Former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad recently penned an excellent essay breaking down whats going on in Mali, Congo and the Middle East.. he also challenged the type of stances many of us have taken with respect to these regions that are embroiled in conflict… To support his essay we interviewed him so he can expand upon his analysis. In true form Dhoruba pulled no punches.. Peep what he has to say..
Hard Knock Radio Interview w/ Dhoruba speaking on African and Middle East Policies
U.S. African and Mideast Policies: War As Foreign Aid and Regime Change As Democratic Transition
by Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Africans in the Diaspora are in a crisis of conscience searching for what it means
to be “African centered” or Pan-African, and citizens of Racist Nation-states
with histories of Imperial domination. We are confronted today with “New Age
Imperialism” where national elites collaborate to oppress the poor and hungry
of the planet rather than wage war with each other over the control of strategic
resources. This global convergence of interests has found its natural opposition in
the international character of the Muslim Ummah.
The US and Race based Democracy – “Democratic Fascism”.
In the U.S. where over 2.5 million American citizens are locked away in prison
and another 15 plus million owners of major “felony” convictions, the African-
American population and other national “minorities” of non-European background
are subjected to a contrived system of fascism masquerading as “democracy” –
a political and social system of police and corporate control, a police state with
unprecedented power (after 9/11 terrorist attacks) that employs a “National
Security” rationale to conceal its crimes of “rendition”, torture (enhanced
interrogation), indefinite detention, and targeted assassinations . Like most modern
“national-security” states, U.S. policies are most closely associated with its perceived
“national interests” primarily involving access to strategic resources and “trade”.
The West’s bogus advocacy of supporting individual freedom by supporting
“Democratic regime change” in its former colonial territories mask not only their
own internal inequalities based on race, religion and gender, but conceal the often
violent cooptation of legitimate revolutionary people’s movements that oppose
entrenched oligarchies, Autocrats, while marginalizing and demonizing Islamic
based anti-imperialist forces across Africa and Mid-East. Islam has replaced the
specter of “communist global domination” as the foremost threat to global Finance
Capitalism and Western global domination. That the West’s perceives opposition to
neo-imperialist diplomacy in secular dimensions, characterizing this opposition as
the “clash of civilizations) is not without historical basis.
Up until the overthrow of the western stooge Shah Reza Palhavi of Iran, a strictly
Islamic based mass movement had never overthrown a modern non-secular
Nation State backed by the Western Imperial powers. Needless to say the Iranian
“revolutions” sent shock waves throughout the region and shook regional Sunni
comprador classes (Oil Sheikdoms) across the region to their reactionary roots. But
to the masses of Muslims on the streets of Arab capitals the Iranian revolution was
a ray of hope – but its Shia dimension served the US and Europe’s historical fallback
tactic of divide and conquer . We now see how effective the West’s early divide and
conquer strategy of containment has been and how it has the region tittering on the
brink of war. Many Arab Sunni rulers, with US blessings, covertly intensified their
alignment with the European settler-state of Israel to contain Iranian geopolitical
influence even as Israel gears up for military strikes against the Islamic Republic. US
and NATO troops are stationed in Muslim lands, military bases across the Mid-
East are designed to project Western military power into the region. All this a
consequence of US divide and conquer fear tactics in the region.
With the support for US militarism abroad (war on terror) a fundamental principle
of both the Right wing and “moderates” in the US congress , it is little surprise
that white American politicians are also major supporters and instigators of anti-
Islamic fervor both inside and outside the US. Because the ramifications of “the
war on terror” has disproportionately affected the immigrant Muslim population
in the US (African-American Muslims have lived under religious, racial, and
political repression for decades) U.S. military and diplomatic actions in Arab
countries of North Africa, Iraq, Syria, as well as in Pakistan and India have all been
characterized as unique, untypical resistance or an “Arab Spring”. This definition of
uprisings across Muslim North Africa by the western media and westernized Arab
intellectuals are aimed at one thing. Dividing the Muslim Ummah along racial and
historical lines, while isolating African Muslims from the general process of Pan-
African unity and democratization.
The use of the contextual term “Arab Spring” to characterize the mass uprising of
NORTH AFRICANS against the rule of despotic Arab elites is purposely and artfully
crafted to discourage sub-Saharan Black Africa and its Muslim populations from
emulating their North African counterparts while appealing to the “Anti-Arab”
sentiments among many Pan-Africans and within the Black Diaspora. ECOWAS
and the African Union’s recent support of French military intervention in Mali and
as US surrogate in Somalia, and else where on the African continent are testimony
to how eagerly Africa’s political elite are utilizing the “West’s war terror” to secure
their positions and prop up their power while ignoring persecuted and marginalized
Muslim minority populations.
In countries like Nigeria the US is on the ground
supporting the Christian dominated government’s “anti-terrorist actions” in the
North of the country against an Islamic insurgency. In Somalia, the US drone war has
spilled over into neighboring countries, like Eritrea, Al-Yemen and has led to tribal
unrest in Northern Kenya. While the US and its European Allies seemed appalled
by the Muslim insurgencies in the North of Mali (consistently failing to mentioned
that this crisis was long in the making and connected to the Western European’s
deposing of Libya’s Ghadaffi and the silent collusion of Black Africa’s leaders) both
the US and Europe are neither horrified or outraged by events in the Eastern Congo.
Africa, A War Zone Without End
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 and
other strategic minerals. Eighty percent of the world’s coltan reserves are in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Often dismissed as an ethnic war, the conflict in the
Congo is really over natural resources sought by foreign corporations —
diamonds,tin, copper, gold, but mostly coltan”
In an article titled “Why the U.S. Won’t Help”, a Nairobi newspaper 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. These figures have quadrupled since 1998 and the
region is no closer to stability than it was when Patrice Lumumba was assassinated
by the US, French and Belgians in 1960s.
The hypocrisy of the US and Europe asking Africa’s political elite to develop and
democratize while cutting levels of non-military international aid and increasing
weapons and military training to the continent’s Armies does not seem to have
registered with African-Americans, neither those (Pan-Africans) who claim
solidarity with the current crop of African leaders, or those elected to public office.
This lack of outspoken opposition to US militarization of Africa, especially under
the Obama administration is inexcusable and attributable to the uncritical and
unprincipled support of the Obama regime by African-Americans. Moreover,
Obama’s policy of destabilization and “democratic regime change” of governments
it is at odds with suggest that there is little real commitment to developing human
resources and a new “partnership” with Africa, the U.S. needs to redirect the focus
away from strengthening military capacity, coopting ethnic and national elites and
more toward promoting human development in Africa.
END
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