by Mickey Huff
Aside from Antarctica, the Sahara is the largest desert mass in the world. It covers over 3.5 million square miles, or roughly 10 percent, of the continent. Parts of several African nations occupy the space, including Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan, and Tunisia. Famous for its large sand dunes, most of the terrain in fact features rough, rocky, windswept plains dotted by low mountains of up to 2000 feet. Although the population is estimated at twelve million, most live in towns and villages around the desert’s edges. In southern Algeria, northern Mali, northern Niger, and northern Chad—where corporate media have largely ignored a decade of war—the primarily pastoralist population does not number more than five million.
The roots of the secret wars trace back to the 1990s, a period of bloody civil strife in Algeria that pitted Islamist rebels against a de facto military government. The decade featured mass imprisonments, massacres and counter-massacres, and free-floating networks and affiliations among various opposition Islamist guerrilla armies. There were continuous allegations that the Algerian military’s secret intelligence service, the Departement du Renseignement et de la Securite (DRS), had infiltrated many of the rebel groups. The numbers of the dead and the injured have never been officially counted, but estimates run beyond 100,000.4
By 1999–2000, the war had wound down as amnesties were offered, an army-backed president was elected, and most of the Islamist groups were disbanded. One group vowed to fight on: Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). A leading figure was a shadowy Algerian DRS operative with a string of aliases and the nickname “El Para.” In the mid-1990s, he had trained with the Green Berets (US Army Special Forces) at Fort Bragg.5
At war’s end, the Algerian government sought to modernize and rearm. In early 2001, Algeria’s newly elected president Abdelaziz Bouteflika met with President George W. Bush in Washington DC. He requested military assistance to counter “terrorism.” There was no interest. After September 11, 2001, all this changed, when the US formulated the global war on terror.
One US focus was on the “arc of unstable Muslim countries” from Afghanistan through the Middle East to North Africa. The Pentagon believed it could work with two nations in North Africa: Morocco and Algeria. Military assistance flowed to them right away.6 A year later, in 2002, a Congressional Research Service report on potential transnational terrorism on the continent did not mention the Sahara or even GSPC as a threat.7 But by then both Algeria and the US needed the world to see that roving international terrorists populated the Sahara.
In February 2003, the GSPC, led by El Para, abducted thirty-two Europeans touring the southern Sahara in Algeria. European media reported the story every day. For a month, the GSPC kidnappers and their captives moved in convoy through southern Algeria en route to northern Mali. They were apparently undetected, despite combined US/Algerian electronic monitoring capabilities. For example, some hostages said later that, from time to time, they saw US Air Force Boeing E-3 Sentry planes, carrying the distinctive Airborne Warning and Control System (AWAC) dishes, flying low over the convoy.8
Later, troops from Chad and Niger, backed by US Special Forces, tracked down and cornered El Para. But instead of capturing the GSPC leader, they mysteriously left him to fall into the hands of yet another rebel group, the Movement for Democracy and Justice (MDJT), which sought liberation of Chad. The MDJT handed El Para over to the Algerians and he was sent north to the capital city, Algiers, for trial. A few months later, Algeria quietly released him. One Algerian official said he was no longer needed.9
The US propaganda machine went into action, kicked off by an article in Air Force Magazine describing the Sahara as “a swamp of terror,” and ripe for military action.10 By 2013, documentation of these endless activities could handily make the case for Congress that the rise of a network of jihadists was responsible for every protest and bombing across North and West Africa.11
The abductions dovetailed with the first official US military pushes into the region. In late 2002, the State Department had launched the Pan Sahel Initiative. US Special Forces deployed to Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger to train and support border patrolling. Then in July 2003, Algeria, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria signed a counterterrorism cooperation agreement with the US, which promised them increasing levels of military training and assistance. By 2005 the programs had been folded into a broader Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP) with Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia added to the mix. Management was moved from the State Department to the Department of Defense, who would coordinate small projects launched by the State Department, the Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of the Treasury. In effect, four years before the official formation of AFRICOM, US program profiles in Africa—and, specifically, in the Sahara—had been reorganized within a military framework. Funding increased steadily, from an initial sixteen million to thirty million dollars in 2006, the year AFRICOM was announced, to an estimated hundred million dollars in 2011.12 The first “official” arrival of US “boots on the ground” was 500 troops to Mauritania in 2004. A steady increase of US military trainers, Special Forces, and a new and regular program of US naval maneuvers up and down the African west coast followed.
TUAREG, PEOPLE OF THE DESERT: FROM RESISTANCE
SOCIETY TO “TERRORISTS”
Of course, the southern Sahara is not “empty.” Approximately 2.5 million indigenous Tuareg inhabit much of the central Sahara and southern Sahara. Their largest number, estimated at 800,000, live in Mali, followed by Niger, with smaller populations in Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Libya. This nomadic people, most of who live by herding goats and camels, controlled trans-Sahara trade routes for almost a thousand years, with the peak in the sixteenth century. In more modern times they have developed cultures of rebellion and resistance as wave after wave of outsiders have sought to take their territory, disrupt their traditional social structure, and end their pastoralism.
Tuareg resisted French invasion in the late nineteenth century. After that, there were rebellions in one part or another of Tuareg territory about every fifteen years, leading up to the withdrawal of the French in the 1960s. Boundaries of new nations were drawn without Tuareg consultation; instead, the new governments continued attempts to crush their pastoral culture.13
Rebellion continued. In Mali, a simmering conflict with the state marked the 1960s. Then there was relative peace for about twenty-five years, but by 1990, more widespread revolt rocked northern Niger and Mali. The Tuareg occupied most of northern Mali and declared an independent state, Azawad. Thousands were killed on all sides. France and Algeria brokered a brooding peace in Niger (1992) and in Mali (1995). Both agreements called for decentralization of national power and guaranteed integration of Tuareg resistance fighters into the countries’ respective national armies.
By most accounts, the agreements’ promises were only marginally implemented or ignored altogether, leaving the Tuareg as ethnic outsiders. Sporadic fighting continued with spikes in 2004 and 2007 in Niger, and 2006 in Mali. Meanwhile, many Tuareg men were attracted to serve and train in Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan armies, where they were not only welcomed but also benefited from a period of relatively steady income. Gaddafi made well-publicized speeches encouraging the formation of a Tuareg state.
Arguably, the rolling Tuareg rebellions after 2004 were responsive to new offensives against them. Newly armed and trained by US Special Forces, the governments of Chad, Mali, and Niger launched sustained attacks in Tuareg communities, killing civilians as well as militants. In 2005, a mob said to be of Tuareg origin attacked and burned the center of the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset. Subsequent legal proceedings revealed that Algerian security police acting as agents provocateurs had led the riot. Similarly, the 2006 rebellion in Mali was found to have been orchestrated by Algerian intelligence operatives assisted by US Special Forces. Someone was trying to frame the rebellious Tuareg as Saharan terrorists.14
A “NEW
” AMERICAN EMPIRE IN AFRICA?
Empire-making is a two-way street. A dominant power needs a threat to justify its action: “We can thus recognize the initial and implicit source of imperial right in terms of police action and the capacity of the police to create and maintain order.”15
Before 9/11, the last time the US had had an official military presence in Africa was 1941–1943, during the Allies’ North Africa campaign in the Second World War. Although there had been sporadic intelligence operations, quiet material and logistical support for proxies, as well as the singular disaster in Somalia in the early 1990s, since World War II, the US had expressed no strategic interest in the continent, much less the intent to establish a permanent military presence there. As recently as the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush had referred to Africa as a continent “of little strategic interest to the US.”16
Africa may not have been on Bush’s (public) agenda during his 2000 presidential campaign, but it was on the Pentagon’s new map by 1995. And yet the policy forces that would identify Africa—and specifically the Sahara—as targets for military expansion, culminating in AFRICOM, trace back to early 1991. Rudderless in the wake of Soviet demise, the Pentagon initiated its global search for continued strategic relevance. By the mid-1990s, military academics provided the Pentagon with a new map of the world, detailing how to perceive strategic allies and threats.17
The simplistic map was based on how well nations were integrated into the “global capitalist system.” The first, “core” states, were closely aligned with the US, primarily through the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Second were “seam states,” partially integrated nations that might be occasional strategic allies. Third were “gap states”: disorganized, failed, unintegrated, and clear threats to current and future core states’ interests. In this view, more than half of the world’s gap states were African. South Africa was deemed a core state. But two African nations—Morocco and Algeria—were deemed “seam states” with which the US might work for strategic management of surrounding “gap states.”
There was no major US corporate presence in Africa after World War II, although there was a heavy focus on resource extraction. Yet, year after year, economic data showed that, despite extreme levels of poverty across the continent, some of the highest profit margins gained by international corporations came from African investments. In 1992, 180 major US corporations formed the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) to lobby the US government to facilitate more access to African markets.18 One major strand in their discussions with government departments was the need for more security in potential markets—to declare West Africa (and its oil) of US strategic interest and to establish a military presence in the region, if necessary.19 CCA was joined in this effort by the Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli lobby group linked to the Likud party. The IASPS wanted creation of a US military “sub-command” for African oil states, in hopes that increased security would reduce the US’s need for oil from Middle Eastern states, particularly Saudi Arabia.20
The policy mechanisms for the creation of a continent-wide, military-led imperial initiative were in place by the late 1990s. When a new focus on Africa was integrated into the global war on terror in 2002, plans had already been made and military treaties had already been signed with a range of African states. The Pentagon designated three theaters: West Africa, particularly oil-producing countries; the Sahara, as a major world “gap” zone; and the Horn of Africa (northeast Africa bordering the Red Sea), as an enduring command center (based in the nation of Djibouti) for surveillance and intervention throughout the Persian Gulf region, North Africa, and Somalia.21
When the Pentagon and President Bush announced AFRICOM in 2006–2007, the discourse of official statements focused on its humanitarian-security-development mandate. But the data show that, in the period leading up to 2008, the US administration shifted its African profile to a military focus.
Despite the outflow of military aid, AFRICOM has not been well received. Every African government except Liberia’s has refused to host the military command, and the Pentagon decided, in 2011, to have its infrastructure remain with the US European Command in Germany. In addition, the US government has refused to align and share the resources of AFRICOM with the emerging regional military and peacekeeping units of the African Union, causing diplomatic
rifts.22
Finally, every known instance of AFRICOM material assistance has proved disastrous, further corrupting already shady governments, destabilizing and increasing local rivalries, and causing many civilians deaths:
▸ Somalia, 2006: AFRICOM Special Forces murdered thousands of civilians fleeing the civil war.23
▸ Niger, 2008: Government troops armed and supported by AFRICOM attacked Tuareg nomadic camps, which were also bombed by light planes. Termed an “ethnocide,” it has been reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and denounced as genocide by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.24
▸ Uganda/Congo, 2011: a Ugandan army/US Special Forces attack on the camp of the well-known Lord’s Resistance Army fails, and the guerrillas flee, leaving a path of thousands of civilians dead in the Congo.25
In context, then, the events of 2012–2013 in northern Mali are best understood as the latest in a growing list of tragic destabilizations intended to provide excuses for a US imperial initiative on the continent. After El Para’s departure, the hapless GSPC fell to bickering and slowly disintegrated. In 2006, a rump of the group renamed itself, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM).26 The GSPC breakup spawned a cluster of new jihadist groups. Rumors persisted that at least AQIM was firmly under the control of the Algerian DRS, which aimed to use it to destabilize northern Mali.27
By 2011, the Tuareg had been drawn into this conspiracy. In 2012, angry Tuareg soldiers, fleeing developments in Libya, initiated another in the 200-year history of rebellions for self-determination. They organized under the name Mouvement National de Liberation de I’Azawad (MNLA). They were immediately countered by AQIM and two new “jihadist” groups—led by local Tuareg leaders—Ansar al-Din and Jamat Tawhid wal Jihad fi Garbi Afriqqiya (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, or MOJWA). The four groups formed a loose alliance and occupied the three northern provinces of Mali, once again declaring it the independent state of Azawad.28
But it was soon clear that the three Islamic groups were determined to impose strict sharia laws. MNLA broke from the coalition. Fighting broke out. The three Islamist groups, heavily armed and provisioned by the Algerian DRS, won the day, moving on from that victory to march south. That is what alerted Western corporations and ultimately led to the French invasion. More than 100,000 people were made refugees. Thousands were killed.
Corporate media have portrayed events in Mali, and the factions involved, as irrational, but as informed insiders and independent journalists have reported, six basic facts are clear:
1. When the US administration and the Pentagon declared the Sahara a dangerous “empty zone” populated by international terrorists, the situation did not exist.
2. Agents of the Algerian military intelligence service (DRS) coopted a hapless local jihadist group, GSPC, to execute acts that gave US and international media an opportunity for speculation that the Sahara based “international terrorists.”
3. This fabrication gave the US government and Pentagon the cover and excuse to initiate military programs (many in planning since the mid-1990s) signaling the start of a “new” American imperialism on the continent.
4. Algerian security agents and intelligence operatives highjacked the indigenous Saharan Tuaregs’ 200-year struggle for self-determination, further destroying Tuareg social structure and reframing their society as a force in international terrorism.
5. Algeria, one of only two “seam states” on the Pentagon’s new map, has used the global war on terror and AFRICOM destabilization to establish itself as the d
ominant regional-imperial political economy in North Africa and the Sahara.
6. AFRICOM, sold as a humanitarian/development initiative, is at the front edge of a new military-based American imperialist project in Africa.29
The ongoing crisis in Mali may lead to that nation’s permanent de-stabilization, resulting in the kind of “failed state” that the US needs to enforce its “new” imperialism in Africa.
BRIAN MARTIN MURPHY, PHD, passed away on June 14, 2013. He was an African affairs analyst and associate professor of communication studies at Niagara University. His reportage appeared in publications like New African and African Business. For six years he was editor in chief of the Inter Press Service’s African bureau, Africa Information Afrique. He continued to serve as editorial advisor and contributor with the New York-based globalinfo.org, which distributes weekly African news reports to US subscribers. He was chair and associate professor of communication studies at Niagara University, where he taught investigative reporting, media history and theory, and interna-ttional communication. In March 2012, the Niagara Index recognized him as one of the university’s twenty “most intriguing professors,” identified by students in response to a campus survey asking which professors had the “greatest impact” on their lives.
Notes
1. For Project Censored’s previous coverage of AFRICOM, see, for example, Censored story #3, “AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources,” Censored 2008: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006–2007, Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 44–48.
