domestic focus and interrelated with his administration's initial Asia-Pacific emphasis. Yet, simultaneously, Obama's opening move saw Asia as Sinocentric and meant acknowledging the rise of emerging powers and regions. The orchestrated emergence of the G20 (including South Africa), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's opening foray into the continent and Obama's symbolic visit to Ghana, including his "tough love" remarks for Africa's leaders, seemed a harbinger of things to come.
Meanwhile, having assembled an expert Africa team under Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the administration's main concerns were crisis-managing Darfur and the north-south Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, reviewing prospects for reassembling the Humpty Dumpty of Somalia and keeping a nervous eye on unsettling developments in Kenya and Nigeria. As Obama surveys the horizon leading up to 2012, many of the early initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and the Hindu Kush have settled into a pattern of engagement, even if not satisfactory resolution. The same goes for closely interrelated areas of strategic interest: the Russian "reset" agenda and navigating ambivalent transatlantic ties including the troubled eurozone. This leaves two areas devoid of Washington's strategic attention: Latin America (and the Caribbean, save for Haiti) and last, but not least, Africa.
In the Americas much depends on Obama's relations with the Dilma Roussef administration in Brazil and how the cautious relaxation of restrictions on a post-Castro Cuba is navigated. Closer to home, there is the urgency of cross-border management of relations with a Mexico battling a drug cartel insurgency, plus an immigration challenge that has made Arizona a flashpoint of violent reaction. But the penultimate test for Obama, is going to be the extent to which he charts a new course in Africa.
Opening a new chapter in US-African relations will not be simple. Overall, relations between the US and Africa are already on a good footing -- complacently and boringly so. The end of white rule in Southern Africa mainly accounts for this. As such, US-Africa policy is a non-controversial terrain of bipartisan consensus. But it is also by and large in a holding pattern, devoid of strategic vision.
As Africa becomes the focus of competitive economic strategies from traditional and emerging powers alike, the Obama administration's challenge will be to break out of this holding pattern into something more dynamic. This is a challenge for African leaders too. How will they exploit the fact that the world's lone superpower (in relative decline though it is) is led by "one of their own", with roots in the continent? The fact that Obama is of Kenyan descent ought to suggest a broader strategic vision converging with a pan-African strategic impetus. The unfolding East African Community (EAC) integration project could result in the five-nation bloc becoming Africa's first regionally integrated political federation, but this seems as yet unregistered on Washington's radar.
The vision of converging US and African agendas on the continent should be one of regional and continental integration. Unless Obama can, in consultation with Africa's leaders, grasp this, his exhortations about African leadership, responsibility and democratic good governance amounts to little for a continent that must overcome its fragmentation. In practical terms this means revisiting the Southern African Development Community-US Forum or initiating a forum for the US and the Southern African Customs Union. This could lead to new trade agreements. In West Africa, it means establishing an Economic Community of West African States-US forum with a sense of urgency informed by the likely break-up of Côte d'Ivoire, a case of "elite sovereignty" defying "popular sovereignty". Unlike in Southern Africa, there are already structured relations between Ecowas and Africom (as with the African Union as well).
Friends if the SADC
Then there is the break-up looming at the eastern end of the Sudano-Sahelian geocultural fault line. South Sudan has just concluded its self-determination referendum. An EAC-US forum could explore South Sudan's joining EAC. Such a prospect could also offer Somaliland an integrationist option while guiding the Somali region into a greater East African federated community.
The break-up of Sudan and, possibly, Côte d'Ivoire means that Africa may see more fragmentation on the road to integration. But both crises present opportunities for exercising the pan-African imagination. Rather than South Sudan and/or north and south Côte d'Ivoire being recognised as fully sovereign states, their respective regional economic communities could integrate them as self-governing autonomous areas, accelerating regional integration.
Then there is the African diaspora. There is no reason why there should not be a "Friends of Ecowas" among West African immigrants in the US, or equivalent "Friends of the EAC" and "Friends of SADC" in their respective diasporic communities. African Americans could boost their African interests through such constituency-building structures. The US is one of the major African diaspora states.
In short, the creative possibilities emanating from a joint US-African integration project are endless. The US must reposition itself as the strategic partner of a continent that will eventually outstrip both China and India in population. If Obama fails to place US-African relations on a more dynamic footing it is difficult to imagine anyone coming after him who will.
Francis A Kornegay is a research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
African immigrant found in England from 300AD
January 26 2011 at 08:21pm
You might think that African immigrants are a fairly recent addition to the British scene.
But the discovery of a 1700-year-old skeleton has turned that idea on its head.
Bones unearthed on the site of a Roman cemetery in Warwickshire are the remains of an African man, archaeologists have concluded.
The discovery, made during analysis of remains found near Stratford-upon-Avon, suggests that African immigrants lived far afield of major settlements, such as London and York, as early as the third or fourth century.
Stuart Palmer, Warwickshire County Council’s archaeology projects manager, said the find was surprising because it indicated that people of African descent lived in Warwickshire far earlier than historians thought.
Palmer said: “African skeletons have previously been found in large Romano-British towns such as York, and African units are known to have formed part of the Hadrian’s Wall garrison, but we had no reason to expect any in Warwickshire, and certainly not in a community as small as Roman Stratford.”
Experts think the skeleton, found in the Tiddington Road area of Stratford during a dig in 2009, may be that of a slave or a former Roman soldier.
A report by experts in excavated remains established that the man was of African descent and was probably in his 40’s or 50’s when he died.
Palmer said the skeletal remains also revealed that the man was heavily-built and that the condition of his spine showed he was used to carrying heavy loads.
Although the cause of the man’s death has not been established, examination of his bones found evidence of arthritis and a childhood plagued by disease or malnutrition.
Palmer added: “He could, for instance, have been a merchant although, based on the evidence of the skeletal pathology it is probably more likely that he was a slave or an army veteran who retired to Stratford.” - Daily Mail
You might think that African immigrants are a fairly recent addition to the British scene.
But the discovery of a 1700-year-old skeleton has turned that idea on its head.
Bones unearthed on the site of a Roman cemetery in Warwickshire are the remains of an African man, archaeologists have concluded.
The discovery, made during analysis of remains found near Stratford-upon-Avon, suggests that African immigrants lived far afield of major settlements, such as London and York, as early as the third or fourth century.
Stuart Palmer, Warwickshire County Council’s archaeology projects manager, said the find was surprising because it indicated that people of African descent lived in Warwickshire far earlier than historians thought.
Palmer said: “African skeletons have previously been found in large Romano-British towns such as York, and African units are known to have formed part of the Hadrian’s Wall garrison, but we had no reason to expect any in Warwickshire, and certainly not in a community as small as Roman Stratford.”
Experts think the skeleton, found in the Tiddington Road area of Stratford during a dig in 2009, may be that of a slave or a former Roman soldier.
A report by experts in excavated remains established that the man was of African descent and was probably in his 40’s or 50’s when he died.
Palmer said the skeletal remains also revealed that the man was heavily-built and that the condition of his spine showed he was used to carrying heavy loads.
Although the cause of the man’s death has not been established, examination of his bones found evidence of arthritis and a childhood plagued by disease or malnutrition.
Palmer added: “He could, for instance, have been a merchant although, based on the evidence of the skeletal pathology it is probably more likely that he was a slave or an army veteran who retired to Stratford.” - Daily Mail
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