The Malvinas and Chagos

These are the days when patriotism runs wild again about some foggy rocks near Antarctica, belonging to "this great nation" (the incedrible phrase used by the co-chairman of the Tory party on Question Time, Jan. 20th) and the right to self-determination of the inhabitants of these rocks is highlighted.

The days when the contrast to Diego Garcia and Chagos is yet a bit more poignant than usually.
John Pilger happens to write about Chagos.

And in London there will be the theatre piece Some Man Fridays in February and March. Check it out if you can.

Lalit on UK & US conspiracy, lies and impunity

It is not every day in our shared history that we find ourselves interconnected in such a matrix of struggles: the struggle against military bases and occupation, the struggle against decolonisation, the struggle to protect human rights and ecosystems. Diego Garcia represents this matrix. These struggles intersect at this atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean in the Chagos Archipelago, which is part of the Mauritius territory. The military base on Diego Garcia is not a coincidence in this matrix; it is at the very heart of the United States and Great Britain's military strategy.

What we are dealing with here in this part of our shared history is a criminal plot concocted by the British State and the American State; a conspiracy that the governments of UK and US have been trying to keep secret from us, from their own people and from the rest of the world. The role Great Britain has played on Chagos and Diego, sometimes on its own, sometimes alongside the prime mover, the United States of America, has been one of secrecy, conspiracy and a web of lies.

And, what is happening on Diego Garcia today can have important repercussions globally.

Further reading.

Football and Chagos

"Our situation is like a football match. The superpower countries are the players, and we are just the ball to be kicked around."

- A young Pakistani civilian,
North Waziristan

Nima Shirazi

The Great Game is indeed alive and kicking. This summer's World Cup tournament is providing yet another way for the United States to project its power across the globe, though not as a result of the American national team's action on the pitch.

Rather, this year, the subjugation will be televised.

While the presence of U.S. Marine Corps recruiting advertisements at each and every commercial break is perhaps mundane at this point, far more surprising is the frequent, scripted announcement by various British and Scottish play-by-play commentators on ESPN that "we'd like to welcome our men and women in uniform, serving in over 175 countries and territories, watching today's 2010 FIFA World Cup match on AFN, the American Forces Network." Other various comments have also been made about how proud the ESPN color men are of the American troops, what a fine job they are doing, and that the commentators are "glad to have them with us" and "sincerely hope [the soldiers] are enjoying the broadcast."

Beyond the surreal fact that announcers from the UK, like Adrian Healey, Martin Tyler, and Ian Darke, are eagerly praising American soldiers and sailors during the broadcast as their own ("our brave men and women..."), how can the rest be said with a straight face or without the most shameful sense of hypocrisy? That there are US troops stationed in over 175 countries around the world is a stunning fact in itself - although well-known by now if you've been paying attention at all for the past decade. At this point, there's probably an 'App' for that.

But again, this is the World Cup, and overseas ESPN announcers are lauding the attention, entertainment, and service of U.S. world domination forces, a military that has invaded, occupied, overthrown, exploited, bombed, blasted, burned, and reduced to rubble many - if not most - of the countries that now vie for the cup of all cups. The same Armed Force that now gets to enjoy the harmonious excitement of the 'beautiful game' in all its High Def glory has stoked tension and supported instability (to say the least) in countries as Greece (in 1947-49, over 500 U.S. armed forces military advisers sent to administer hundreds of millions of dollars in their civil war), Brazil (in 1964, U.S. backs a coup d'etat to overthrow popular president João Goulart), Chile (in 1973, U.S.-supported military coup overthrows - and murders - democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and brings dictatorship of Pinochet to power), Uruguay (in 1973, U.S.-backed coup brings military dictatorship to power), Argentina (in 1976, military junta deposes government of Isabel Perón with U.S. support), Honduras (besides past interventions in 1905, 1907, 1911, and 1943, in 1983 over 1000 troops and National Guard members were deployed to help the Contra fight against Nicaragua, not to mention the U.S. support for last year's coup), Slovenia and Serbia (in 1992-6, U.S. Navy joins in a naval blockade of Yugoslavia in Adriatic waters while in 1999, U.S. participated in months of air bombing and cruise missile strikes in Kosovo 'war').

The U.S military is still essentially occupying Germany (52,440 troops in over 50 installations), Japan (35,688 troops with an additional 5,500 American civilians employed by the DoD - oh yeah, and Japan pays about $2 billion each year for the US to be there as part of the 'Omoiyari Yosan,' or 'compassion budget'), and South Korea (28,500 U.S. troops). There are 9,660 U.S troops still stationed in Italy, 9,015 in the United Kingdom, over 1,300 in Serbia and over 1,200 in Spain.

Furthermore, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay all suffer the presence of at least a few American soldiers who are officially stationed there; some of these countries are forced to host 400-800 US troops. All told, there are about 78,000 American military personnel in Europe, along with approximately 47,240 in East Asia and the Pacific, 3,360 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia (obviously not including the 92,000 troops in Iraq and about 100,000 in Afghanistan and Pakistan), 1,355 in sub-Saharan Africa, and an additional 1,940 in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States itself.

When broadcasting from the new Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on the east coast of South Africa, Scottish announcer Derek Rae has made sure to point out that "U.S. sailors and Marines are with us today...on AFN, the American Forces Network."

As of 2008, the U.S. Navy had over 90,000 sailors afloat in and around the United States and its satellite territories around the world. Another 18,280 are deployed in foreign waters, accompanied by over 4,300 Marines. There are about 10,500 Naval personnel stationed in East Asia and the Pacific alone.

Continuing, Rae states, "We'd like say hello to the crews of all the ships at sea. And we are just a stone's throw from the ocean ourselves, the Indian Ocean, in this case. Great to have you with us."

The island of Diego Garcia, located about 1,000 miles from the southern coasts of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, is a British colony, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, and serves as a massive U.S. military naval and airbase under an arrangement made in 1971 (for which the UK does not charge the U.S. any rent). The agreement led to 2,000 native islanders being forcibly evicted to the Seychelles and Mauritius. (Reportedly, the U.S. is "opposed to anyone other than military personnel and their employees living anywhere in the Chagos archipelago, asserting that security will be compromised." Since the U.S. has always had such an ironic sense of humor when it comes to unabashed ethnic cleansing - whether in the Americas, Palestine, or the Indian Ocean - it should come as no surprise that the island's military base was named "Camp Justice" until 2006.) Currently, about 50 British military staff are stationed on the island, with more than 3,200 U.S. personnel.

The Diego Garcia installation acts as a refueling and support station for the U.S. Navy and Air Force and is home of a U.S. naval prepositioning squadron (responsible for the readiness of naval vessels as part of the Military Sealift Command in the Indian Ocean). The aerial bombardment and invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq were launched from the island. More recently, Diego Garcia is home to forward deployed U.S. guided missile nuclear submarines, in stark violation of the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, and has been used as a "black site" in the Bush administration's illegal extraordinary rendition program, a program protected and continued by Obama.

Earlier this year, the Scottish Sunday Herald revealed that "hundreds of powerful US 'bunker-buster' bombs" had been "shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran." The cargo included "195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs," which are "used for blasting hardened or underground structures" such as Iran's fortified nuclear energy facilities. Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London and co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran, has stated that the United States is "gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran...US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours."

The only country in this year's World Cup proceedings without any substantial or even token United States military presence is - surprise - North Korea. Yet even this might change if Obama gets his way. That would put American troops in every single one of the 32 countries currently competing in South Africa, along with over 140 others.

A press release distributed by U.S. Africa Command (US AFRICOM) this week reports, "Through the cooperation of a host of international television licensees, the American Forces Network Broadcast Center (AFN-BC) has been granted permission by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) to distribute the full complement of matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa."

A recent article in Stars and Stripes, quotes Lt. Col. Steve Berger, an intelligence planner with U.S. Army Africa stationed in Vicenza, Italy, as saying, "It’s really great for the soldiers to see, especially for an emerging sport in the U.S.” (So that they can get a glimpse of the kinds of people they'll be ordered to conquer and kill next?) Even more exciting is the fact that, "Because AFN doesn’t pay for programming, it was important that it receive the rights to the World Cup for free, AFN chief of affiliate relations Larry Sichter said." Apparently, the military can invade your country and station troops there indefinitely, but it sure as hell won't pay for television broadcasting! Especially not with the $531 billion allocated this fiscal year for U.S. military spending (a total which is expected to rise by $18 billion next year along with an additional $272 billion for the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan, the illegal predator drone bombings in Pakistan, and rebuilding and updating a nuclear arsenal in clear violation of the requirements of the NPT). The U.S. armed forces just can't spare a square.

Perhaps FIFA had no choice but to comply with the requests of the U.S. military for fear of having their offices occupied or blown to pieces. What a relief a deal was struck! How global! How peaceful! How imperial! How obvious, unsurprising, and embarrassing.

"Having the most-watched sports event on the planet play out on AFN is a real feather in our cap," notes Jeff White, Executive Director of AFN-BC, in the text of the military press release filed from Riverdale, CA via Stuttgart, Germany. "But more importantly," White continues, "we'll be able to deliver the entire compliment [sic] of matches to the side that means the most -- our brave men and women in uniform serving their country overseas and in harm's way. It doesn't get any better than this."

That, out of the planetary pride, representation, and unification that the World Cup is supposed to be all about, the U.S. military would be "the side that means the most" is in itself upsetting - but hey, it's a military press release and the guy's name is White after all.

But White is wholly wrong about "it" not getting "any better than this." There is a very simple way for things to be much, much better. If the U.S. reduced its dominating and destructive presence and aggressive involvement around the world and dismantled the hundreds of foreign installations and imperial infrastructure that keep the rest of the world in submission and under American occupation, these "brave men and women in uniform" could - and should - be watching these 64 soccer games from the comfort of their own homes in the United States, on the couch with their families.

For the sake of the entire world, it truly wouldn't get any better than that.

Source.

Base on Diego Garcia aiming at China?

If China's satellites and spies were working properly, there would have been a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese navy last week. A new class of U.S. superweapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy has been dispatching modified "boomers" to who knows where (they do travel underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles each, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads.
Their capability makes watching these particular submarines especially interesting. The 14 Trident-carrying subs are useful in the unlikely event of a nuclear Armageddon, and Russia remains their prime target. But the Tomahawk-outfitted quartet carries a weapon that the U.S. military has used repeatedly against targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan.

That's why alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing on June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-ft. U.S.S. Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay. More alarms were likely sounded when the U.S.S. Michigan arrived in Pusan, South Korea, on the same day. And the Klaxons would have maxed out as the U.S.S. Florida surfaced, also on the same day, at the joint U.S.-British naval base on Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. In all, the Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 new Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood. "There's been a decision to bolster our forces in the Pacific," says Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There is no doubt that China will stand up and take notice."

U.S. officials deny that any message is being directed at Beijing, saying the Tomahawk triple play was a coincidence. But they did make sure that news of the deployments appeared in the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post - on July 4, no less. The Chinese took notice quietly. "At present, common aspirations of countries in the Asian and Pacific regions are seeking for peace, stability and regional security," Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said on Wednesday. "We hope the relevant U.S. military activities will serve for the regional peace, stability and security, and not the contrary."


Last month, the Navy announced that all four of the Tomahawk-carrying subs were operationally deployed away from their home ports for the first time. Each vessel packs "the firepower of multiple surface ships," says Captain Tracy Howard of Submarine Squadron 16 in Kings Bay, Ga., and can "respond to diverse threats on short notice."

The move forms part of a policy by the U.S. government to shift firepower from the Atlantic to the Pacific theater, which Washington sees as the military focus of the 21st century. Reduced tensions since the end of the Cold War have seen the U.S. scale back its deployment of nuclear weapons, allowing the Navy to reduce its Trident fleet from 18 to 14. (Why 14 subs, as well as bombers and land-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons, are still required to deal with the Russian threat is a topic for another day.) (See "Obama Shelves U.S. Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers.")
Sure, the Navy could have retired the four additional subs and saved the Pentagon some money, but that's not how bureaucracies operate. Instead, it spent about $4 billion replacing the Tridents with Tomahawks and making room for 60 special-ops troops to live aboard each sub and operate stealthily around the globe. "We're there for weeks, we have the situational awareness of being there, of being part of the environment," Navy Rear Admiral Mark Kenny explained after the first Tomahawk-carrying former Trident sub set sail in 2008. "We can detect, classify and locate targets and, if need be, hit them from the same platform."

The submarines aren't the only new potential issue of concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the U.S. and its allies in the region are now under way. More than three dozen naval ships and subs began participating in the "Rim of the Pacific" war games off Hawaii on Wednesday. Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations are involved in the biennial exercise, which includes missile drills and the sinking of three abandoned vessels playing the role of enemy ships. Nations joining the U.S. in what is billed as the world's largest-ever naval war game are Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Singapore and Thailand. Closer to China, CARAT 2010 - for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training - just got under way off Singapore. The operation involves 17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S., Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.


China is absent from both exercises, and that's no oversight. Many nations in the eastern Pacific, including Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, have been encouraging the U.S. to push back against what they see as China's increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. And the U.S. military remains concerned over China's growing missile force - now more than 1,000 - near the Taiwan Strait. The Tomahawks' arrival "is part of a larger effort to bolster our capabilities in the region," Glaser says. "It sends a signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the region that many countries there want us to be." No doubt Beijing got the signal.f China's satellites and spies were working properly, there would have been a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese navy last week. A new class of U.S. superweapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy has been dispatching modified "boomers" to who knows where (they do travel underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles each, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads.

Their capability makes watching these particular submarines especially interesting. The 14 Trident-carrying subs are useful in the unlikely event of a nuclear Armageddon, and Russia remains their prime target. But the Tomahawk-outfitted quartet carries a weapon that the U.S. military has used repeatedly against targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan.

That's why alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing on June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-ft. U.S.S. Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay. More alarms were likely sounded when the U.S.S. Michigan arrived in Pusan, South Korea, on the same day. And the Klaxons would have maxed out as the U.S.S. Florida surfaced, also on the same day, at the joint U.S.-British naval base on Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. In all, the Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 new Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood. "There's been a decision to bolster our forces in the Pacific," says Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There is no doubt that China will stand up and take notice."

U.S. officials deny that any message is being directed at Beijing, saying the Tomahawk triple play was a coincidence. But they did make sure that news of the deployments appeared in the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post - on July 4, no less. The Chinese took notice quietly. "At present, common aspirations of countries in the Asian and Pacific regions are seeking for peace, stability and regional security," Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said on Wednesday. "We hope the relevant U.S. military activities will serve for the regional peace, stability and security, and not the contrary."

Last month, the Navy announced that all four of the Tomahawk-carrying subs were operationally deployed away from their home ports for the first time. Each vessel packs "the firepower of multiple surface ships," says Captain Tracy Howard of Submarine Squadron 16 in Kings Bay, Ga., and can "respond to diverse threats on short notice."

The move forms part of a policy by the U.S. government to shift firepower from the Atlantic to the Pacific theater, which Washington sees as the military focus of the 21st century. Reduced tensions since the end of the Cold War have seen the U.S. scale back its deployment of nuclear weapons, allowing the Navy to reduce its Trident fleet from 18 to 14. (Why 14 subs, as well as bombers and land-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons, are still required to deal with the Russian threat is a topic for another day.) (See "Obama Shelves U.S. Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers.")
Sure, the Navy could have retired the four additional subs and saved the Pentagon some money, but that's not how bureaucracies operate. Instead, it spent about $4 billion replacing the Tridents with Tomahawks and making room for 60 special-ops troops to live aboard each sub and operate stealthily around the globe. "We're there for weeks, we have the situational awareness of being there, of being part of the environment," Navy Rear Admiral Mark Kenny explained after the first Tomahawk-carrying former Trident sub set sail in 2008. "We can detect, classify and locate targets and, if need be, hit them from the same platform."

The submarines aren't the only new potential issue of concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the U.S. and its allies in the region are now under way. More than three dozen naval ships and subs began participating in the "Rim of the Pacific" war games off Hawaii on Wednesday. Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations are involved in the biennial exercise, which includes missile drills and the sinking of three abandoned vessels playing the role of enemy ships. Nations joining the U.S. in what is billed as the world's largest-ever naval war game are Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Singapore and Thailand. Closer to China, CARAT 2010 - for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training - just got under way off Singapore. The operation involves 17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S., Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.


China is absent from both exercises, and that's no oversight. Many nations in the eastern Pacific, including Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, have been encouraging the U.S. to push back against what they see as China's increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. And the U.S. military remains concerned over China's growing missile force - now more than 1,000 - near the Taiwan Strait. The Tomahawks' arrival "is part of a larger effort to bolster our capabilities in the region," Glaser says. "It sends a signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the region that many countries there want us to be." No doubt Beijing got the signal.
(AP/Yahoo News, 9 July 2010)

Africa, new target of US imperialism

Rather to my amazement Allafrica.com very recently carried this piece from Zabalaza, South African "platformist"-anarchist journal with which I used to be in touch. Chagos is mentioned in passing but the whole article seems important enough to be placed here.

Michael Schmidt

Former colonial power, France, has maintained the largest foreign military presence in Africa since most countries attained sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s. While France reduced its armed presence on the continent by two thirds at the end of the last century, it continues to intervene in a muscular and controversial fashion. For example, under a 1961 'mutual defence' pact, French forces were allowed to be permanently stationed in Ivory Coast and the 500-strong 43rd Marine Infantry Battalion is still based at Port Bouet next to the Abidjan airport.

When the civil war erupted in Ivory Coast in September 2002, France added a 'stabilisation force', now numbering some 4,000 under Operation Licorne, which was augmented in 2003 by 1,500 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 'peacekeepers' drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. In January 2006, the United Nations extended the mandate of Operation Licorne until December 2006.

Piggybacking off the French military presence in Africa, however, are a series of new foreign military and policing initiatives by the United States and the European Union. It appears that the US has devised a new 'Monroe Doctrine' for Africa (the term has become a synonym for the doctrine of US interventions in what it saw as its Latin American 'back yard').

Under the George W. Bush regime's War on Terror doctrine, the US has designated a swathe of territory - curving across the globe from Colombia and Venezuela in South America, through Africa's Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel regions, and into the Middle East and Central Asia - as the 'arc of instability', where both real and supposed terrorists may find refuge and training.

In Africa, which falls under the US military's European Command (EUCOM), the US has struck agreements with France to share its military bases. For example, there is now a US marine corps base in Djibouti at the French base of Camp Lemonier. More than 1,800 marines are stationed there, allegedly for 'counter-terrorism' operations in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and East Africa, as well as for controlling the Red Sea shipping lanes.

But the US presence involves more than piggybacking off French bases. In 2003, US intelligence operatives began training spies for four unnamed North African countries. These are believed to be Morocco and Egypt and perhaps also Algeria and Tunisia.

It is also conducting training of the armed forces of countries such as Chad. In September 2005, Bush told the United Nations Security Council that the US would train 40,000 'African peace-keepers' to 'preserve justice and order in Africa', over the following five years. The US Embassy in Pretoria said, at the time, that the US had already trained 20,000 'peace-keepers' in 12 African countries in the use of 'non-lethal equipment'.

And now, while the US is downscaling and dismantling military bases in Germany and South Korea, it is relocating these military resources to Africa and the Middle East in order to 'combat terrorism' and 'protect oil resources'.

In Africa, new US bases are being built in Djibouti, Uganda, Senegal, and São Tomé & Prí­ncipe. These 'jumping-off points' will station small, permanent forces, but with the ability to launch major regional military adventures, according to the US-based Associated Press. An existing US base at Entebbe in Uganda, under the one-party regime of US ally Yoweri Museveni, already 'covers' East Africa and the Great Lakes region. In Dakar, Senegal, the US is busy upgrading an airfield.

SOUTH AFRICA SECRETLY JOINS THE 'WAR ON TERROR'

Governments with whom the US has concluded military pacts with include Gabon, Mauritania, Rwanda, Guinea and South Africa. The US also has a 'second Guantanamo' in the Indian Ocean, where alleged terror suspects who are kidnapped in Africa, the Middle East or Asia can be detained and interrogated without trial. This 'second Guantanamo' comprises of a detention camp, refueling point and bomber base situated on the British-colonised Chagos Archipelago island of Diego Garcia, an island from which the indigenous inhabitants were forcibly removed to Mauritius.

In South Africa's case, while it is unlikely that there will ever be US bases established - the strength of South Africa's own military, SANDF, makes this unnecessary - in 2005, the country quietly signed on to the US's Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme, which is aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (imperialist) objectives.

South Africa, by signing on to ACOTA as the 13th African member, effectively joined the American War on Terror. ACOTA started life as a 'humanitarian' programme run by EUCOM out of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1996. After the 9/11 attacks, however, the Pentagon reorganised ACOTA and gave it more teeth.

Today, ACOTA's makeup is more obviously aggressive than defensive. According to journalist Pierre Abromovici - writing, in the July 2004 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, about rumours that South Africa was preparing to sign ACOTA a full year before it did so - 'ACOTA includes offensive training, particularly for regular infantry units and small units modelled on special forces... In Washington, the talk is no longer of non-lethal weapons... the emphasis is on "offensive" co-operation'.

The real nature of ACOTA is perhaps indicated by the career of the man heading it up, Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina. He is, according to Abromovici, 'a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs... He is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defence Board, and, in the 1960s, he took part in clandestine operations against the Sandanistas. He was accused of involvement in drug-trafficking to fund arms sent to Central America' to prop up pro-Washington right-wing dictatorships.

Clearly, Pino-Marina is a fervent 'anti-communist' - whether that means opposing rebellious states or popular insurrections. He also sits on the executive of a strange outfit within the US military called the Cuban-American Military council, which aims at installing itself as the government of Cuba should the US ever achieve a forcible 'regime-change' there.

The career of the US ambassador, Jendayi Fraser, who concluded the ACOTA pact with South Africa is also an indicator of US intentions. Fraser, Bush's senior advisor on Africa, had no diplomatic experience. Instead, she once served as a politico-military planner with the joint chiefs of staff in the Department of Defence and as senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. According to Fraser's online biography, she 'worked on African security issues with the State Department's international military education training programmes'.

IS THERE A MURDEROUS 'SCHOOL OF THE AFRICAS'?

The programmes that Fraser mentions include the 'Next Generation of African Military Leaders' course run by the shady African Centre for Strategic Studies based in Washington, which has 'chapters' in various African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of 'School of the Africas' similar to the infamous 'School of the Americas' based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous death-squad killers, and Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002.

Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of Nicaragua, in 1980, and the 'El Mozote' massacre of 767 villagers in El Salvador, in 1981, were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC down, is on an FBI 'anti-terrorism' watch-list.

So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch cannot confirm these fears? There is more: we've all heard of the 'Standby Force' being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa's authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe - which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia - the African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism.

The Centre is based in Algiers in Algeria, at the heart of a murderous regime that has itself 'made disappear' some 3,000 people between 1992 and 2003 (according to Amnesty International this is equivalent to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, but it is a fact ignored by the African left). The Centre's director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a think-tank and trainer of 'anti-terrorism' judges, but that it would also have teeth and would provide training in 'specific armed intervention' to support the continent's regimes.

Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said though, that only ten per cent of terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only six per cent were on state figures and institutions, though the latter were 'focused'. She warned that a major cause of African terrorism was 'a growing void between government and security forces on the one hand, and local communities on the other'. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are recruited into rebel armies even though few of these offer any sort of real solution.

The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU's 'Algiers Convention on Terrorism', which is notoriously vague on the definition of terrorism. This opens the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the new counter-terrorism forces. It would be naïve to think that bourgeois democracy - which passed South Africa's equally vaguely-defined Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act into law last year - will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.

- Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based journalist and political activist. This article was first published in three years ago in 'Zabalaza: a Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism', No. 8, November 2006. Zabalaza is the English-language sister journal of the French-language Afrique Sans Châines.

Doutes sur retraite de Chagos

La récente décision des Etats-Unis pour un upgrading of the wharf facilties à la base militaire de Diego Garcia suscite des doutes quant à un éventuel retrait à l'expiration du bail initial de 50 ans et le retour de l'archipel des Chagos à Maurice en 2016. C'est ce qu'indiquent des observateurs qui suivent avec intérêt depuis plusieurs années déjà ce différend anglo-mauricien. Le dernier développement majeur en date demeure l'octroi d'un contrat d'un montant de Rs 300 millions pour des travaux au quai de Diego Garcia. Les travaux de modernisation des facilités portuaires devront durer jusqu'en octobre 2011, indique-t-on de sources militaires officielles.

Ainsi un consortium connu sous le nom de Black Construction Corp. / MACE International, JV, GMF Barrigada de Guam s'est vu octroyer en ce début d'année le contrat pour des travaux visant à upgrade the wharf facilities at Naval Support Facility à Diego Garcia. Mention est également faite qu'une firme spécialisée du Japon, The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Far East, à Yokosuka, comme faisant partie des contracting activities.

A ce stade, l'annonce publique de ce contrat d'un montant de Rs 300 millions pour des travaux échelonnés sur les prochains 22 mois, n'est pas accompagné de détails sur la nature des travaux envisagés par les militaires américains ou encore si ces travaux auront des répercussions sur l'environnement marin de l'archipel. Rappelons que Londres ambitionne de transformer les eaux des Chagos en une marine protection area.

Néanmoins, la succession de projets de nature militaire exécutés à Diego Garcia commence à susciter de malaises à Port-Louis. Les travaux pour la modernisation des wharf facilities at the Naval Support Base de Diego Garcia fait suite à la décision de Washington de doter cette base militaire de facilités pour accueillir des sous-marins équipés de lance-missile type Tomahawk. Ces nouvelles dispositions devront être opérationnelles à partir du mois d'avril prochain, avait annoncé la Marine américaine vers la fin de l'année dernière.

D'autre part, fin décémbre 2009, dans le sillage de l'attentat terroriste manqué sur un avion de la Northwest Airlines le jour de Noël avec pour principal suspect, l'étudiant nigérian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, la presse internationale avait fait état d'un projet des Américains pour l'utilisation des facilités militaires à Diego Garcia dans la nouvelle offensive contre Al-Qaeda au Yémen.

" The US has never publicly acknowledged the rapid build-up of its military presence in and near Yemen since last year but sources say that attacks already mounted by Yemeni government forces on al-Qaeda training camps would have been impossible without American hardware and knowhow. Future strikes could involve the use of US drones, fighter jets and ship-launched cruise missiles. "We are going to work with allies and partners to seek out terrorist activity [and] al-Qaeda", Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said. The US military has formidable firepower on permanent standby in the form of carrier battle groups stationed in Bahrain, and unimpeded access to Yemen from bases in Djibouti and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia ", rapporte le Times de Londres à cet effet.

A ce stade, le gouvernement est encore au stade de la confirmation officielle des intentions militaires des Américains. Le ministre des Affaires étrangères, Arvin Boolell, interrogé par Le Mauricien, ce matin, sur ces nouveaux travaux d'infrastructure à Diego Garcia, a laissé entendre qu'il compte soulever cette affaire pour des précisions sur les composantes de ces travaux lors de sa prochaine rencontre avec le nouveau Chargé d'Affaires des Etats-Unis demain.

Entre-temps, le froid diplomatique entre Port-Louis et Londres est toujours de mise car le Foreign Secretary britannique, David Miliband, n'a pas encore répondu aux demandes d'explications et d'éclaircissements de Maurice au sujet du " Consultation Paper " sur le projet visant à faire de l'archipel des Chagos une marine protection area. Une des conséquences est que le troisième round des consultations bilatérales sur les Chagos, qui aurait dû se dérouler cette semaine à Londres, a été gelé à l'initiative de Maurice.





Source: Le Mauricien

Diego Garcia: The Other Guantánamo

David Vine

On the small, remote island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, the United States has one of the most secretive military bases in the world. From its position almost 10,000 miles closer to the Persian Gulf than the east coast of the United States, this huge U.S. air and naval base has been a major, if little known, launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the past year, the Bush administration has made improvements that point toward its use in a possible attack on Iran. The administration recently admitted what it had long denied and what journalists, human rights investigators, and others had long suspected: The island has also been part of the CIA's secret "rendition" program for captured terrorist suspects.

While few know about the base on Diego Garcia – it has long been off-limits to all non-military personnel – even fewer know how it came into being. To create the base, the United States, with the help of Great Britain, exiled all the indigenous people of Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos Archipelago. Between 1968 and 1973, U.S. and U.K. officials forcibly removed around 2,000 people, called Chagossians, 1,200 miles away to islands in the western Indian Ocean. Left on the docks of Mauritius and the Seychelles with no resettlement assistance, the Chagossians, whose ancestry in Chagos dated to the 18th century, have grown deeply impoverished in exile.

Diego Garcia has become another Guantánamo in more ways than one: The product of years of deception and lies, a far more secretive detention facility than the Cuban prison, the cause of immense suffering and pain for an entire people, Diego Garcia has become mark of shame for the United States that must be repaired.

Further reading.