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African Diaspora: How the U.S. Is Strangling Haiti as It Attempts Regime Change in Venezuela
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Their message is simple: if you won't let us breathe, we won't let you breathe, and if you suffocate Venezuela, you suffocate us
By Vijay Prashad
February 19, 2019 - commondreams.org
Last year, in October, Haitians followed two Twitter hashtags that went viral–#PetrocaribeChallenge and #KotKobPetwoKaribea. If you are not Haitian and do not follow Haitian politics carefully, you can be forgiven for not noticing this development. The complaint on Twitter–and soon on the streets–was simple: what has happened to the billions of U.S. dollars that was in the Venezuelan-financed Petrocaribe program?
In 2005, when oil prices began to creep upwards and when the Bolivarian socialists led by Hugo Chávez were at their peak, 14 countries from the Caribbean met in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, to launch the Petrocaribe scheme. The idea was elegant. Venezuela, with one of the world's largest oil reserves, would sell oil to the struggling Caribbean islands through a very lucrative deal. Part of the oil price was paid up front, and the rest was to be paid back over the years at a ridiculously low interest rate (1 percent).
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African Diaspora: The British Royal Wedding, Feelgoodism and the Colonial Jumbie
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By Tyehimba Salandy
May 20, 2018
Ten years ago, British ‘royalty’, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla visited the Caribbean and locals prostrated before them. Local leaders made arrangements for them to play the Steelpan and the sacred Rastafarian Nyabinghi drums. Leslie from Africaspeaks.com wrote an insightful article titled Royal Visit Highlights Lingering Colonialism that brought attention to the dynamics of colonialism in this visit. This article is as relevant today as it was ten years ago when it was written, given the celebratory eruptions at the wedding of British monarch Prince Harry and his bride Meghan Markle. Yet the region is poorer today for elevating fake royalty to dizzying heights of reverence while neglecting the royalty inherent in resistant Caribbean voices who have worked hard at improving Caribbean societies.
While many people gush at royalty and the “power of love”, for people of the Caribbean and wider global south, who are still faced with the structures of British coloniality imbedded deeply in our society and the world we live in, it is an opportunity to reflect on these issues.
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African Diaspora: Zimbabwe Open for Business, Code for International Finance Capitalism
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By Netfa Freeman
March 15, 2018 - blackagendareport.com
“Zimbabwe’s new president offered an open invitation to international capital investment and latecomers for Zimbabwe’s trek down the neoliberal development road.”
Over the last four months, peddling the mantra “Zimbabwe is open for business,” the country’s new president in cahoots with the Western press has been whitewashing a military coup into a popular, peaceful revolution that brought from exile a benevolent leader and placed him in power on an interim basis until elections. Omitted from the portrayal of the March 11, 2018 op-ed, “We Are Bringing About the New Zimbabwe ,” published in the New York Times and by-lined to Zimbabwe’s sitting president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are all the maneuvers selling out the country’s political independence. Given reports of what happened to some of ZANU-PF’s G40 faction, including the killing of a bodyguard, and jailing with allegations of torture from November 14, 2017, until at least Robert Mugabe resigned as president a week later, the accounts in Mnangagwa’s op-ed are a pretty audacious rewriting of history.
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African Diaspora: Shadow Armies: The Unseen, But Real US War In Africa
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By Ramzy Baroud
January 12, 2018
There is a real – but largely concealed – war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to define the future of the continent and its global outlook.
It is easy to pin the blame on US President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is, the current US military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration of President George W. Bush, and actively pursued by President Barack Obama.
In 2007, under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, the US consolidated its various military operations in Africa to establish the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). With a starting budget of half a billion dollars, AFRICOM was supposedly launched to engage with African countries in terms of diplomacy and aid. But, over the course of the last 10 years, AFRICOM has been transformed into a central command for military incursions and interventions.
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African Diaspora: Clearing the Smoke and Mirrors Around Zimbabwe
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By Netfa Freeman
November 29, 2017 - blackagendareport.com
“The West, led by Britain and the U.S., have been engaged in a regime policy against the Southern African nation for the last 18 years.”
Reasons for examining what is happening in Zimbabwe are many but few to none can be found in accounts by major news media or from liberal progressive pundits. Such accounts are busy reinforcing the over simplified and misinforming narrative that forcing out former 93 year-old president Robert Mugabe marks the end of 37 years of brutal dictatorship that has driven the country into economic disaster.
The over simplified version being fed to the general public is that everything kicked off after Mugabe fired a disagreeable vice-President. Zimbabwe is to be seen as just another African country with a long reigning dictator who presides over the repression and impoverishment of his own people who really are unable to govern themselves without the aid of the benevolent West.
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African Diaspora: What is Behind the Military Coup in Zimbabwe?
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By Gregory Elich
November 21, 2017 - gregoryelich.org
Long-roiling factional conflict within Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF political party exploded last week in a military coup that quickly seized control of the government and state media. The coup was led by Commander of Zimbabwe Defense Forces Constantino Chiwenga, who is closely aligned with former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Emboldened by President Robert Mugabe’s declining mental sharpness and physical health in recent years, Mnangagwa actively maneuvered to ensure that he would succeed the president. Mnangagwa served as one of Zimbabwe’s two vice presidents. From that position, he and his supporters, known as Team Lacoste, became embroiled in a bitter struggle with younger party members who coalesced around Secretary of Women’s Affairs Grace Mugabe, wife of the president, and whose group was known as Generation 40, or G40.
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African Diaspora: Always Remember
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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 09, 2016
In academic and political lectures, when I refer to the negative psychological and economic impact slavery has had on black people, my questioners usually retort: "You have to bring up slavery again?"
The same people who object to my bringing up slavery's impact upon black people have no objections when Jews urge their people: "Never forget!"
This raises the question: Why should black people forget about slavery when Haiti, well into the 20th century, paid reparations to France for having fought for and won their freedom? In 1825, threatening an invasion, France sent a flotilla to Haiti to compel Haitians to pay a ransom of 150 million gold francs for their freedom. It was reduced subsequently to 90 million gold francs or US$40 billion in today's currency. In 2010, 90 leading academics, authors, and human rights activists, in an open letter to president Nicolas Sarkozy, "urged the French government to pay Haiti for the 90 million gold francs Haitians were forced to pay France for their independence" (London, Guardian, 16 August 2010).
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African Diaspora: U.S. Sets Stage for Libya-Like Regime Change in Eritrea, “Africa’s Cuba”
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By Glen Ford
June 18, 2016 - blackagendareport.com
“Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs.”
The United States is methodically setting the stage for a so-called “humanitarian” military intervention against the small northeast African nation of Eritrea, under legal pretexts much like those used to justify NATO’s war of regime change against Libya, in 2011. As in Libya, the U.S. has hijacked the United Nations human rights apparatus to claim a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) Eritrea’s citizens from alleged abuses by their own government. War and regime change are the intended result.
Washington engineered UN sanctions against Eritrea, beginning in 2009, on the patently bogus charge that Eritrea’s determinedly secular government provided “political, financial and logistical support” to Islamist Shabaab fighters in Somalia. Islamic jihadism is anathema to Eritrea, whose population of six million on the shores of the Red Sea is about evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. But few people in the United States knew Eritrea existed, much less its secular revolutionary history and politics. The lies stuck, as did the sanctions, even after the UN Human Rights Council conceded there was no further evidence of Eritrean aid to the Shabaab.
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African Diaspora: Questioning the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign
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By Danny Haiphong
May 21, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“US imperialism is the real terrorist for African people and the root of terrorism in Africa.”
When tragedies occur, questions arise. If a close relative is injured in a car accident, the affected family may ask a number of questions for both clarity and guidance. One question certain to come up is “who or what is responsible for the accident?” Most people wouldn’t accept an answer to this question from just anyone. Instead, concerned family and community members would probably seek verifiable evidence that leads to logical conclusions about the nature of the incident.
The #BringBackOurGirls campaign doesn’t appear interested in asking the difficult questions necessary to understanding the forces behind the kidnapping of 300 young girls in Nigeria. The campaign instead calls for US intervention to track down the so-called “terrorist” organization, Boko Haram. US imperialism responded quickly by sending marines to Nigeria, escalating US militarization in a country already dominated economically and politically by the West. #BringBackOurGirls supporters achieved their objective of further US militarization at the expense of African people. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign is thus not a social movement at all, and it must be clearly understood that there is much more to the kidnappings in Nigeria than the campaign is willing to address.
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African Diaspora: How Not to “Bring Back our Girls”
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By Margaret Kimberley
May 13, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“The last thing Nigeria needs is a foreign military presence to prop up its corrupt government.”
Bring back our girls. The message is a simple one that resonates with millions of people around the world. Those four words were first seen in a now famous twitter hashtag in the aftermath of the kidnapping of 280 teenagers from a school in Chibok, Nigeria on April 14, 2014. The Boko Haram group which is fighting that country’s government admits to holding the girls captive.
Only people who closely follow international news were aware of this situation until last week. It is right that so many people are concerned for the girls’ safety. Unfortunately, the effort to draw attention to this horror is of little use without a deeper understanding of Africa’s political situation.
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African Diaspora: U.S. Deploys More Special Forces in Search of Kony
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U.S. Deploys More Special Forces in Search of Kony, Africa’s Stand-in for Osama bin Laden
By executive editor Glen Ford
April 03, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“Many millions are at risk from the very presence of a military command whose reason-for-being is instability and war.”
The tempo of U.S. military occupation of Africa quickens by the day. Seizing every real and manufactured crisis as an opportunity, Washington has created a continental infrastructure that has already reduced most African armies to appendages of U.S. foreign policy, dependencies of the Pentagon. American armed forces operate across the length and breadth of Africa and exercise effective control over the armies of nearly all of the continent’s constituent states.
According to a study by Nick Turse, AFRICOM, the U.S. military command, last year carried out “activities” in every country on the continent except Western Sahara, Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Somalia. Somalia doesn’t show up in AFRICOM’s 2013 mission schedule because the country is nominally under the auspices of African Union “peacekeeping” forces. However, the U.S. and Europe pay for every African soldier and weapon engaged in the occupation of Somalia, while the overall operation is run by the CIA. (Egypt is considered part of the Middle East, for U.S. military purposes.)
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African Diaspora: Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa:
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By Edward S. Herman
January 21, 2014 - Global Research
Robin Philpot's important new book Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa is an eye-opener and essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the recent history of Rwanda, ongoing U.S. and Western policy in Africa, and how efficiently the Western propaganda system works.
As in the case of the wars dismantling Yugoslavia, there is a "standard model" of what happened in Rwanda both in 1994 and in the preceding and later years, a model that puts the victorious Tutsi expatriate and Ugandan official Paul Kagame, his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), and his Western supporters in a favorable light and the government of Rwanda, led by the Hutu Juvenal Habyarimana, in a negative light. Philpot challenges this model in all of its aspects and shows convincingly that, in a virtual miracle of systematic distortion, this version of history stands the truth on its head.
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African Diaspora: South Sudan: When the Empire is Your Liberator, You're Not Really Independent
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By Glen Ford
January 20, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“The South Sudanese military has broke up into its component warlord parts.”
For decades, the United States and Israel sought to bring about the fracturing of Sudan, which had been, geographically, the largest nation in Africa. Secession of the South was a special project of Israel, whose most enduring and fundamental foreign policy is to spread chaos and dissention in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Sudan, under the political control of the mostly Muslim North, joined the Arab League immediately upon independence, in 1956. Israel has sought to destabilize Sudan ever since, both to strike a blow at “Arabized” Africans and to curry favor among Christians on the continent.
John Garang, who rose to leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, received military training in Israel in 1970, during Sudan’s first civil war. However, Garang favored keeping the South in federation with a united Sudan. In 2005, under a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Garang became vice president of the whole of Sudan and premier of the southern part of the country. He died in a mysterious helicopter crash six months later. Garang was succeeded by Salva Kiir, who sports a black cowboy hat given to him by President Bush, in 2006.
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African Diaspora: David Diop's Africa
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By Kumbirayi Shonhiwa
January 20, 2014 - herald.co.zw
David Mandessi Diop (1927-1960) was a revolutionary African poet born in France to parents of West African descent, and an active member of the Negritude movement. Diop’s poems highlight African problems brought about by colonialism and give a message of hope and resistance to people of the continent.
One poem starts with the narrator reminiscing about Africa, which he has not yet seen but knows from his grandmother’s songs of his childhood.
Despite not having been to Africa, he calls it “My Africa” to emphasise his sense of belonging as he describes the “black blood” which flows in his veins as a descendant of the continent.
The verses assume an angry and accusatory tone as he stresses that it is the blood and sweat of his people which is irrigating the fields of the colonialists without any benefit to the black people of Africa.
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African Diaspora: Mandela Is Dead: Why Hide The Truth About Apartheid?
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By Fidel Castro
December 29, 2013 - monthlyreview.org
Maybe the empire thought that we would not honor our word when, during days of uncertainty in the past century, we affirmed that even if the USSR were to disappear Cuba would continue struggling. World War II broke out on September 1, 1939 when Nazi-fascist troops invaded Poland and struck like a lightning over the heroic people of the USSR, who contributed 27 million lives to preserve mankind from that brutal massacre that ended the lives of 50 million persons.
War, on the other hand, is the only venture that the human race throughout history has failed to avoid, leading Einstein to say that he did not know how World War III would be like but most certainly the fourth would be fought with sticks and stones.
Added up, the means available to the two most powerful powers –United States and Russia— amount to 20,000 (twenty thousand) nuclear warheads. Mankind should know that three days before John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency of his country on January 20, 1961, a US B-52 bomber, in a routine flight, carrying two atomic bombs with a destructive capacity 260 times that of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, had an accident and the aircraft crashed. For such cases sophisticated automatic equipment are in place to prevent the bombs from exploding. The first bomb landed without risks. In the case of the second, three of the four mechanisms failed, and the fourth, in very critical conditions could barely function. The bomb did not explode by mere chance.
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