The Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRAM) says there are still 600 thousand slaves in Mauritania, almost one in five of the country’s 3.2 million people, despite a law voted in September 2007 making slavery a criminal offense, punishable by ten years in prison.  “Nothing has changed in Mauritania,” says Balla Touré, an agricultural engineer and IRAM secretary for foreign relations. “No slave owners have been jailed.”

Western diplomatic sources disagree with the figure saying the number of slaves is much lower. They do admit the government shows little enthusiasm in enforcing the 2007 law. “No cases have been successfully prosecuted under the antislavery law despite the fact that de facto slavery exists in Mauritania,” writes the US State Department in its 2010 Human Rights Report.

But a high ranking US Embassy official in Nouakchott tells me they received confirmation one slave owner did go to jail this year although this is not information they verified in person.

The truth is slavery continues unpunished but nobody knows the real number of slaves in the country and investigating is very difficult. The French based NGO, SOS – Esclaves, estimates “approximately 18% of the Mauritania’s population lives in slavery.”

If you wanted to investigate, you would have to go out into the desert villages. Balla Touré says you can find communities of ten thousand people where “150 are the owners and the rest are slaves.”  Western embassies have told their nationals most of Mauritania is off-limits because of the danger of being kidnapped by bandits or al-Qaeda.  A slave owner could easily see that a bothersome reporter was disappeared.

The government is also determined to keep slavery out of the limelight.  As of this writing CNN has been waiting for over five weeks to get a visa to do a story for their modern slavery series.  US Embassy efforts have not worked.  CNN may have to forego a slave story on the country which is perhaps the world’s biggest slave state.

Three ethnicities and two races

The slaves and descendents of slaves are a group called the Haratine. They are of sub-Saharan origin but after centuries of servitude took on Moorish culture and language, the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic. They make up between 40% and 50% of the population.  “Ninety-nine percent of them are illiterate,” says Mohamed O., the son of a former slave owning family who denies slavery is still widespread in the country.

The Haratine are Black but have little in common with Mauritania’s more educated Black Africans who make up about 30% of the population and live in the South along the Senegal River.   What the two share is perhaps the poverty imposed by a regime dominated by a minority of wealthy White Moors.

But the racism goes both ways.  “All those in government are slave owners,” says Salé, a Haratine militant with IRAM. “White Moors own everything,” adds Bella Touré who is not a Haratine but a Pulaar speaking Black from the south.  “My condition as a Black,” he explains, “is linked to the condition of the slaves.”

Tourad, a rare educated Haratine and a teacher, insists the White Moors are attached to slavery more than anything else.  “The Army, Gendarmes and Police are all led by Whites,” Touad says, “while 99% of their personnel is Black.”  These figures are contested by progressive Moors who point to the occasional successful Black.”  Six of the country’s 40 diplomats are Black I am told, although it does not mean they are Haratine which makes sense if less than five percent of the slave caste ever received any schooling.

IRAM, unlike the two other anti-slavery groups in the country, is made up of young, mostly Haratine, people.  Their radicalization has western embassies worried that it could create political and ethnic instability. “The IRAM Chairman, Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid, said recently he “will bring down the government,” a US embassy official warned me.  “This is not the language of an NGO.”

Many IRAM members were either babies or not even born in 1989 when deadly ethnic and racial violence broke out in Mauritania and almost led to armed conflict with Senegal.  The 12 young men I met are angry and therefore impatient and lack the historical perspective of their elders who remember all too well the bloodshed of a generation ago.  The Moor run military and police are better equipped and trained than ever thanks to the west — France and the US in particular.

Don’t rock the ‘war on terrorism’ boat

Mauritania is a major ally of the US and France in the fight against al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, AQMI, and any instability in Mauritania could hurt American efforts in the ‘War on Terrorism’. All talk of slavery in the country could push western public opinion against foreign aid to the regime of General Ould Abed Aziz who seized power in a coup d’état in 2008.

IRAM members say the government has offered them “money and jobs on numerous occasions” if they would scale back their anti-slavery activities.  The US embassy encourages them to be more moderate in their actions and words.  IRAM’s Chairman is even being offered a trip to the US to meet with NGOs and discuss their practices in the hopes it will help temper his language.

The situation between Black Mauritanians and White Moors is tense.  “White Moors have fired 60 thousand Black workers in the past few months out of fear,” says Mohamed O., a former official with the Information Ministry. In April Moorish students and Blacks clashed at Nouakchott University over what the Blacks called “the complete Arabisation of the Administration.”  The Moors want to see Arabic take over while the Blacks, who in this case are not Hassaniya speaking Haratine, are better versed in French and insist both official languages be used.  The linguistic battle is just another element indicating extreme ethnic animosity.

This is the powder keg of racial and ethnic tension western diplomats do not want to see people like IRAM ignite.  A racial explosion with a background of slavery could raise questions back home about the intense military cooperation Washington and Paris enjoy with the Mauritanian regime.

Mohamed O. admits there is a Haratine problem but says it is not ongoing slavery.  “Nothing has been done to help the Haratine integrate society,” he says.

Corruption does not help.  In August 2010, the Human Rights Commissioner, Mohamed Lemine Ould Daddeh, was fired when he was unable to reimburse nearly one million dollars that went missing.  This is the amount of money set aside for the assimilation of the Haratine.

Balla Touré says in villages where slavery exists the master holds on to the voter registration cards of his ‘slaves’ and negotiates the way they will vote with the politician who offers the most favors.  This, along with tribal loyalties, could explain why a candidate obtains impossibly high percentages in different regions.  Such practices make a mockery of democracy in Mauritania, a country which Transparency International lists among the most corrupt in the world: n° 148 out of 178.

Those who see slavery in Mauritania as a thing of the past say what destroyed the institution was the drought of the 1970s and not the never enforced 1981 presidential decree abolishing the practice, and even  less the un-enforced 2007 law.  The drought wiped out the country’s livestock, litterally millions of head, and devastated agriculture.  “The master became poorer than their slaves,” Mohamed O. says.  The result was the slave owners abandoned their slaves and flooded into Nouakchott leaving the helpless to fend for themselves.

Those Haratine who found themselves abandoned did not fare well and many followed their masters to the city. Under slavery “the master took care of the slaves needs,” Mohamed O. says, “his food, clothing and health.  All of a sudden that stopped.”

But activists deny recurrent drought ended the practice. “If slavery disappeared,” asks Moulai, a Haratine now in Nouakchott, “then who takes care of their livestock in the countryside?”  Still today, they say, any child born to a slave belongs to the master, even if the former slave’s freedom was bought.  In Mauritania “slavery is an inherited status,” the NGO Anti-Slavery International writes.

The situation is complicated.  Many Haratine fear leaving their masters with no way to survive on their own.  In the early 1970s Mohamed O. asked Maria, the slave who breast fed him and his siblings, why she did not go away and live her own life as a free person.  “She grabbed her breast in her hand and said ‘I fed you from here and now that you are a big boy you want to send me away?’”  The scene still brings tears to Mohamed O’s eyes today, as it did to Maria’s all those years ago.

It is not rare for people like Mohamed O. to receive phone calls about people who are in trouble and say their father or grandfather was a slave of his family’s 40 years ago.  Mohamed O. feels obliged to help “people I don’t even know.  I am paying for sins I never committed.”

The West is concerned about the instability Islamic guerrillas could cause in the region and they have found a willing ally in President-General Ould Abdel Aziz but they may not be seeing an even more pressing cause of instability: the anger of a generation of young Blacks left out by a small minority of Moors who own and control the country.  These Blacks are becoming more vocal, more active and more radical.

But the authorities, and their western backers, would have us believe that when five private press groups get a license to broadcast radio and TV for the first time this October, it will represent a major change.  This opening of the airwaves is Sahara sand in our eyes to hide the real racial nature of a regime which has become an important actor in “the war on terrorism”.

The first question is who will get a license?  One of the five will certainly be Nouakchott Info, a press group which, according to my sources, is owned by General Muhammud Ould al-Ghazwany, military Chief-of-staff and head of the Presidential Guard.  He is a long time close associate of General Ould Abdel-Aziz who seized power in 2008 from the only government which came close to being democratically elected in the country since independence in 1960.  General al-Ghazwany made his money in mysterious ways as a military officer during the 20 year rule of Ould Taya who took power in a Coup in 1984 and was himself ousted in a coup in 2005. (1)

Secondly, these radio and TV stations will broadcast nationally over the government owned and managed transmitters so even if only close (Moor?) associates get a license, they can be turned off at a minute’s notice. (2) This also means that there will be no local news or community service which only FM could afford.  Moreover, it practically assures that the major media groups will continue to work in languages few Mauritanians master such a classical Arabic which some of the White Moors learned as children in Koranic schools or French. Most Moors (30% of the population) and the (ex?) slave and illiterate caste, the Haratine (40% of the population) speak Hassaniya Arabic. (3) Other subsaharan Blacks speak different languages.

There are 12 daily newspapers registered in Mauritania which come out regularly. (4) They are printed on the government owned press and each one is limited to eight pages and one thousand copies with no distribution service. They sell for one dollar a piece (half a day’s wages for over half the country) and are written in classical Arabic or French. The two languages used and the small number of each issue are good indicators of how small is the number of elite Mauritanians who debate the countries future, decide on policies and divide the dividends.

Another group which seems set to get a license is Al Watan (The Nation), a group reportedly financed by Prime Minister Moulaye Mohamed Laghdaf, a White Moor and a longtime ally of General (now President) Ould Abdel-Aziz who appointed him Prime Minister after the 2008 coup and kept him on once Ould Abel-Aziz got himself elected president in 2009.  As a leader of the very powerful Tajakant Tribe, Laghdaf’s support is a must.

Saharamedias.net has become very successful, setting up a TV film and production agency which works for such big outsiders as al-Jazeera, al-Arabia and France 24 and has “bureaus” in Rabat, Dakar and Bamako. The group is linked to longtime Education Minister Hasni Ould Didi of a powerful Eastern tribe, the Idalwahli. (5)

The group Essirage (The Light) are openly Islamist and according to my sources get funding from radical Muslim groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other radicals located in Sudan, Egypt and Turkey.  “They have no local financing,” one media expert told me.

If You Want Freedom of the Press, Own One

“There is no independent media in Mauritania,” says Mohamed O., who once worked in the Information Ministry. “There is just private media.”  The Mauritanian media represent the interests of those wealthy people who own it.

Mohamed Salem Ould Haiba writes on the Mauritanian internet news site CRIDEM (www.cridem.org) that you can “count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have pocketed the wealth” of the country.  Although an exaggeration, the number of Mauritanians who control the country’s security and financial institutions is extremely small. They are the people own the private media.

This may be one reason why there are no reported cases of censorship under the new government. “We probably have the greatest press freedom of the Arab world,” says Mohammed Mahmud Abu al-Ma-ahi of Nouakchott Info. “What we lack are the means and the financing.”  There is no market for publicity in Mauritania.

The government and its western backers can argue that the press groups all have internet sites where readers can access their material and debate policies.  But this means little in a country where officially at least half the population is illiterate (much higher if considering French and classical Arabic) and where as many as 60% live on less than two dollars a day.  Some sources say that 99% of the Haratine (slave caste) are illiterate. A free internet is no threat to those in power in Mauritania.

Yet, Mauritanian journalists hope the new licenses will lead to greater press freedoms.  “The liberalization of the audio-visual is a victory,” says Raky Sy of the National Union of Mauritanian Journalists which counts some 500 members.  “But is is extremely limited.”

The West will use this media liberalization to justify increased aid to a government which can easily be called an apartheid regime: the nearly absolute rule of a small White Moor minority to the exclusion of the Black majority.  President-General Ould Abel Aziz is a very active member in the fight against al-Qaeda.  France and the US would like us to forget he came to power in a coup and runs one of the world’s most corrupt and least transparent countries.  The truth is we are nowhere near a real freeing of the airwaves that would benefit Mauritanian citizens and their aspirations for greater democracy and transparency.

Many journalists I spoke to say the private media will be no more informative the the state run radio.  “If you want to know the news,” says a longtime reporter with Radio Mauritania, “then you have to look in the Editor-in-chief’s trash bin.”

FM radios are community radios.  They cost little to set up, speak the language of the people in their area and speak to their problems.  Such radios could articulate the anger of Black Mauritanians at the despotic rule by a minority of White Moors who control the military and the government and pocket the wealth while the majority of the people are left to wallow in their poverty.

We will be able to speak of freedom of the press in Mauritania when people in their own communities are allowed to open and run FM stations without government interference.  Under Ould Abdel Aziz, that day is probably still a long ways away.

1. al-Gazwany continues to profit handsomely.  Transparency International lists Mauritania as one of the world’s most corrupt countries,  n°143 out of 178.
2. In my listing I count White Maures at 30% of the population.  They are the slave holding cast.  The other 70% is Black.  This breaks down to 40% Haratine, the slave caste of Blacks who, after hundreds of years of servitude to the Berber and Arabic Moors, adopted their language (Hassaniya Arabic) and culture without the status and the 30% of more recent sub-saharan Africans.
3. There is no doubt that slavery still exists in Mauritania.  Abolitionists from the mainly Haratine IRAM (Initiative de Résurgence du Mouvement Abolitionniste en Mauritanie) told me there are 600 thousand slaves in the country.  The US Embassy in Nouakchott told me the number is much smaller although they could not give me a figure.  All seem to agree the government is showing little enthusiasm in enforcing the September 2007 law prohibiting slavery.
4. In all, some 700 titles (weeklies, monthlies etc.) are registered with the government but only around 40 publish regularly.  Many are printed only when the owner of the name is paid by someone who wants to take a shot at someone else in public.  These ‘pens-for-hire’ are referred to as “Peshmerghas” by serious Mauritanian reporters.
5. In Mauritania racism is never far from the surface even if it is often expressed in codified language.  Other Moors refer to the Idawahli as descendants of Jews because of their tight tribal solidarity and their reputation for economizing.

Now that Standard and Poor’s has downgraded America’s credit rating because Congress took too long to accept to pay for the measures they voted on, we can really expect the shit to hit the fan.

I am especially angry at the press for letting know-nothing Tea Party people like Michele Bachman get away with calling for the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He did not vote the spending. His job is to allocate funds to pay for it and to get those funds, he needs Congress to accept to pay for what they bought. The Treasury Secretary “manages the public debt”.

Don’t get me wrong. Geithner is a rat. As President of the Federal Reserve of New York, he is in great part responsible for the sub-prime crisis by allowing finance to run wild and unregulated. He earned $400 thousand dollars a year to do nothing about the harmful speculation and greed on Wall Street.

Here’s another example of the press failing to do its job. Take John Boehner who is allowed to speak of not giving Obama “a blank check”. It is not “a blank check”. It is a check to pay for what John Boehner voted to spend.

To let these politicians off the hook, especially the Members of Congress, is criminal. To allow them to leave on vacation when the mess they created is going to destroy the lives of tens of millions is criminally insane.

It has been repeatedly pointed out how bad government manages things and so the logical conclusion is don’t let government manage anything. As a matter of fact let us do away with government (Tea Party hacks). The reality is, there is a deliberate attempt to sabotage everything government to make sure American back free enterprise capitalists, and especially the corporations at the top so they can make huge profits and bonuses on our backs. Isn’t that why they call our needs “utilities” rather than “public services”? They don’t want us to believe some things we need should be run by the government for the public good so they mismanage what they can.

If Post Offices work well around the world, they should also work well in the US. The same goes for medical care, power and education. They tell us it all costs too much.

Want to save money? Stop voting for war.

Senator Dick Durbin (Dem. Ill.) summed it up on the Daily Show Thursday when he said “Republicans like war. They like waging war…and when the president says I’m going to have to borrow some money to pay for the war, they say ‘no way!’.” He added “Afghanistan costs us ten billion dollars a week.” Hello? That’s a hundred billion dollars every two-and-a-half months for Afghanistan alone; a senseless war. By the way, Obama must like war too. He is fighting six of them.

It’s been said over and over again. Obama’s wars, because they are now his, are costing us billions and billions a week. A Brown University study says the wars have cost nearly four trillion dollars since 2001 (http://costsofwar.org/). And we are not even talking of the human cost.

Hey, what if the soldiers said they would stop fighting because its time to go on vacation? At least it could save us some money. Some reports say it costs from $400 to $800 a gallon to import the fuel military gas-guzzlers need to operate in Afghanistan.

Want to pay your bills? Make the wealthiest pay their fair share.

Then the Bush tax cuts which benefit the wealthiest have cost between one-and-a-half trillion dollars (low estimate) and three trillion dollars (high estimate). Anybody who does not know that the rich have never paid so little in relation to their income since Eisenhower just does not want to know.

Which brings me back to my problem. Balance in the press does not mean taking the middle ground when the debate is so lop-sided it would sink a ship. The job of the press is to inform the public correctly, and that includes telling them where the ‘sane middle ground’ is.

It also means holding to account those we pay to work in our interests.

I am no economist but I don’t think I need a PhD to understand if I spend less on war and make the very rich pay a fairer share in taxes (at least the share they paid under Reagan) I will be able to invest in projects that will create jobs, thus create tax revenues and reduce welfare/unemployment spending. Isn’t that the ‘sane middle ground’?

How can we allow these public servants and elected officials, who have so mismanaged everything they have touched, to go on vacation? Get back in Washington and fix it!

It has long become clear that the UN Resolution is just a pretext for regime change in Libya,  yet NATO continues to look us straight in the eyes as they tell the wildest whoppers, and this time to justify attacking a hostile press. 

The attack “was necessary,” said NATO spokesman Colonel Roland Lavoie, “as TV was being used as an integral component of the regime apparatus to systematically oppress and threaten civilians.”

If that were true, why did it take four months for NATO to discover this?  Of course, it is not true.  What is true is they attacked the TV the day rebel commander, General Abdel Fattah Yunis, was killed by another rebel faction.  I believe NATO did not want Tripoli to explain to the Libyan people what had happened and certainly does not want public opinion to know the tribal nature of the rebellion and the large presence of al-Qaeda sympathizers in its ranks.

But whatever the case, there can be no justification for bombing the press, even a hostile press.

Libyan TV director, Rabea Mukhtar, said this is the second time his TV has been attacked by NATO.  “What is there inside?” he asked.  “Are there weapons inside them?  What is inside Libyan Television to attack?”

Mukhtar went on to warn NATO they could “bomb us again four or five times, we will continue doing our duties…”.

The director of Libyan TV’s English Channel, Khaled Bazelya, said bombing is an act of “international terrorism… We are employees of the official Libyan TV.  We are not a military target.”

The West’s Long History of Bombing the Press

But NATO and the US have a ling history of attacking the press.  On April 23, 1999, during the needless Kosovo War, a NATO missile blew up Serbian Radio and TV  in Belgrade, killing 16 people and using the same excuse.

On November 13, 2001, a US missile hit Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul.  On April 8, 2003 a US missile hit an electric generator at Al-Jazeera’s offices in Baghdad leading to the death of one reporter and hurting a second. 

In April 2003 they shelled the Basra hotel where Al-Jazeera reporters were the only guests. Al-Jazeera reporters have been arrested with at least one sent to Guantanamo.

On November 22, 2005, according to minutes received by The Daily Mirror , US President George W. Bush, in a White House meeting in April 2004, speculated with his good friend, then  UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, about a US bombing raid on Al-Jazeera world headquarter is Doha, Qatar and other locations.  The Mirror says Blair convinced Bush to take no action.  The UK government run BBC came to the rescue saying that Bush’s comments could have been intended as “some kind of joke.”  The Independent countered “official note takers don’t normally record jokes”. The Pentagon denied the story.

On July 12, 2007, a US helicopter killed a group of men in Baghdad including two Reuters staff.  The US denied any knowledge of the incident until Wikileaks put the secret helicopter video online showing clearly the US soldiers not only shot unarmed civilians but also shot the wounded and those who came to help them.

Of the 189 journalists killed in Iraq since the invasion, at least 18 have been killed by the US.  The Geneva Conventions stipulate that parties that have “no active part in the hostilities” shall “in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”  This includes journalists and media technicians.

But then again, UN rules outlaw foreign intervention for regime change and the Nuremburg trials banned pre-emptive war.  That does not stop NATO powers from doing both: Iraq, Ivory Coast, Libya….

Yes, information is a weapon.  That is why NATO has professional spin-doctors and tells us lies while looking us straight in the eyes such as the French Defense Minister, Gérad Longuet, on May 1st when he said there is no information of Islamic Fundamentalists in the Libyan rebellion.  

If  the US wants to bomb media they say is “inciting to violence against civilians” they can start by bombing Fox News, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh who never hesitate to tell a whopper if  it can stir up hate.

Every time US drones mistake a wedding or a funeral or some other party for an ‘Islamic militant gathering’, the missile fired causes carnage on the scale of Oslo.  This has been going on for ten years and the number of drone strikes has doubled since Obama came into office.  For example, of the 258 air strikes in Pakistan, 248 have taken place since 2008 (The Long War Journal).  Drones have killed thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. That the US should be bombing in these countries at all is an outrage.

Drones: Should we not be outraged when American kids playing a deadly video game with joy-sticks, sometimes thousands of miles away from their target, kill people who did nothing to them, or us for that matter?  And is this not one of the most cowardly acts you can think of?  What if a Pakistani drone killed hundreds of people mistakenly taken for ‘Christian Fundamentalists’ in Cincinnati?

How many military videos does wekileaks have to release before we see that our soldiers are having fun killing unarmed people from a cowardly safe distance?  If you have not seen one go here:      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

Shooting the wounded, torture, secret prisons in Bagram, Mogadishu ,Guantanamo, extra-judicial executions … where’s the outrage?

In the first six months of this year alone, Israel has shot hundreds of unarmed protesters, killing scores.  For example, on June 6, Tsahal shot dead 23 unarmed people and wounded 350 more in the Golan.  The Jewish state was mildly chastised for shooting before they even tried tear gas.

When western supported Bahraini and Saudi troops shoot unarmed protesters seeking better lives, there is hardly a whimper.  When US trained and equipped special-forces in Yemen shot down hundreds of protesters, Washington said nothing for three months.  Then the US called on the thug President Saleh to step down and hand power over to another pro-American kleptocrat while the US continued to pound the country with Hellfire missiles from drones.  The ‘collateral damage’  (i.e. dead civilians)  from these attacks is pushing people “who never hurt US interests”  into the arms of more radical groups  (interview with Abdul Jabbar, The National).

The British medical review The Lancet along with John Hopkins University published a second Iraqi survey on October 11, 2006 which estimated there were 654, 965 “excess deaths” related to the war (2.5% of the population).  Civilians died in droves during  the US invasion and subsequent street battles with Iraqi Insurgent/Resistance fighters.

How many martyred cities like Falluja, 90% destroyed, are there in Iraq and Afghanistan? We can only mimic US Army Major Phil Cannella in Vietnam who explained to Peter Arnett  “we had to destroy the village to save it,” after Ben Tre was wiped off the map on February 7, 1968.

And what do we say of the 200 000 Blackwater type mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan; those we euphemistically call “civilian contractors”?  Each and every one of them is an Anders Behring Breivik, murdering with impunity in our name.  Even the idea of privatizing and subcontracting war should spark outrage.

It is estimated that the embargo on Iraq from 1990 led to the deaths of over five hundred thousand children under the age of five (UNICEF).  In an interview on May 12, 1996, then US Ambassador to the UN,  Madeleine Albright was asked on 60 Minutes if the embargo was worth the price in lives.  Her response was “We think the price is worth it.”

And yes, the instability caused by the US (and Israel) has led to Muslims killing other Muslims on the Oslo scale daily.

Our use of selective outrage is not new.

How many people died under US bombs in the first Gulf War like the one that killed over four hundred civilians in Baghdad’s Amiriyah bomb shelter on February 13, 1991?  What could be more cowardly than the US air attack on fleeing Iraqi troops on Iraq’s Highway 8 (the Highway of Death) on February 26 – 27, 1991.  A US pilot said “It was a turkey shoot.  Like shooting ducks in a barrel.”   The war was over.  The Iraqis had abandoned Kuwait.  The attack was cowardly mass murder.

This year France went to war against, I believe, the legitimate government of Ivory Coast to put a puppet in power because the 2002 Coup d’Etat had failed.  The French backed and armed rebels killed thousands as they marched on the capital, Abidjan.  Since the take over, there have been many more killings.  But the western press and governments are not nearly as interested as they were when people got killed in attacks on the forces of a government they did not like.  Almost total silence.  Very often ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ determines the worthy dead from the unworthy to quote Chomsky and Hermann.

In Libya, the rebels supported by NATO systematically executed the Black African prisoners they took, accusing them of being mercenaries.  Most were merely migrant workers.  Where is the outrage?  It is known that NATO bombs are killing civilians in Libya and all of this, I believe, because Qaddafi threatened to nationalize the country’s oil and create an African Central Bank which would make the IMF and World Bank useless and, more importantly, powerless.  There was nothing spontaneous about the Benghazi revolt as far as I am concerned.  The flags had been industrially made and were in the streets the first day.  The posters and banners, in several languages, were professionally printed in a country without private printers and were out the first day. The ‘rebels’ were armed and ready on the very first day.  How is it reporters have not picked up on this.  Where is the outrage?

The reality is some deaths are worth more than others.  Every now and then a Twin Towers(9/11/01), London underground bombing (7/7/07), Madrid metro bombing (11/3/05)  or Oslo killing spree comes along and because more worthier people are killed, we get outraged.

The scene is Independence Square in Libreville.  The white plastic lawn chairs are stacked for citizens who come by to show support and chat with the man lying on the ground.  Civil society has provided tarps and large umbrellas for protection from the merciless sun and eventual downpours.

 “He will win this battle,” says one man, “because we, the Gabonese people, are behind him.”

On July 14^th, the French national holiday, Roland Désiré set up camp in the sun-baked city center with the firm intention to not eat nor drink until the 900 man French Army garrison leaves his country. Two days later, French Prime Minister François Fillon arrived in the Gabon to announce the French base will in fact be “reinforced” to form the “essential part” of France’s forces in the region.

Roland Désiré says the French soldiers “are here only to guarantee and secure French interests in exploiting our natural resources.” (For more on Gabon’s kleptocracy and France see my June 18, 2010 blog entry here: http://kazodaily.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/omar-bongo-the-french-monkey/)

Roland Désiré Aba’a, a father of two, is a 42 year-old engineer and member of the Gabonese Economic and Social Council.  On July 19, army doctors began emergency intravenous feeding but Roland Désiré soon refused the treatment and resumed his hunger strike.

 He has the support of 13 local NGOs and trade unions who submitted a letter to the French Premier during his visit calling on France to “no longer support this ignominious dictatorship”.

Roland Désiré has other demands.  He wants the economic accords revised.  “France is the master of all our surface and underground wealth,” he says.  He also wants Gabon’s nearly two-and-a-half  billion dollar foreign debt erased.

Gabon is an extremely wealthy country where the population lives in poverty while the Bongo Kleptocrats, who have run Gabon in French interests since independence, prosper.  President Ali Bongo’s father, Omar, got most of his wealth by siphoning off oil wealth to the tune of one dollar per barrel from royalties paid by Elf-Aquitaine (now Total).  It was a deal which worked out very well for the French.  Loik Le Floch Prigeant, CEO of Elf-Aquitaine, 1989 to 1993, said in the 2010 French documentary ‘France-Afrique’ that the French are making a killing in Gabon.  “Imagine … Gabonese oil is very cheap, about four or five dollars a barrel to extract, and then it is resold at eighty dollars a barrel.”

The French control a lion’s share of oil extraction in Gabon, probably the only sector where there is a little competition. “Over 60% of the foreign companies extracting in Gabon are French.” says Roland  Désiré.  “The whole timber and mineral industries are in French hands.”

And once again adding insult to injury, during his visit, the French Prime Minister pushed through two new contracts worth 73 million euros (105 million dollars) on the ever-ready-to-satisfy Ali Bongo, including a deal to the French Rougier and Cassagne for exclusive exploitation of 39 thousand hectares (96 thousand acres) of forest.

Given how often the French have intervened to keep their puppets in power in Gabon, it is easy to think Roland Désiré’s hunger strike is doomed to fail.  The French Army easily ousted President Laurent Gbagbo in April to impose their ‘boy’ Alassane Ouattara.  But we learned this year there is such a thing as the ‘Arab Street’ and it is powerful.  It is quite possible we will discover an ‘African Street’ in the not too distant future.

Meanwhile, Roland Désiré Aba’a remains determined despite the danger.  “If the loss of my life,” he says, “can allow us to expose to the international community that my country is confiscated, then I will be lowered into my tomb a happy man.”

It all started when President Abdoulaye Wade, 85, tried to push through parliament a constitutional reform which would have assured his son Karim, 42, become President upon his death.  The reform would have created the position of vice-president and would have allowed the ticket to be elected with only 25% of the vote in the first round rather than in the two-round majority system.  On June 23, serious rioting against what the opposition feared was a ‘Constitutional Coup’ set Senegal ablaze and President Wade withdrew his reform.

Bourgi said Karim called him at nearly three o:clock in the morning on June 27, saying the “situation is quasi insurrectional” and warned that “French interests are at stake”. “Uncle” Bourgi refused to use his influence on French President Sarkozy and told Karim “You are panicking. I want you to be a bit more coherent.”

Adding fuel to speculation, former Prime Minister and opposition candidate for the February 2012 presidential elections, Macky Sall, on July 1, accused President Wade of “recruiting mercenaries” to attack the opposition.  Sall said the mercenaries are from the Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Nigeria. “Four hundred have entered the national territory through the southern border,” he said.

Presidential asociates have vehemently denied all the accusations.  “We have enough gendarmes, soldiers and police,” Wade spokesman Serigne Mbacké Ndiaye said, “that we don’t need to ask anybody for aid.”  You cannot get any clearer as to the real mission of Senegal’s security forces.

As Wade tried to push through his unpopular constitutional reform he was also doing his best to restore good relations with the French.  In a break with his African peers and against his own public opinion, Wade recognized Libya’s rebel Council of Transition and backed NATO’s war against Gaddafi.

On June 9, the Senegalese President became the first African leader to visit the rebel capital, Benghazi.  Karim, who has never been elected to office but who holds four ministerial portfolios, was at his father’s side.  Their chaperon was the French pseudo philosopher and self-proclaimed foreign minister for the LIbyan crisis Bernard Henri Levy.  It was Levy who brought the rebel leaders to see President Sarkozy in Paris and obtain official recognition of the rebellion from the Head of State.

Was the ‘Libya thing’ an attempt by Wade to prepare to ask the French to intervene in Senegal when it became clear his reform would be met by violent opposition?  The problem for Wade is apparently neither Robert Bourgi nor French Interior Minister Claude Guéant can stomach Bernard Henri Levy and those two have Sarkozy’s attention.

Another man who sees Levy’s meddling as counter-productive is the real Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé.  To hammer home the distance between Wade and Paris, Juppé, on July 7, sided with the opposition calling the constitutional reform “abnormal”. In an allusion to the request for armed intervention, Juppé said it was up to the Senegalese to decide their future.  “You don’t change such an important rule a few months from the ballot.” he added.  “I believe the authorities understand that by abandoning the reform.”

Abdoulaye Wade’s chances of seducing Sarkozy were slim from the start.  He has stung France’s “General Pinocchio” more than once. In April 2010, Wade unilaterally reneged on the 1974 military agreement with France and told the 1200 French troops in his country to get out.  “I don’t risk a Coup d’Etat in Senegal.” he said.  The French Marines left in June 2010.

He had already angered Sarkozy in 2007 when he took the Dakar Port contract away from the French President’s close and super-rich friend, Vincent Bollaré, and gave it to Dubai Port World.  The same company that took the contract for Djibouti away from the French Group.

The French are clearly realigning their pawns in ‘their African sphere of influence’.  They put their puppet Alassane Ouattara in Power in Cote d’Ivoire.  They are dropping the Wade family. Paris is pulling its Army out of Chad after saving President Deby from rebel offensives twice since 2007.  (Very reliable sources tell me Chadian troops are in Libya fighting the rebellion to support Gaddafi).  But Paris is leaving its Army in Gabon where the French did not have a problem seeing a son access ‘the thrwon’ after his father’s death.  But then again, Gabon has oil.  Senegal does not.

Two-hundred-and-ten-thousand Niger citizens have returned to their home country to flee the fighting in Libya. People like Mallam Abdou who worked as a garbage-man in Ourba and sent 300 dinar (175 euros) back home every month. Multiply that by the number of Niger workers who have come back, and you get the scale of the disaster France, the UK and the US have imposed on the countries of the Sahel.

Niger is a country where two-thirds of the 15 million people live on less than a euro a day! “I came back with nothing,” Abdou says. “Not a penny.” Today Abdou sits with other refugees under a tree in Niamey wondering how they will feed their families.

President Issoufou now finds himself with an army of unemployed to feed in a country which is suffering from drought and food insecurity so bad international organizations last year warned of impending famine.

Beyond the massive influx of refugees and the money no longer being sent home, NATO’s war on Libya has hurt the state coffers. “There are no longer any exchanges between Niger and Libya since the crisis started.” Issoufou said. “And that has an effect on government tax revenue.” Niamey announced in May they are reducing their meagre budget by seven percent. You can be sure there are more cuts to come as Libya descends into anarchy.

The 800 kilometer highway through the desert to land-locked Niger Libya was to finance is abandoned.  The road would have linked Niamey to Libyan ports and reduced transport costs.

Niger is a fragile Democracy. Issoufou was elected in March following a coup d’etat and transition which put an end to the ten year rule of military strongman Mamadou Tandja. The people were hoping things could finally improve, and then came the war.

Mahamadou Issoufou also told Sarkozy what he already knows: many arms which fall into the rebel hands in Libya end up in the hands of terrorists. “There is the spread of weapons throughout the Sahel region, even heavy- weapons,” the president said.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been fighting in Mauritania and Mali with Islamic guerrillas benefiting from the chaos in Libya.

Niger stopped a truck load of arms and explosives from Libya in mid-June destined for Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. How much has already got through to this Uranium rich nation? A diplomat in Niamey told AFP that now “You find more AK-47s than millet in the country.”

France gets practically all its uranium from Niger and given that 80% of French energy comes from nuclear reactors, you can bet Issoufou has Sarkozy’s short-sighted attention. Last September, al Qaeda kidnapped four French nationals (along with five other non-French foreigners) working for Areva, the French nuclear giant.

Although Issoufou reiterated that there is no question of French troops being sent to his country he may not get the final word if the situation spins out of (French) control. Just ask President Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire.

Mahamadou Issoufou relayed the position of the African Union drawn up in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, last week: the bombing must stop, a ceasefire put into effect and talks opened among the Libyan factions. The result of the AU declaration was a sharp increase in French bombing this week with the launching of rebel offensives on all fronts.

We already know Greece has been renting its airspace to the Israeli Air Force since Turkey suspended military cooperation last year. 

Last week two of the ten boats in the flotilla were sabotaged at port. The Israeli embassy in Athens says accusations Israel’s Mossad sabotaged the boats is “ridiculous”. Oh, really? Israel did not hesitate to commit piracy on the high seas last year when it stormed the first flotilla in international waters killing ten people, seizing the boats and arresting the survivors.

You know what is “ridiculous”? Israel’s calling this crime “self-defense”. What is “ridiculous” is to think Israel incapable of any act of terrorism. Did they not fake European and Australian Passports to kill a Palestinian leader in Dubai in February 2010?

Israel would not sabotage the boats at port? This is a country which has shot hundreds of unarmed protesters this year alone. Scores have been killed. So, what’s a little sabotage among assassins?

Papandreaou is going even further than preventing the boats from sailing and arresting the American captain of one that tried or sending his commandos aboard a Canadian boat leaving Crete. He is tacitly recognizing the legitimacy of the blockade by offering to deliver the aid through the existing (Israeli) channels.

Of course, none of this would be possible if it were not for the absolute hypocrisy and collusion of the so-called “international community” and in first lieu, the United States who has been bankrolling the apartheid and land-grabbing state since its inception.

I guess the Greeks are just getting used to being on their knees after a year of bending over for the EU, the IMF and the banks. But bending over before Israel? How much are they paying the Greeks to forfeit what little honor and dignity they have left?

The Israelis are on the defensive. Their image around the world is terrible as well it should be. It would be nice if the media pointed this out and gave us the context as to why. That our governments practice ‘double-standards’ in the Middle East is despicable enough. But that the media cater to the Jewish Lobbies in mis-informing public opinion through double standards is outrageous.

Thank God for the internet. It is a sad day when we need a Fifth Estate to do the job the Fourth Estate was supposed to be doing.

UN Resolution 1970 imposed a military embargo on Libya but this week we learned the French have been parachuting arms to the rebels since the beginning of June. The French response? It is not in violation of the resolution because it is to “protect civilians”.

Ah, yes, UN Resolution 1973 which imposed a no-fly-zone to “protect civilians”. Lets see how that panned out. France, the UK and the US opened hostilities as Gaddafi’s forces were about to regain control of Benghazi on March 19. To “protect civilians” Gaddafi’s infrastructure was attacked through-out the country, especially his radar and anti-aircraft batteries. Normal when you want to impose a no-fly-zone.

But quickly, from the first days, mission creep set in and NATO aircraft began giving combat support to the rebels to help them advance on loyalist forces all in the name of “protecting civilians”.

Then NATO began targeting Libyan leaders, including Gaddafi himself, in violation not only of the UN resolutions but of international law. Civilians have died by the scores under NATO bombs in this war to “protect civilians”.

As a matter of fact mauvaise foi has gone so far that Obama pretends it is not even a war and so he does not have to consult Congress. Not a war? It certainly looks like one when you are on the receiving end of a Cruise missile.

It was not long before France recognized the rebels as the official government of Libya while denying the war was about ‘regime change’. The French must take us all for perfect idiots. But then again Obama says “Gaddafi must go” while also denying this is about regime change.

And what of the African Union hypocrisy, condemning the NATO attack on Libya while most sat back and applauded the French intervention in Cote d’Ivoire which overthrew elected President Gbagbo to put French puppet Ouattara in power.

AU Secretary General Jean Ping, former member of Omar Bongo’s clique of kleptocrats, is worried about the “Somaliazation” of Libya and contagion to neighboring countries. But he is hardly bothered by the Burkinabe backed, equipped and often manned rebels who stole democracy from the Cote d’Ivoire. Is it because Gbagbo does not have billions stuck away and invested around the continent?

I have received reports from very reliable sources that Chadian soldiers killed while fighting against the rebels in Libya are coming home in body-bags by the dozens. The grieving families have been banned from holding public mourning. President Idriss Deby does not want the world to know his troops are in Libya backing Gaddafi the way Gaddafi backed him in the past. It would be interesting for the mainstream press to investigate this but the press has been failing miserably by being “on side” in Libya.

France has troops and fighter aircraft in Chad under a longterm military operation called ‘Epervier’. Would it not be ironic if the aircraft in N’djamena were flying sorties into Libya and targeting Chadian men? (I understand the French fighter-planes that were staioned in Abeché are no longer there). “Oh, what a lovely war” to quote Teddy Roosevelt after the conquest of Cuba in 1898.

The Spanish America war was also a war “to protect civilians’. We know how well that worked out for the Cubans (with Batista among others) and the people of the Philippines (over a million-and-a-half dead). Ah, beware imperialist liberators. They speak with forked-tongues but their Tomahawks are real and deadly and their mauvaise foi knows no limit.