Into
Africa
By Conn Hallinan
20 March, 2007
Foreign Policy In
Focus
When
the Bush Administration recently unveiled its new African military command
– AFRICOM – Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Theresa
Whelan said that the initiative was aimed at “promoting security,
to build African capacity to build their own environments and not be
subject to the instability that has toppled governments and caused so
much pain on the continent.”
And yet hardly was the announcement
made when the Bush administration organized the overthrow of the first
stable government Somalia has had since 1991, stirring up a hornet’s
nest of regional rivalries in the strategic Horn of Africa. U.S. Special
Forces accompanied the Ethiopian Army when it stormed across the border
in late December to support the besieged and isolated Transitional Federal
Government (TFG). The United States also provided the Ethiopians with
“up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the Islamist
fighters in Somalia,” Pentagon and counterterrorism officials
told The New York Times.
The target of the invasion
was the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which over the past year had brought
a modicum of peace to the warlord-riven country. Since the poorly armed
ICU militias were routed, fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, sharply
escalated. Nor have matters improved in recent months. “The situation
here [Mogadishu] is out of control,” Ali Said Omar, chair of the
Center for Peace and Democracy, told the Guardian in late February.
The ostensible reason for
U.S. participation in the invasion was the ICU’s supposed association
with al-Qaida, a charge that has never been substantiated. U.S. warplanes
and ships shelled and rocketed parts of southern Somalia where, according
to Oxfam and the UN Refugee Center, 70 civilians died and more than
100 were wounded.
Beyond the Horn
The White House’s plans
for Africa, which reach far beyond the Horn, are part of a general militarization
of U.S. foreign policy. A recent congressional report found that “some
embassies have effectively become command posts, with military personnel
in those countries all but supplanting the role of ambassadors in conducting
American foreign policy.” The United States 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. A major U.S. base in Djibouti houses some 1,800 troops and
played an important role in the Somali invasion.
With Africa expected to provide
a quarter of all U.S. oil imports by 2015, a major focus of AFRICOM
will be the Gulf of Guinea. The gulf countries of Nigeria, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, Angola, and the Congo Republic all possess enormous oil
reserves. Some of them are plagued by exactly the kind of “instability”
that AFRICOM was created to address.
Nigeria, for instance, is
the world’s eighth largest oil exporter. “Though all the
eyes of the public seem focused on the atomic ambitions of Iran, Nigeria
is at the greatest risk of oil disruption today,” according to
Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial Corporation.
A year ago, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)
shut down one-fifth of Nigeria’s oil production through a series
of attacks on pumping stations and oilrigs.
General James L. Jones, North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supreme commander, says the U.S.-dominated
military alliance is “talking” about using its forces to
protect oil tankers off the west coast of Africa and to provide security
for “storage and production facilities in areas such as the oil-rich
Niger Delta.” NATO is doing more than talking. In June of last
year, NATO troops stormed ashore at Vila Dos Espargos on the Cape Verde
Islands. The war game modeled intervening in a civil war over energy
resources.
If NATO were to “provide
security” in the strategic Niger Delta, it would find itself in
the middle of an enormously complex political situation that pits local
people fighting for a bigger slice of the resource pie against corrupt
elites allied with transnational oil giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron,
Shell, France’s Total, and Italy’s ENI.
A spokesman for MEND, Jomo
Gbomo, charged that “oil is the key concern of the U.S. in establishing
its African command,” and warned “we will fight everyone
who goes on the side of the Nigerian government.” While the United
States says its focus is on “terrorism,” Nicole Lee of TransAfrica
responds that “This [AFRICOM] is nothing short of a sovereignty
and resource grab.”
The Bush administration has
long considered the control of resources like oil to be a strategic
issue. In 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy
Development Group recommended that the administration “make energy
security a priority of our trade and foreign policy,” a blueprint
the White House has religiously followed. In 2002, the Administration
also rolled out its “West Point Doctrine,” which in essence
said that the United States would not permit the development of a major
economic, political, or military competitor.
Both of these policies are
increasingly running up against the new energy-hungry kids on the block,
particularly China and India. China has been investing heavily into
Africa. India, Malaysia, and South Korea have also joined the oil rush,
along with competing for copper from Zambia, platinum from Zimbabwe,
timber from the Congo, and iron ore from South Africa. In a strange
reversal of the 19th century, former colonies are going head to head
with their old masters in the race for raw materials.
Darfur and Oil
The Sudan is one of those places where it seems easy to distinguish
the good guys from the bad. But up close, things are considerably more
complex. The tragedy unfolding in Darfur is fueled in part by competition
between nomads and agriculturalists. But it is also a proxy war between
Sudanese elites in Khartoum as well as an arena for regional competition
among Sudan, Chad, and Niger.
Lost in the media images
of burned villages and destitute refugees is the issue of oil. The vast
bulk of Sudan’s oil is in its south, where a long-running civil
war is currently dormant. But in 2011 the south will hold a referendum
to decide whether to remain part of Sudan or become independent. Will
western oil companies that pulled up stakes in the 1980s and decamped
to Chad push southerners to vote for independence so they can move back
in? Will Khartoum really accept a breakup of the country?
The bottom line is that Sudan,
like Somalia, Nigeria, and most African countries, is a complex place,
where military solutions are likely to cause problems, not solve them.
There is also fear, according to Nigerian journalist Dulue Mbachu, “that
increased U.S. military presence in Africa may simply serve to protect
unpopular regimes that are friendly to its interests, as was the case
during the Cold War, while Africa slips further into poverty.”
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org)
columnist.
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