AFRICOM Year Two: Seizing The Helm Of Africa By: Rick Rozoff

The article below by Rick Rozoff gives some idea as to the degree the United States is tightening its grip over Africa. The reason for America's constricting grip on Africa is simple: GREED. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives reports that -

"Nearly 80% of the strategic minerals the U.S. requires are found in Africa including 90% of the world's cobalt, 90% of the platinum, 40% of the gold, 98% of the chromium, 64% of the magnesium, and one-third of the uranium. These minerals are needed to make jet engines, cars, missiles, electronic components and so forth and so on. Africa also accounts for 18% of U.S. oil imports as compared to 25% from the Persian Gulf, with Nigeria and Angola being the fifth largest and ninth largest exporters to the U.S. respectively."

This is to say nothing of other resources including coltan (Africa is at present the ONLY source of coltan which is ESSENTIAL in the manufacture of computers, cell phones, and fiber optics), tin, zinc and the vast amount of agricultural products that are churned out of Africa by Western-owned "plantation farms" including timber, coffee, palm oil, exotic fruits of all sorts, etc. - "plantation farms" where Africans work as virtual "slave-laborers" much as their cousins did on the plantations of the "Old South." [We urge you to see our articles, "Christians in Africa: Awake," and "The Congo and American Greed."]

October 1st [2009] marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM). AFRICOM was established as a temporary command under the wing of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) a year earlier and launched as an independent entity on October 1, 2008. Its creation signalled several important milestones in plans by the United States ... to expand into all corners of the earth and to achieve military, political and economic hegemony in the Southern as well as the Northern Hemisphere.

AFRICOM is the first American regional military command established OUTSIDE of North America in the post-Cold War era. Its area of responsibility includes more nations – 53 – than any other U.S. military command. By way of comparison, EUCOM includes 51 nations, among which are 19 new nations emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and the reunification of Germany. The Pacific Command (PACOM) incorporates 36 countries in its theater of operations. Central Command (CENTCOM) currently includes 20 nations in what is referred to as the Broader Middle East. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) covers 32 nations, 19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean, of which 14 are U.S. and European territories ...

Africa is [the last] ... continent targeted by the Pentagon for a comprehensive military structure ... Until the acquisition of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti in early 2001 ... there was no permanent U.S. military installation on the continent.

The permanent U.S. base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, Africa

The beginning of AFRICOM's second year has witnessed major military exercises on the western and eastern ends of the continent. On September 29 AFRICOM led the militaries of 30 African nations in the ten-day Africa Endeavor 2009 maneuvers in Gabon off the coast of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. "The U.S. military has begun an exercise in the African nation of Gabon ... to improve command and control between forces for possible peacekeeping or anti-terrorism missions. Africom ... is sponsoring the exercise and much of the instruction is done by U.S. military personnel based in Europe and the United States."

Right: SFC Julius Bryant explains bridge operations to the Liberian delegation in Africa Endeavor 2009. The delegates are accompanied by COL A.L. Rumphrey, of the U.S. African Command; Left U.S. Air Force personnel teaching computer skills to an African contingent from Burundi.

The Gabon-based exercise reprised the previous year's Africa Endeavor which was run by European Command before AFRICOM's formal activation and which included "21 African nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the United States. Nations and organizations who participated...were Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Uganda, the United States and Zambia ...

The Pentagon participated with personnel from "U.S. Marine Forces Europe (MARFOREUR); U.S. Air Forces in Europe, Public Affairs; First Combat Communications Squadron, Ramstein Air Force Base; 8th Communications Battalion, Camp Lejeune; Marine Headquarters History, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa; U.S. European Command (EUCOM); U.S. African Command (AFRICOM); and the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC)."

This year's maneuvers effected the formal transfer of Africa from European Command to the new Africa Command. From October 16-25 the U.S. is heading a multinational military exercise, Natural Fire 10, in Uganda in which More than 1,000 American and East African troops are ... deployed...as the United States carries out its biggest military exercise in Africa this year. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are to provide troops to join 450 U.S. military personnel in drills which involve live fire in the field as well as convoy operations, crowd control and vehicle checkpoints ...

An African newspaper, however, accounts for the exercise's ulterior motives:

"[T]he decision to site the exercise in northern Uganda raises questions about whether it may presage a renewed US-supported assault against the Lord's Resistance Army, which has waged an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government since 1987."

Joseph Kony, head of the LRA

NOTE: The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a sectarian Christian militant group based in northern Uganda. The LRA operates mainly in northern Uganda, but also in parts of Sudan and DR Congo. The group was formed in 1987 and is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa's longest-running conflicts. It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself the "spokesperson" of the Holy Spirit. The group claims to be establishing a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments. While the LRA is accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, sexual enslavement of women and children, and forcing children to participate in hostilities, THE MAIN REASON THAT THE U.S. IS TARGETING THE LRA IS THAT IT IS "UNSETTLING" AMERICA'S ATTEMPT TO RAPE THE AREA OF ITS OIL AND MINERAL RIGHTS.

The same source continued with these observations:

DJIBOUTI: U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is greeted by U.S. Military officials in Djibouti. Gates arrived to inspect U.S. counterterrorism activities in the Horn of Africa.

"The exercise in northern Uganda is scheduled to begin one week after the conclusion of another US-led military exercise in Gabon. Nearly 30 African nations – including Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – took part in that communications-focused initiative led by the US Africa Command ... TOGETHER, THESE EXERCISES ARE CITED BY AFRICOM'S CRITICS AS FURTHER INDICATIONS OF WHAT THEY DESCRIBE AS THE GROWING MILITARIZATION OF THE U.S. PRESENCE IN AFRICA. Situating the exercise in Uganda reflects the close military relationship that the United States has developed with that East African country ... Worries persist in Africa that the Pentagon intends to station large numbers of US troops on the continent, despite denials by Africom's leaders that such a move is being planned. The United States already maintains about 2,000 troops at a base in Djibouti. This Joint Task Force/Horn of Africa detachment is the source of some of the US soldiers, sailors and Marines who will participate in Natural Fire 10."

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

NOTE: In his book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism At The Heart of American Power, Jeff Sharlet, described the secretive "goings on" of a Washington-based group known as "THE FAMILY" to which a powerful group of Christian conservative American Senators and Congressmen belong, including such luminaries as Tom Coburn, John Ensign, Joe Pitts, Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback. Sharlet asserts that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, is a member of this organization. Since associating himself (i.e., Museveni) with "THE FAMILY," a wave of persecution against gays has broken out in Uganda – and so much so that a bill is now before the Ugandan Parliament that makes homosexuality a crime against the state punishable by death. THE FAMILY has asserted that it has had nothing to do with this campaign against homosexuals in Uganda, but the claim has a very hollow ring to it. ALL THIS GIVES ONE PAUSE AS TO WHAT SUCH SO-CALLED CHRISTIANS – IF THEY EVER GAIN POWER IN THE UNITED STATES – MIGHT DO TO THE HOMOSEXUAL COMMUNITY IN THIS COUNTRY. We urge you to see our article on THE FAMILY, "The Cedars: The House on 24^th Street." Please also see our article, "The Creation of an Enemy Absolute – Beginning First with the Gay and Lesbian Community." [Antipas Editor]

On October 20 a Rwandan news source revealed that "The visiting US commander of US Army Africa, Maj. Gen. William B. Garrett III, has stressed that the US army is interested in strengthening its cooperation with the Rwandan Defense Force (RDF)." Garrett was quoted as saying "We are hoping to improve the relationship between Rwandan Defense Forces and the US army – this involves increase in interaction between our forces ... Likewise, we hope that the Rwandan Defense Forces can also participate in our exercises. So we are hoping to increase the level of cooperation between the US and the Rwandan Defense forces." The U.S. previously deployed Rwandan troops they trained and armed to Somalia.

Two years earlier the Pentagon led a multinational military exercise, Operation Flintlock 2007, in the capital of Mali with troops from thirteen African nations. In the prototype exercise, Flintlock 2005, the U.S. deployed over 1,000 Special Operations troops and Green Berets for joint military maneuvers with counterparts from Senegal, Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria and Tunisia. Flintlock 2005 was employed to launch Washington's Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative with Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. An American news report of the exercise bore the title "U.S. Said Eying Sahara For New War Front." An official with the U.S. Special Operations Command Europe said at the time, "This is just the start of decades worth of work in Africa," a sentiment echoed by an American armed forces publication which wrote "If military planners have their way, U.S. troops are going to be deploying to Africa for years or maybe decades."

U.S. forces in Mali

What is in fact the reason for the heightened American military role in Mali and Niger rather than the Pentagon's by now standard claim – alleged al-Qaeda threats – was mentioned in a Reuters dispatch of last year:

"The stakes are rising. We've got companies, beyond gold exploration [Mali is Africa's third largest gold producer], wanting to explore for oil in northern Mali. There has been significant interest by investors wanting to explore for oil in Timbuktu (and other northern towns) ... If oil is eventually discovered, that could of course play a role."

Gold mining operations in Mali run by Resolute Mining Ltd., an Australian Mining Consortium financed largely with U.S. money

AFRICOM's mission in the region, as with much of the rest of Africa, is to wage counterinsurgency campaigns to secure vital resources including gold, precious stones, oil, natural gas and uranium.

A Middle Eastern website put together several components of AFRICOM's plans in rendering this analysis:

"The United States is taking its military venture in Africa to new levels amid suspicions that Washington could be advancing yet another hidden agenda. American operatives are expected to fly pilotless surveillance aircraft over [Seychelles] territory from US ships off its coast ... Washington has also started to equip Mali with USD 4.5 million worth of military vehicles and communications equipment, in what is reported to be an increasing US involvement in Africa. The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa ... [A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention."

The same news site reported two days earlier that a U.S. spy drone had been shot down over the southern Somali port of Kismayu. "Kismayu residents routinely report suspected US drones flying over the port. The drones are believed to be launched from warships in the Indian Ocean." It was also reported that the -

"US plans to make a Blackwater-style entry into Somalia. The grounds have reportedly been established for an armed American presence on Somali soil with a US security firm [Michigan-based CSS Global Inc.] winning a contract in the war-ravaged country."

Michigan-based CSS Global Inc. is linked to Blackwater - the same company that was called out to "quell rioting in New Orleans" after Katrina. It seems that the U.S. is prepared to use in Somalia the same mercenaries it used in New Orleans. It doesn't make a whit of difference to the elites: The "masses" are the "masses" - whether found in Africa or the United States. "Lawlessness" is defined as anything that gets in the way of "good order" anywhere in the American Imperial System - that is, "good order" that enables the American elites to plunder mankind.

The development was characterized as follows:

"Washington has been [increasingly] deputizing the companies, which are notorious for misusing their State Department-issued gun licenses as excuses for trigger-ready atrocities. The move has been denounced as an effort at putting a non-military face on the US pursuits in the respective countries."

Also in 2007 it was reported that the "USS Fort McHenry will begin a roughly six-month deployment to Western Africa as the Navy tries a new concept it has dubbed the Global Fleet Station program." The Global Fleet Station (GFS) program was elaborated in 2007 in a U.S. combined maritime services release, "A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea power." In June of that year Admiral Harry Ulrich, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe, spoke at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. and said "The Global Fleet Station concept is 'closely aligned' with the task to be provided by the still-developing U.S. Africa Command."

The USS Fort McHenry is a Whidbey Island class dock landing ship; it carries a large contingent of Marines as well as a party of Navy Seals; it features a massive well deck for the transport of four air-cushion hovercraft for landing its Marine contingent. It is used in "special operations" involving so-called "anti-terrorist" activities.

Even before AFRICOM was formally announced, Defense News reported that the Pentagon had already decided to divide the continent into five regions: North, south, central, east and west:

"One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola ... A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara ..."

Before the official inauguration of AFRICOM, analysts around the world sounded the alarm that beneath the innocuous-sounding claims by Washington that it was solely interested in becoming a "security partner" to African nations lurked something more geostrategically significant. And more sinister.

Nigerian sources report:

"From the current data on production capacities and proven oil reserves, only two regions appear to exist where, in addition to the Middle East, oil production will grow and where a strategy of diversification may easily work: The Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Guinea. The Caspian Sea came into the limelight after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the US has since entered the region and built up a strong military presence on both sides of the lake. Some of the problems linked to Caspian oil give the Gulf of Guinea a competitive edge. Much of its oil is conveniently located off shore. [T]he region enjoys several advantages, including its strategic location just opposite the refineries of the US east coast. It is ahead of all other regions in proven deep water oil reserves, which will lead to significant savings in security provisions. And it requires a drilling technology easily available from the Gulf of Mexico." [Please see our articles, "The Caucasus Mountains, Gog, Magog, and Chevron Oil" and "The Elite's Explanation of What's Happening in Chechnya."]

Algerian sources report: 

"A major focus of AFRICOM will be the Gulf of Guinea, with its enormous oil reserves in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola and the Congo Republic ... The U.S. is already pouring $500 million into its Trans-Sahel Counterterrorism Initiative that embraces Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in North Africa, and nations boarding the Sahara including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Senegal." By building a dozen forefront bases or establishments in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other African nations, the U.S. will gradually establish a network of military bases to cover the entire continent and make essential preparations for docking an aircraft carrier fleet in the region. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with the U.S. at the head...carried out a large-scale military exercise in Cape Verde, a western African island nation, with the sole purpose for control of the sea and air corridor of crude oil extracting zones and to monitor the situation with oil pipelines operating there. [The US] is also seeking to set up military facilities in Senegal, Ghana and Mali, so as to facilitate its interference in the oil-rich African nations ... [T]he African Command represents a vital, crucial link for the US adjustment of its global military deployment.

Oil platform in the Gulf of Guinea

The Algerian report continues ominously:

"At present, it moves the gravity of its [i.e., US] forces in Europe eastward and opens new bases in East Europe. Africa is flanked by Eurasia, with its northern part located at the juncture of the Asian, European and African continents. The present US global military redeployment centers mainly on an 'arc of instability' from the Caucasus, Central and Southern Asia down to the Korean Peninsula ... AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe."

A third set of observations is from a director of the Chinese Army's Academy of Military Sciences. He situates America's military drive into Africa, all of Africa, within an integrated global context ...

The campaign to subjugate an entire continent with its more than one billion inhabitants to Western military and economic demands is an integral and milestone component of broader [US] designs around the world. Starting with the Balkans and Eastern Europe as a whole after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and its NATO allies have relentlessly pursued plans to penetrate and dominate the former Eastern bloc, former Soviet space, the Broader Middle East, the Arctic Circle and Greater Antarctica and to reclaim and solidify control of Latin America and Oceania.

AFRICOM is an exponential advancement of the campaign by the US to reassert and expand global supremacy by targeting a continent at the crossroads of north and south, west and east, and the industrial and the developing worlds. As an earlier citation mentioned, it is also the meeting place of three continents and the Middle East with coasts on two of the world's oceans and three of its seas.

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