10-08-07, 9:31 am

Not content with beefing up its economic assets across the continent, the US is about to set up a military command on African soil.

Now at the beginning of October there is taking place, with the utmost discretion, an event most revealing as to the desire for hegemony of the Bush administration over the entire planet.


The initiative – called Africom (United States Africa Command) – was announced by the warmonger in the White House last February, and was launched early this month from Stuttgart. General William Ward, leading element for the operational command, has been in command of the US forces already present in Africa. He is to leave his European headquarters early next year, but exactly where he will land is as yet uncertain.

It probably never entered the White House’s calculations that the African capitals (Liberia excepted) would not queue up for the privilege of playing host to the future US military command in Africa. On June 16th, the fourteen countries that make up the SADC (South African Development Community), together with Zambia, made so bold as to turn the proposal down and enjoined the other African states to follow suit. Among the fifteen were Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.

Then at the Northern end of the continent the Algerian and Moroccan governments, which were rumoured to have been approached, declared that they would in no way have it in their own territory. That leaves only the countries that are in no position to say no to Uncle Sam, like Ethiopia, or Kenya, to mention but two examples.

This initiative must be placed in the proper light, within the context of a continent that is growing outrageously poorer by the day under the rules set by the international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for the sole benefit of the “Northern” countries, and as a result of the many related conflicts. The UN now assigns the best part of its military budget and blue berets to operations in Africa.

What is taking place in Africa is a shift in the international balance of power, a new deal of the cards. Tangled up in its disastrous management of the Ivory Coast crisis, France is trying to no longer appear in its former vocation as “Africa’s policeman” (le gendarme de l’Afrique). It has set up a new operation called “Recamp” which consists in equipping and training, from each of its permanent regional bases in the West, Center, and East, an African battalion that can take over for specific intervention operations.

But above all, during the last five years, it is the Pentagon that has signed multiple agreements with countries forming a strategic arc from Mauritania to the eastern shores of the Horn.

In the name of “War on Terrorism”, Washington set up the TSCI program (Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative) starting in 2003, and established in the east the Task Force–150, an international naval force that assumed as a matter of fact its right to control the sea traffic from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Djibouti saw its status changed from that of a “French aircraft carrier” to that of a “multi-national aircraft carrier” under American command and a French lieutenancy.

As for economic factors, the present context is woven from interests the US business community has lately taken in the continent’s raw materials, especially toward the oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea (off the coasts of Angola, Nigeria, Congo, Equatorial Guinea). Trade between the US and Africa soared from about thirty to approximately a hundred billion dollars between 2003 and 2006. The interconnection between these two trends, the military and the commercial, is illustrated by the case of the São Tomé archipelago where radar stations have been installed. São Tomé is a tiny country of strategic importance owing to its geographic position, and, having just joined the exclusive club of oil-producing countries, it now boasts another obvious asset.

From l'Humanite. Translated by Isabelle Metral.