african reports
can we really understand in Europe what it means to read that 27,000 people are on the move?

what elements in our governments' foreign affairs departments are looking into appalling events continuing in Africa at present?

what is the EU Commission's take on these matters?

"They Bombed Everything that Moved"

Aerial military attacks on civilians and humanitarians in Sudan,

1999 - 2011

(report and data update as of October 15, 2011)

www.sudanbombing.org

July 15 - October 15, 2011

Since this report and data spreadsheet were originally released on May 6, 2011, the Sudan Armed Forces---at the direction of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime in Khartoum---have continued their aerial onslaught against civilians in various regions of North Sudan.  This savagery has now spread from South Kordofan to another northern border state, Blue Nile.  At the same time, civilian villages in Darfur, without any military presence, continue to be targeted.  I have argued that in aggregate, these many hundreds of confirmed, deliberate aerial attacks on civilians and humanitarians---going back more than a decade---constitute crimes against humanity.  So, too, does the widespread, systematic denial of humanitarian access on an ethnic basis, something the UN first reported in Darfur in 2003(in South Sudan the Nuba Mountains this had begun over a decade earlier).  And yet these tactics, which have defined the military strategy of the Khartoum regime for so long, show no signs of being curtailed.  Nor is there any sign that these atrocity crimes will confront meaningful action by international actors, who know full well their deadly consequences---and hence the consequences of their own acquiescence.

In South Kordofan the bombing continues to be particularly intense in the Nuba Mountains, and for months has prevented planting and tending of crops; continued bombing now endangers even a meager harvest.  Khartoum has prevented all international humanitarian access to a vast population that is now squarely facing starvation. Many people have made the dangerous trek to South Sudan, some 8,000 as of mid-September, and the UN High Commission for Refugees estimated at the time that there were some 500 new arrivals per day. 

Civilians in Blue Nile---another region with a long history of marginalization, violence, and tyranny at the hands of the NIF/NCP regime---are consistently reported as enduring daily bombing attacks.  Civilian casualties have been high and the number of civilians displaced by bombardment is enormous.  Elected governor Malik Agar estimates that half of Blue Nile's 1.2 million people are now on the move.  This is harvest season and it appears increasingly unlikely that those forced from their lands by aerial military violence will be able to survive without international humanitarian aid---which Khartoum has again denied categorically. 

Lacking food and humanitarian assistance, and facing increasing violence, civilians from Blue Nile have begun to pour into neighboring Ethiopia, with no end to the exodus in sight:

"The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says 27,500 people have fled the conflict in Blue Nile State to nearby Ethiopia since early September. The agency is due to open a second camp 200km from the border with a capacity of 3,000 people, as fighting and SAF aerial bombardments continue." (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks [IRIN] [dateline: Kurmuk], October 13, 2011)

In South Kordofan, the SPLA/M-North leader Abdel Aziz el-Hilu reports that as many as 500,000 Nuba have been displaced, and he has assembled locality data to support this claim.  The actual figure for displaced persons can't be known, but now---after more than four months of intense bombings---it is almost certainly more than 300,000, and the number of conflict-affected civilians much greater.  Khartoum's military assaults on Abyei (May 20), South Kordofan (June 5), and Blue Nile (September 1) may now have displaced 1 million civilians.

Origins and character of conflict in Blue Nile

Violence in Blue Nile was initiated by Khartoum's Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) on September 1, 2011 in yet another well-prepared assault.  Such an assault was predicted in a previous iteration of this update (July 15, 2011), as it was by the elected governor of Blue Nile, Malik Agar.  Malik insisted to all who would listen that the longer conflict and ethnic targeting of civilians continued in South Kordofan, the more likely it was that Blue Nile would be drawn into the fighting.  Unsurprisingly, Malik's residence in Damazine was the first target of SAF shelling.  Such shelling has now extended southward toward Kurmuk as Khartoum increasingly engages in "stand-off" military actions against the forces so effectively led by Malik (the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement-North; SPLA/M-N).  Large-scale, long-range, and indiscriminate shelling has many of the same effects as aerial bombardment by Antonov aircraft, which are inherently incapable of achieving bombing accuracy sufficient to be militarily effective.  It is now the greatest fear of many on the ground in Blue Nile.  UN IRIN reports from Kurmuk (October 12, 2011):

"The priority is to move patients from the hospital as quickly as possible, either back home or across the border to Ethiopia where other aid agencies can care for them. 'The fear that an Antonov might bomb [the hospital] is terrible,' [Dr. Evan] Atar said, adding: 'Most of the people who were injured are people who were running. The bomb usually explodes upwards in a conical form, so if you keep down you are fine.'"

But fear in such circumstances can be extremely difficult to control; and the fact that Khartoum is notorious for its deliberate bombing of hospitals is widely known among the people who endured more than 20 years of civil war (see original May 6 report, pp. 14 - 15, 23 - 24).  Moreover, as Dr. Atar also notes:

"'In the [civil] war, there was peace in the villages; now they [the Antonovs] bomb even the villages---that's the problem; and the increasing accuracy of the bombing is leading to rising patient numbers as the weeks go by.'" (UN IRIN [dateline: Kurmuk], October 12, 2011)

While still not sufficiently accurate to be militarily effective, there have been repeated reports of Antonovs increasing their accuracy through crude bomb-sighting mechanisms, and their destructiveness by using bombs with greater explosive power.

Atar, who is the only doctor in Kurmuk, notes the connection between bombing and shelling by Khartoum's SAF and the looming food shortages: "Food would also become a problem [ ]. 'First of all the war will continue and the second thing is, now, hunger will come and it is not going to spare anyone unless the people go and become refugees to be helped, but for the people left within, it is going to be a big problem.' Artillery fire directed at rebels could be the last straw. 'For now it is the Antonov bombing, but I don't think I would be here if there is shelling ... and no patients could be brought here,' Atar said" (emphasis added) (UN IRIN October 12). And even now, a major SAF force is on the move toward Kurmuk.  A highly alarming report from the Satellite Sentinel Project (September 23), based on substantial satellite photography, indicates a massive formation of armor, troops, and military aircraft: "heavily camouflaged, mechanized units comprising at least a brigade---3,000 troops or more"; "these forces appear to be equipped with heavy armor and artillery, supported by helicopter gunships."  Once they are in artillery range, they will likely engage in annihilating shelling, which will compel the SPLA/N to withdraw or risk large numbers of casualties among civilians who have remained (a rapidly dwindling number).

The experience of civilians who are bombed and shelled is captured in an important dispatch from Agence France-Presse (also with a Kurmuk dateline, October 10):

"Anima's eyes flicker and weep as the doctor sews up the stump of his left arm, before he rolls back on the hospital bed, one of the latest victims in Sudan's relentless bombing campaign in Blue Nile state. Dr Evan Atar says he has done seven amputations since war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and fighters loyal to the SPLM-North in Blue Nile state last month. He has treated more than 600 others for shrapnel wounds. 'We are really now running out of supplies. We have been running here and there and crying....  But now where to get it from is really an issue,' he said. President Omar al-Bashir has blocked foreign aid agencies from entering Blue Nile and nearby South Kordofan state, where a separate conflict between the army and SPLM-North rebels has raged since June." "Kurmuk's is the only hospital between neighbouring Ethiopia and Damazin ... and Dr Atar is the only doctor. He says the hospital will run out of vital supplies such as saline solution, cotton and gauze this week if no aid arrives, after using up six months' supplies in one [month]. In another hospital bed, 65-year-old Altom Osman is recovering from a deep shrapnel wound in his back and one in his arm after a bomb hit the village of Sali an hour north of Kurmuk. 'I was taking some sorghum flour to my wife. We were passing our farm and then the Antonov came immediately and bombed,' Osman whispered."

[full report and data spreadsheet at www.sudanbombing.org]

Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

ereeves@smith.edu
413-585-3326
Skype: ReevesSudan
www.sudanreeves.org

B.F.Bankie

Sudan Sensitisation Project (SSP)

www.bankie.info

Minerals / Resources in Uganda:
1. Copper
2. Cobalt
3. Tin
4. Phosphates
5. Vermiculite
6. Diamond
7. Gold
8. Petroleum
9. Columbite/Tantalite
10. Kaolin
11. Cobalt
12. Limestone
13. Chronite
14. Magnetite
15. Uranium
16. Wolfram
17. Iron ore
18. Gypsum
19. Beryllium
20. Bismuth
21. Chromium
22. Lead
23. Lithium
24. Niobium-tantalum
25. Glass/silica sand
26. Feldspar
27. Clays
28. Marble
29. Platinum group of minerals
30. Salts
31. Nickel
32. Glass
33. Sand

Uganda : Another US Military Adventure

By Nicholas Kramer

October 24, 2011 "Information Clearing House"  -- I have authorized a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces… On October 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy… These forces will act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]… Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

So stated Barack Obama, the elected representative of the American people and the leader of our empire, in a short note to the leaders of the US congress. Thus began yet another immoral military adventure into foreign lands at a time when America itself is crumbling to such an extent that its own citizens have (finally) begun long-term occupations of its cities and towns.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Lord’s Resistance Army is a brutal scourge on the African people. Its members have indeed “murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women, and children in central Africa” as Obama has stated. For example, according to Human Rights Watch, over the course of just four days in 2009, the LRA viciously killed at least 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others (likely for use as child soldiers, sex slaves, and other horrible purposes). Most of those killed (including a three year-old girl and a 72-year old man) were first tied up, then hacked or beaten to death with machetes, axes, or clubs. We should all hope for the end of this organization, and on an individual level do whatever we can to speed its demise.

As an individual, I could choose to travel to central Africa to volunteer as a human shield, standing between the LRA and its victims. Or, as a less extreme option, I could donate my time and/or money to a non-governmental organization that is working to end the violence in the region through capacity-building and demobilization of child soldiers. I could engage in any number of actions as an individual that would be both moral and beneficial to the people of Uganda and other affected countries.

If only we could trust governments to make good and moral decisions that would always reflect what we would do as individuals. Unfortunately for us all, the US government is not known for this, especially when it comes to propping up authoritarian regimes, arming dictators with weapons to use against their own people, and training military-types to more effectively and efficiently torture and otherwise “control” human beings. See, for example, US military “aid” to Afghanistan, Bahrain, Colombia, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Lebanon, Oman, Turkey, and the West Bank/Gaza, all of whom received more than $100 million each just between 2002 and 2004 and tend to be regularly cited by even the US State department for things such as ethnic/minority oppression, oppression of women, threats to civil liberties, child exploitation, religious persecution, and judicial/prison abuses.

The simple truth is that throughout history, violence perpetrated by governments (often against their own people) tends to far outstrip violence perpetrated by non-state actors, including terrorist organizations, rebel groups, and individual criminals. This is not because governments are any less moral than violent non-state actors, but rather because governments have more resources at their disposal with which to wreak their terror.

In his statement celebrating the enactment of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, Barack Obama commended the government of Uganda “for its efforts to stabilize the northern part of the country” against the LRA and noted that we “have supported regional governments as they worked to provide for their people’s security.” The people of Uganda might wonder exactly when it is that their government is providing for their “security”: is it when Ugandan women are gang raped by members of the military and/or police? Or perhaps it is when state security forces mutilate the genitals of Ugandan men through kicking, beating with sticks, puncturing with hypodermic needles, and tying the penis with wire or weights. These are just a few examples of the “efforts” of the Ugandan government in what Human Rights Watch describes as a “state-sanctioned campaign of political suppression” which includes “illegal and arbitrary detention and unlawful killing/extrajudicial executions, and using torture to force victims to confess to links to the government’s past political opponents or current rebel groups” in its 2004 report State of Pain: Torture in Uganda.

The details of violence and torture are difficult to even read, but it is important to understand exactly what sort of activities our government is supporting in our names. Put yourself, for instance, in Derrick’s shoes – his story was also recounted in the Human Rights Watch report mentioned above. One day in Uganda, Derrick was riding in a bus which was hijacked by five or six armed members of the Ugandan military in civilian clothes. The men pulled two passengers from the bus, executed them, and then asked Derrick if he knew them. When he denied it, they started beating him, shoved a gun into his mouth, then dragged him to the headquarters of the Ugandan military intelligence organization. He was there beaten with an electrical wire and a hammer, cut deeply with a knife across his back, stabbed in his testicles with needles, and finally shocked and burned with electricity before he lost consciousness. He woke up under the steps of a nearby building; his captors apparently had no more use for him.

Now put yourself more realistically in the shoes of his torturers and their employer, the Ugandan government, which Barack Obama commends. Make no mistake: it is they who we support with our “aid” – not Derrick, and certainly not the people of Uganda. Ending the threat to Ugandan civilians posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army is a noble goal (for who and under what authority are separate questions). But at what moral cost do American military personnel “advise” the Ugandan military? When we support brutal governments in foreign countries – be it through aid, training, or troops on the ground – there are real and lasting consequences for the people who live there. There are many reasons to oppose the US incursion into Uganda (the risk of blowback, the chance of escalation, the furtherance of the imperial presidency, the financial cost, the practical fact that we can’t intervene everywhere, and so on), but the most important argument is moral.

In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was not seeking merely to criticize, but rather to acknowledge the moral hypocrisy of his calls for non-violence in the civil rights movement while implicitly supporting the violent actions of his own government. “For the sake of those boys,” he continued, “for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” For the sake of us all, we cannot be silent now. It is fundamentally immoral to arm, train, or otherwise “advise” any government that engages in torture and/or other forms of repression, no matter who our common enemy may be. As the still-reigning greatest purveyor of violence worldwide, the single most important action the United States government could take against the horrors of the world would be to stop contributing to them. Please join me in demanding an immediate end to US military operations in and aid to the Ugandan government.

Nicholas Kramer is a former associate investigator for an oversight & investigations (O&I) committee in the United States Senate. He no longer lives or works in Washington, D.C. He may be reached through his website at TakingResponsibilityForEmpire.com

WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT: Oil Find ‘Africa’s Biggest’

By The Times
"The Times" - -Heritage Oil announced details of a large oil discovery in Uganda in January 2009, which the company claimed could be the largest onshore discovery in sub-Saharan Africa.
Heritage said that its discovery – Giraffe1 – in the Lake Albert region, could total at least 400 million barrels of oil.

However, Paul Atherton, chief financial officer, told The Times that the wider field it was developing, dubbed Buffalo-Giraffe, had several “billions of barrels of oil in place”, although it was unclear how much of this would be recoverable.He said that the field, which is 9,000 square kilometers in size – or six times the size of Greater London – was unquestionably the largest onshore discovery made in sub-Saharan Africa in at least 20 years, possibly ever.Mr Atherton said that of the 18 wells the company had drilled in the basin so far, all had produced oil. “Clearly the entire basin is full of oil,” he said. “It’s a world-class discovery, the most exciting new basin in Africa in decades.”

Previously, the largest onshore fields discovered in sub-Saharan Africa were at Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, where 900 million barrels were found in 1985, and at Kome in Chad, where 485 million barrels were found in 1977.

Mr Atherton said that it would take at least another three years to start commercial production. The crude could be exported by road or rail, he said, but analysts believe that the most practical solution would be to build an 806-mile pipeline to take it to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and then the Kenyan coast. The pipeline would need to be heated and designed to traverse swampy and mountainous land. It would cost an estimated $1.5 billion (£1 billion) to complete.Heritage and its partner Tullow Oil, which also has a 50 per cent equity stake in the project, would need to demonstrate that the field could produce at least 400 million barrels of oil to justify the cost of building such a pipeline. Richard Griffith, an Evolution Securities analyst, said the latest discovery “thrashed” this commerciality threshold.

See Also - Uganda : Pressure Mounts To Make Public Oil Agreements:Uganda's oil discovery is already attracting major players like Italian oil giant Eni Spa, U.S. Exxon Mobil, France's Total and of recent the China National Offshore Oil Company. The country does not have the funds to finance the production of oil and instead signed agreements with oil giants spelling out how the revenue will be shared with investors willing to fund the production phase. The companies will build an oil refinery in Uganda and an oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. This will enable the landlocked country to sell its estimated two billion barrels of crude oil internationally

Uganda's oil contracts leaked - a bad deal made worse: The repeated claims by the Ugandan government and the oil companies that Uganda has received a very good deal and the best in the region are not only a fiction, but were reliant on the real terms of the contracts being kept secret. While the contracts will deliver vast profits to Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil, the contracts will prevent the Ugandan people from receiving their due benefits.

Oil extraction and the potential for domestic instability in Uganda: The paper identifies and discusses in detail three sources of domestic volatility that may arise as a result of oil development.

Uganda: Oil could cause war : The attacks are by armed gangs suspected to be rebels of the FDLR, LRA, and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). In the ongoing campaign in DR Congo, President Joseph Kabila is being criticised for failing to restore peace in this vital area.

The Son of Africa Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels

By John Pilger

October 19, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as “highly unusual” and “surprising”, even “weird”. It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and “protect” Indonesia, which President Nixon called “the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize”. Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually “self defence” or “humanitarian”, words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.
In Africa, says Obama, the “humanitarian mission” is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA), which “has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the “national security of the United States”. The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US “national security” usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s “president-for-life” Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military “aid” – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American “threat”. When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, “Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats”. These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s “humanitarian intervention” was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the “rebel” National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.
Like the “victory” in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified “pro-Gaddafi” fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, “celebrate”. According to General Petraeus, there is now a war “of perception … conducted continuously through the news media”.

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

www.johnpilger.com

The Real Reason Obama Is Sending US Troops To Uganda

• Posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton on October 22, 2011 at 9:10am in ABOUT POLITICS
• View Discussions

?From The Ramparts        

 Junious Ricardo Stanton        

 The Real Reason Obama Sent Troops To Uganda

“A DETERMINED push by Western wildcatters and big oil companies from fast-growing Asian economies such as those of China and Malaysia may change the fortunes of several countries in remoter and trickier bits of Africa once largely ignored by foreign investors. One of the most spectacular recent finds has been in Uganda. The reserves of the Albertine rift, which takes in the Ugandan and Congolese shores of Lake Albert (see map), are said to need $10 billion for development. All being well, Uganda will soon become a mid-sized producer, alongside countries such as Mexico. Foreign investment in Uganda may nearly double this year to $3 billion. The country expects to earn $2 billion a year from oil by 2015.” www.economist.com/node/15825780

On Friday October 14th President Obama sent a letter to Congress informing them he was sending a small contingent of US Special Ops Forces to Uganda ostensibly on another “humanitarian mission” to advise Ugandan officials tracking down Joseph Kony the newest bogey man being used to justify US intervention, imperialism and the imposition of AFRICOM on the African continent. Just like the Orwellian doublespeak Obama used when he and the NATO warmongers  attacked Libya for “humanitarian reasons” on behalf of the international bankers supposedly to prevent Col. Mormar Kadafi from killing rebels, Obama is now sending troops into Uganda to stop another “notorious bad guy” from murdering, looting and wrecking havoc in Central Africa! This song is getting old and tired: invasion is peace, massive murder of civilians is part of the program and theft of resources is liberation. George Orwell would be so proud.

At some point in time, the US public must stop believing the mass media’s unsubstantiated assertions and start asking pointed questions like: why after twenty-five years is Joseph Kony all of a sudden such an evil force? But beyond that, stop and think a minute and look at history. Where did Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden get the weapons, military support and the knowhow the US claimed they were using to either to kill dissident Iraqis or to mastermind 9-11?  Now we are being asked to believe Joseph Kony is this monster who needs Uncle Sam to come in and bring him to justice?!  We need to ask ourselves where is Kony getting the weapons, camouflage gear, food and supplies he needed to start his reign of terror that has been going on for twenty-five years?  Did the Russians fund and supply him? Is it the Chinese or is it the West (Europeans)? Is it the US? From what the Western media says about him, and we know how reliable they are don’t we, we are supposed to believe Kony is a religious fanatic on a mission to seize power and run the country in accordance with the Ten Commandments. Hmm, except for the fighting, raping and killing he is doing, Kony could fit right in with the Christian Right in the US. He and George W. Bu$h must have a lot in common.

We are expected to believe via US media brainwashing this guy Kony stayed under the radar, getting guns ammunition, food and supplies from who knows where or out of thin air for twenty-five years then all of a sudden the US decides enough is enough, that US troops are a must and Joseph Kony is the target. Where was Uncle Sam when the Coltan Wars in Central Africa were being fought? What, you never heard of the Coltan Wars or the Congo wars? “Cellphones may have revolutionized the way we communicate, but in Central Africa their biggest legacy is war. Nearly 3 million people have died in Congo in a four-year war over coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and playstations. Eighty percent of the world's coltan reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mountainous jungle area where the coltan is mined is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed ‘Africa's first World War,’ pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighboring countries and numerous armed factions. The victims are mostly civilians. Starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands and the fighting has displaced 2 million people from their homes. Often dismissed as an ethnic war, the conflict is really over natural resources sought by foreign corporations -- diamonds, tin, copper, gold, but mostly coltan” http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/kinshasa/

The US has been openly and clandestinely arming various ethnic groups in Africa for decades, fomenting hostilities and stoking the fires they create in order to justify selling more arms to whomever will buy them. Keep in mind the Africans  are buying the weapons on credit (with interest). This means the banksters get their cut along with the weapons manufacturers and the arms middle men and they all get paid from US tax payer dollars!! “Because many of the recipient countries remain some of the world’s poorest, the U.S. government provided around $87 million in foreign military financing loans (subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars) to cover the costs, increasing the debt burden that is already suffocating the continent. The DRC alone owes more than $150 million in outstanding DoD loans, with Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan owing another $160 million combined. These loans, accrued while corrupt dictators were serving as U.S. clients, have further contributed to the economic hardships of these nations by saddling them with unproductive military debt. In an article titled Why the U.S. Won’t Help, a Nairobi newspaper recently explained, ‘Right from the days of the Cold War, Western governments have been comfortable with a situation in which African regimes squandered meager resources on the instruments of war, borrowing from the West to finance domestic consumption. The war in the Congo and the countries involved in it are a case in point’... In 1998, the State Department licensed commercial weapons sales by U.S. manufacturers to sub-Saharan Africa worth up to $64 million, on top of the $12 million in government-to-government deliveries that year. Commercial sales to the region included 300 M16s, 236 pistols and revolvers, 3940 rifles, and 10.8 million cartridges of .22-.50 caliber ammunition. A number of the countries engaged in the Congo war were recipients of these stocks, including Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Namibia.  Congress also continues to provide only meager amounts of debt relief and development aid. Of the $370 million requested by the Clinton administration for various debt relief initiatives in FY2000, less than half – $123 million – was approved by Congress. The hypocrisy of asking Africa to develop and democratize while shrinking levels of non-military international aid and increasing weapons and training to the continent does not seem to have registered with policy-makers. To demonstrate real commitment to developing a new partnership with Africa, the U.S. needs to redirect the focus away from strengthening military capacity and toward promoting human development in Africa.”  Report: U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War - World Policy Institute - Research Project www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm#usrole  

On top of that the wars create instability and humanitarian crisis which gives the corporations and the Western government who serve them a pretext to come in and steal whatever it is they covet be it coltan, diamonds or in the case of Uganda, oil. Do you get the picture They are doing to Africa what they are doing in our communities here bringing in guns, and drugs fomenting strife and sitting back watching us kill each other!!!  By the way, did Obama or the mainstream media tell you oil was recently discovered in Uganda? “KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda expects to start refining crude oil from its fields in 2014 and the proceeds will help end the economy's dependence on donor aid, its president said. The east African nation discovered commercial oil deposits in 2006 in the Albertine basin along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and reserves of about 2.5 billion barrels have been confirmed...  The country's ministry of energy estimates the basin's crude reserves could climb to 6 billion barrels when fully explored. Only 40 percent of the basin has so far been studied. In November last year, the ministry said a phased construction of the refinery would begin in 2012, starting with capacity for limited production to satisfy the domestic market whose demand ranges between 20,000-25,000 barrels per day.” http://af.reuters.com/article/investingNews/idAFJOE79H04O20111018?p...  Call me a cynic but it makes sense Obama would send troops into Uganda now that they have discovered oil there; especially as the US moves to secure all the continent’s resources and prevent the Chinese from gaining another toe hold in Africa. This is how they roll. To keep us inthe dark and make us fall for their okey-doke they tell us some cock and bull story about going after a “bad guy” who they armed and supported for twenty-five years. It’s the same ol’ same ol’ only this time its being done by a “black”  president.
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Tags: Joseph, Kony, Obama, Uganda, coltan, oil

somalia

A US drone strike has killed at least 15 civilians and injured dozens of others in the southern region of war-torn Somalia, Press TV reports.

The unmanned plane has left at least 15 people dead, while injuring at least 43 in the southern town of Bilis Qooqani near Afmadow.

This recent strike follows a similar strike in the same region on Friday, which killed at least 70 people.

Somalia is the sixth country where the United States military has used remote-controlled drone aircrafts to launch targeted operations and killings.

The airstrikes continue as the African nation continues to struggle with its famine and water-borne diseases, killing tens of thousands of children over the past months.

The US military has also used drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Strategically located in the Horn of Africa, Somalia remains one of the countries generating the highest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world.

SZH/JR