Gold and Oil: Petrodollars and the United States Attacks in Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran; Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People

Gold and Oil:

Petrodollars and the United States Attacks in Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran; Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People

“Towards the end of World War II, when it became obvious that the allies were going to win and dictate the post war environment, the major world economic powers met at Bretton Woods, a luxury resort in New Hampshire, in July 1944, and hammered out the Bretton Woods agreement for international finance. The British Pound lost its position as the global trade and reserve currency and its place was taken by the US dollar (part of the price demanded by Roosevelt in exchange for the US entry into the war). Without the economic advantages of being the world’s central currency, Britain was forced to nationalize the Bank of England in 1946. The Bretton Woods agreement was ratified in 1945, and in addition to making the US dollar the global reserve and trade currency, obliged the signatory nations to tie their currencies to the dollar. The nations which ratified Bretton Woods did so on two conditions. The first was that the Federal Reserve would refrain from over-printing the dollar as a means to loot real products and produce from other nations in exchange for ink and paper: basically an imperial tax. That assurance was backed up by the second, which was that the US dollar would always be convertible to gold at $35 per ounce.

Of course , the Federal Reserve, being a private bank and not answerable to the US Government, did start overprinting paper dollars, and much of the perceived prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of foreign nations’ obligations to accept the paper notes as being worth gold at the rate of $35 an ounce. . . . .

In the years leading up to 1970, expenditures in the Vietnam War made it clear to many countries that the US was printing far more money than it had in gold, and in response, they began to ask for their gold back. This, of course, set off a rapid decline in the value of the dollar . . . .

Then in 1970, France looked at the huge pile of paper notes sitting in their vaults, for which real French products like wine and cheese had been traded, and notified the United States government that they would exercise their option under Bretton Woods to return the paper notes for gold at the $35 per ounce exchange rate. Of course, the United States had nowhere near the gold to redeem the paper notes, so on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon ‘temporarily’ suspended the gold convertibility of the US Federal Reserve Notes:

‘I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily, the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and in conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.’

This ‘Nixon Shock’ effectively ended Bretton Woods and many global currencies started to disengage from the US dollar. Worse still, since the United States had collateralized their loans with the nation’s gold reserves, it quickly became apparent that the US Government did not in fact have enough gold to cover its outstanding debts. Foreign nations began to get nervous about their loans to the US and understandably were reluctant to lend any additional money to the United States without some form of collateral. So Richard Nixon started the environmental movement, with the EPA and its various programs such as ‘wilderness zones’, ‘Road-less areas’, ‘Heritage rivers’, ‘Wetlands’, all of which took vast areas of public lands and made them off limits to the American people who were technically the owners of those lands. But Nixon had little concern for the environment, for the real purpose of this land grab under the guise of the environment was to pledge those pristine lands and their vast mineral resources as collateral on the national debt. The plethora of different programs was simply to conceal the true scale of how much American land was being pledged to foreign lenders as collateral on the government’s debts eventually almost 25% of the nation itself.

With open lands for collateral already in short supply, the US Government embarked on a new program to shore up sagging international demand for the dollar. The United States approached the world’s oil producing nations, mostly in the Middle East, and offered them a deal. In exchange for only selling their oil for dollars, the United States would guarantee the military safety of those oil-rich nations.

[Siphiwe note: this is called “extortion” and “gangsterism”]

The oil rich nations would agree to spend and invest their US paper dollars inside the United States, in particular in US Treasury Bonds, redeemable through future generations of US taxpayers. The concept was labelled the ‘petrodollar’. In effect, the US, no longer able to back the dollar with gold, was now backing it with oil. Other peoples’ oil, and the necessity to control those oil nations in order to prop up the dollar has shaped America’s foreign policy in the region ever since. . . .

This was not a temporary suspension as Nixon claimed, but rather a permanent default, and for the rest of the world who had entrusted the United States with their gold, it was outright theft. In 1973, President Nixon asked King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to accept only US dollars in payment for oil, and to invest any excess profits in US Treasury Bonds, Notes and Bills. In return, Nixon offered military protection for Saudi oil fields. The same offer was extended to each of the key oil-producing countries, and by 1975 every member of OPEC had agreed to only sell their oil in US dollars.

The act of moving the dollar off gold and tying it to foreign oil, instantly forced every oil-importing country in the world to maintain a constant supply of Federal Reserve paper, and in order to get that paper, whey would have to send real physical goods to America. . . . Paper went out, everything America needed came in, and the United States got very, very rich as a result. It was the largest financial con in recorded history.

The Arms Race of the Cold War was a game of poker. Military Expenditures were the chips, and the US had an endless supply of chips. With the Petro Dollar under its belt, it was able to raise the stakes higher and higher, outspending every other country on the planet, until eventually US military expenditure surpassed that of all of the other nations in the world combined - the Soviet Union never had a chance. . . .

The collapse of the communist bloc in 1991 removed the last counterbalance to American military might. The United States was now an undisputed Super-power with no rival. . . . Within that same year, the US invaded Iraq in the first Gulf War, and after crushing the Iraqi military, and destroying their infrastructure, including hospitals and water-purification plants, crippling sanctions were imposed which prevented Iraq’s infrastructure from being rebuilt.

These sanctions which were initiated by Bush Senior, and sustained throughout the entire Clinton administration, lasted for over a decade and were estimated to have killed more than five hundred thousand children . . . .

But as America’s manufacturing and agriculture has declined, the oil producing nations faced a dilemma. Those piles of US Federal Reserve notes were not able to purchase much from the United States because the United States had little (other than real estate) which anyone wanted to buy.

Europe’s cars and aircraft were superior and less costly, while experiments with GMO food crops led to nations refusing to buy US food exports. Israel’s constant belligerence against its neighbors caused them to wonder if the US could actually keep up their end of the petrodollar arrangement. Oil-producing nations started to talk of selling their oil for whatever currency the purchasers chose to use. Iraq, already hostile to the United States, following Desert Storm, demanded the right to sell their oil for Euros, in 2000, and the United Nations agreed to allow it in 2002 under the Oil for Food program instituted following Desert Storm. . . . In response, the US Government with the assistance of mainstream media, began to build up a mass propaganda campaign claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to use them. . . . One year later the United States re-invaded Iraq, lynched Saddam Hussein, and placed Iraq’s oil back on the world market only for US dollars.

Following 9-11, the US policy shift away from being an impartial broker of peace in the Middle East to one of unquestioned support for Israel’s aggressions, only further eroded confidence in the Petrodollar deal and even more oil-producing nations started openly talking of oil trade for other global currencies.

Over in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi had instituted a state-owned central bank and a value-based trade currency, the Gold Dinar. Gaddafi announced that Libya’s oil was for sale, but only for the gold Dinar. Other African nations, seeing the rise of the Gold Dinar and the Euro, even as the US dollar continued its inflation-driven decline, flocked to the new Libyan currency for trade. This move had the potential to seriously undermine the global hegemony of the dollar. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a ‘threat’ to the financial security of the world.

According to General Wesley Clark, the master plan for the ‘dollarification’ of the world’s oil nations included seven targets, Irag; Syria; Lebanon; Libya; Somalia; Sudan; and Iran (Venezuela- which dared to sell their oil to China for the Yuan - is a late 8th addition). . . . On 2nd March 2007, US General Wesley Clark said,

‘So I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said “oh it’s worse than that’. He said as he reached over on his desk and picked up a piece of paper and he said “I just got this down from upstairs today (meaning from the Secretary of Defense’s Office), this is a memo which describes how we are going to take out seven countries in five years, starting off with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran.’

What is notable about the original seven nations originally targeted by the US is that none of them are members of the Bank for International Settlements, the private central bankers private central bank, located in Switzerland. This meant that these nations were deciding for themselves how to run their nations’ economies, rather than submit to the private international banks. So, the United States invaded Libya, brutally murdered Gaddafi“

According to Gold Dinar: the Real Reason Behind Gaddafi’s Murder

"In 2009, Colonel Gaddafi, then President of the African Union, suggested to the States of the African continent to switch to a new currency, independent of the American dollar: the gold dinar.

The objective of this new currency was to divert oil revenues towards state-controlled funds rather than American banks. In other words, to stop using the dollar for oil transactions. Countries such as Nigeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Angola were ready to change their currencies. Unfortunately in March 2011, the NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya in the name of freedom….

Free water, almost free gasoline, free health system and free education were commonplace for Libyans under Gaddafi’s dictatorship.

The leader, who has been in power for 41 years, has managed to gain the support of all the major tribes and buy social peace through radical measures and a policy of shared oil revenues.

Jihadism, the number one enemy of the West, Gaddafi eliminated it with Napalm in the 1990s. Although he financed many armed groups in the Sahel, Libya itself was a stable country where the risk of being kidnapped or even murdered by an armed militia was non-existent.

With an excellent management of oil revenues, the Libyan state had managed to store hundreds of tons of gold (143 tons according to WikiLeaks) and the same amount in silver.

All these resources were going to make Libya the most influential country in Africa, supplanting France for example.

Gaddafi wanted to avoid American influence in his oil transactions by using this gold. He launched the gold dinar project, and other major African governments were ready to support him in this project. It was both an African dream and a nightmare for the West’s financial system.

The end of the African dream

This information was discovered through Hillary Clinton’s electronic mailbox. One of the 3000 emails showed NATO’s willingness to overthrow Gaddafi’s government. NATO mainly wanted to to neutralize the African gold currency supported by Libyan oil reserves.

At the beginning of March, the Libyan army and the many militias loyal to the government had already crushed the rebellion, thanks to their numbers and equipment. However, with Western intervention, the dream of a unified monetary system based on gold and independent of the dollar perished…’

“(the object lesson of Saddam’s lynching not being enough of a message, apparently), [the US] imposed a private central bank, and returned Libya’s oil output to dollars only. The gold that was to have been made into the Gold Dinars is, as of last report, unaccounted for.

Now the banker’s gun sights are on Iran, which dares to have a government controlled central bak and sell their oil for whatever currency they choose. The war agenda is, as always, to force Iran’s oil to be sold only for dollars and to force them to accept a privately owned central bank.

The German government just recently asked for the return of some of their gold bullion from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve. France has said it will take 5 years to return Germany’s gold. The United States has said the will need 8 years to return Germany’s gold. This suggests strongly that the Bank of France and the NY Federal Reserve have used the deposited gold for other purposes, and they are scrambling to find new gold to cover the shortfall and prevent a gold run.

NOTICE THAT MALI ISN’T ON THE LIST…..

In 2013, gold exports were of the order of 67.4 tonnes, nearly a 50% increase over the production in 2012 which is attributed mainly to the contribution of 20.7 tonnes made by artisanal mining.[1][3] Gold, followed by cotton, is the top export item making a large contribution to the economy of the country.[4]

So France suddenly invades Mali, ostensibly to combat Al Queda, with the US joining in.

Mali just happens to be one of the world’s largest gold producers with gold accounting for 80% of Mali exports. War for the bankers does not get more obvious than that!

Americans have been raised by a public school system and media that constantly assures them that the reasons for all these wars and assassinations are many and varied. The US claims to bring democracy to the conquered lands (they haven’t). The usual result of a US overthrow is the imposition of a dictatorship - such as the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and the imposition of the Shah - or the 1973 CIA overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, and the imposition of Agusto Pinochet) - or to save a people from a cruel oppressor, revenge for 9-11; or that tired worn-out catch all excuse for invasion: ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Assassinations are always passed off as ‘crazed lone nuts’ to obscure the real agenda.

The real agenda is simple. It is enslavement of the people by the creation of a false sense of obligation.

That obligation is false because the private Central Banking System, by design, always creates more debt than money with which to repay the debt. Private Central Banking is not Science, it is a Religion; a set of arbitrary rules created to benefit the Priesthood, meaning the owners of the Private Central Bank.

The fraud persists, with often lethal results, because the people are tricked into believing that this is the way life is supposed to be and no alternative exists or should be dreamed of. The same was true of two earlier systems of enslavement, Rule by Divine Right and Slavery, both of which ar systems designed to trick people into obedience, and both of which are now recognized by modern civilization as illegitimate.

Now we are entering a time in human history where we will recognize that ‘rule by debt’, or rule by private Central Bankers issuing the public currency as a loan at interest, is equally illegitimate.”

It only works as long as people allow themselves to believe that this is the way life is supposed to be. . . .

Behind all these wars, all these assassinations, the hundred million horrible deaths from all the wars lies a single policy of dictatorship. The private central bankers allow rulers to rule only on the condition that the people of a nation remain enslaved to the private central banks. Failing that, any ruler will be killed, and their nations invaded by those other nations which are already enslaved to private central banks.

The so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ we read about on the corporate media is really a war between banking systems, with the private central bankers forcing themselves on to the rest of the world, no matter how many millions must die for it. Indeed the constant hatemongering against Muslims lies in a simple fact. Like the ancient Christians (prior to the Knight’s Templar’s private banking system) Muslims forbid usury (the lending of money at interest), and that is the reason why the American government and media insist that Muslims must be converted or killed. They refuse to submit to currencies issued at interest. They refuse to be debt slaves.

Flag waving and propaganda aside, all modern wars are wars by and for the private bankers, fought and bled for by third parties unaware of the true reason why they are expected to be crippled and killed. The process is quite simple. As soon as the Private Central Bank issues its currency as a loan at interest, the public is forced deeper and deeper into debt. When the people are reluctant to borrow any more, that is when the Keynesian economists demand the government borrow more to keep the pyramid scheme working. When both the people and government refuse to borrow any more, that is when the wars start, to plunge everyone even deeper into debt to pay for the war, then after the war to borrow more to rebuild. When the war is over, the people have about the same as they did before the war, except the graveyards are far larger and everyone is in debt to the private bankers for the next century. This is why Brown Brothers Harriman in New York funded the rise of Adolf Hitler. . . .

Those who control the United States understand that if even a few countries begin to sell their oil in another currency, it will set off a chain reaction and the dollar will collapse. They understand that there is absolutely nothing else holding p the value of the dollar at this point, and so does the rest of the world. But instead of accepting the fact that the dollar is nearing the end of it’s life-span, the ‘powers that be’ have made a calculated gambit. They have decided to use the brute force of the US military to crush each and every resistant State in Africa and the Middle East.” (Excerpt taken from Meet Your Strawman And Whatever You Want to Know).

Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People

It is now possible to put into context the Presidency of Barack Obama and properly evaluate the foreign policy objectives that the UNITED STATES CORPORATION used him to achieve.

According to Voltairenet.org,

“Created in 2007 on the findings of an Israëli study, AfriCom (US Command for Africa) has never yet managed to install its headquarters on the continent. This structure carries out anti-terrorist operations from Germany, with the support of France in the region of the Sahel. In return, US and French transnational companies conserve a privileged access to African prime materials. . . . In Djibouti is situated Camp Lemonnier, the huge US base from which the Horn of Africa Joint Task Force has been operating since 2001. The Task Force is composed of 4,000 specialists in top secret missions, including targeted assassinations by commandos or killer drones, particularly in Yemen and Somalia. While aircraft and helicopters for these special operations take off from Camp Lemonnier, the drones have been concentrated at Chabelley airport, a dozen kilometres from the capital. New hangars are being built there, and the work has been handed by the Pentagon to a company from Catania which is already employed for the work taking place in Sigonella, the main drones base used by the USA and NATO for operations in Africa and the Greater Middle East.

There is also a Japanese and a French base in Djibouti, which house German and Spanish troops. A Chinese military base was added in 2017, the only one outside of its national territory. Apart from certain basic logistical functions, such as the housing of the crews of the military vessels that escort merchant ships, and warehouses for the storage of supplies, it represents a significant signal of the growing Chinese presence in Africa.

This is an essentially economic presence, to which the United States and other Western powers oppose a growing military presence. This accounts for the intensification of operations led by AfriCom (US Command for Africa), which has two important subordinate Commands in Italy - the US Army Africa, at the Ederle de Vicence barracks ; the US Naval Forces Europe-Africa, whose headquarters is at the Capodichino base in Naples, composed of the warships of the Sixth Fleet based in Gaeta.

In the same strategic infrastructure is another US base for armed drones, which is under construction in Agadez, Niger, where the Pentagon already uses air base 101 in Niamey for drones. This base serves for military operations that the USA has been leading for years, with France in the Sahel, especially in Mali, Niger and Chad. President Giuseppe Conte will be visiting the last two bases as from tomorrow.

These countries are amongst the poorest in the world, but very rich in prime materials - coltan, uranium, gold, oil and many others - exploited by transnational companies based in the USA and in France, who are increasingly afraid of the competition from Chinese companies who offer African countries much more favourable conditions.”

On February 19, 2008, the Ligali website reported,

“America has been forced to host AFRICOM - its military central command centre for Africa - in Germany after rejection by members of the African Union.

The American attempt to secure Africa’s natural resources by force faced a major setback after the African Union rejected US plans to increase its military footprint in the Continent. America claims it was seeking to help build the defence capabilities of African nations. This spurious claim was rejected by most African leaders who believe an enhanced US military presence in Africa would be extremely damaging to Africa’s own security and future development. Liberia, which originally accepted the proposals is now reported to have rejected the imperial plans alongside opposition from nations such as Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa.

There are already concerns with Americas existing military involvement in Africa, from its closeness with the presidents of Ethiopia and Eritrea and the role it played in the crisis facing Somalia. America which is increasingly viewing itself in a new ‘cold war’ with China who is arming the Khartoum’s regimes war in Sudan is desperate to maintain its stranglehold on Africa’s natural resources. To this end, President Bush recently embarked on a five day tour to secure US long term strategic interests and cement links with those leaders amenable to neo-colonial intervention. Arriving in Benin he visited Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia. Unsuprisingly his Africom strategy has the support of the presidential hopeful Barak Obama, speaking on the matter Obama said; "There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force. Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action.

Theresa Whelan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs claims that the Africom is needed to help develop and manage military training and exercises with African troops.

Whelan rejected revelations that America was motivated in anyway by its desire to secure African oil deposits calling such accusations ‘illogical’.

She warned Africa that if it does not accept Africom then the United States would sever its ‘military to military’ defence relations with the Continent. Whelan admits that America had hoped to be able to establish a presence on the Continent but claims they had always planned to have it partially based in Stuttgart to ferment links with their European command. The US government maintains its position that Africom was solely about providing a base for ‘military training with African nations’. Africom's commander, General William E. "Kip" Ward, said Africom was not about ‘militarisation’."

On June 24, 2012, Voltairenet. org reported,

“The White House has put in writing its policies for sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is, there’s hardly a word of truth in the document, and not a single mention of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command on the continent. The presidential paper repeats Obama’s 2009 lecture to Africans on “good governance.” He also warned that they avoid the “excuses” of blaming “neocolonialism” and “racism” for their problems. Meanwhile, AFRICOM is “positioning the U.S. to launch coups at will against African civilian, or even military, leaders that fall out of favor with Washington. . . .

The White House report does not once mention AFRICOM, the U.S. military command that has pushed aside the State Department as the primary institution of U.S. policy and power in sub-Saharan Africa. The report comes three years after Obama’s trip to Ghana, when he declared that Africa’s biggest problems were “corruption and poor governance,” rather than five centuries (and still counting) of Euro-American predation. African complaints about “neo-colonialism, or [that] the West has been oppressive, or racism” are mere “excuses,” said Obama, in a performance that scholar Ama Biney described as “imperialist lecturing” and “Obama-speak.”

Having effectively abandoned even the pretense of competing with China, India, Brazil and other rising economic powers in Africa, the Obama regime has turned the continent into a battleground, where AFRICOM is the principle interlocutor with the region’s governments and peoples. In addition to conducting year-round military maneuvers with nearly every nation on the continent, AFRICOM handles much of U.S. food distribution and medical aid to the region, while the CIA monitors Africa’s vast expanses with a network of secret airstrips and surveillance aircraft.

The White House report, a document of pure obfuscation, puts U.S. efforts to “strengthen democratic institutions” at the top of the list. It rehashes Obama’s Ghana declaration, that “Africa does not need strong men, it needs strong institutions.” Yet, Washington’s closest allies in sub-Saharan Africa are Paul Kagame, the minority Tutsi warlord in Rwanda; Yoweri Museveni, who rose to power with a guerilla army of child-soldiers and locked up two million Acholi people in concentration camps; and Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi, a military dictator who heads an ethnic-based regime. Rwanda and Uganda are the principal culprits in the deaths of six million Congolese since 1996, the worst genocide since World War Two, while Zenawi’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, instigated by the United States, led to “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur,” according to United Nations observers.

The text of the president’s statement on the “new” sub-Saharan strategy warns that “the United States will not stand idly by when actors threaten legitimately elected governments or manipulate the fairness and integrity of democratic processes, and we will stand in steady partnership with those who are committed to the principles of equality, justice, and the rule of law.” In the context of Obama’s humanitarian military intervention doctrine – and especially since AFRICOM led NATO’s regime change in Libya – this is war talk. . . .

Obama brags that: “We have been the world’s leader in responding to humanitarian crises, including in the Horn of Africa, while at the same time working with our African partners to promote resilience and prevent future crises.” In reality, George Bush and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi ended Somalia’s brief period of peace under an Islamic Courts regime, plunged the country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa,” and then, under Obama, withheld food from Somalia in order to weaken the Shabaab resistance, all of which set the stage for an even worse famine in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands. Such realities give the lie to Obama’s promise to “work to prevent the weakening or collapse of local economies, protect livestock, promote sustainable access to clean water, and invest in programs that reduce community-level vulnerability to man-made and natural disasters.” AFRICOM and U.S. policy are the disasters afflicting the continent; they are part of the disease, not the cure. . . .

Obama assures Africa that: “The United States will seek to expand adherence to the principle of civilian control of the military.” In practice, AFRICOM has cultivated a “soldier-to-soldier” policy between U.S. troops and African militaries that extends from “general-to-general” to “colonel-to-colonel” and down the ranks, positioning the U.S. to launch coups at will against African civilian, or even military, leaders that fall out of favor with Washington. As Dan Glazebrook recently wrote in The Guardian, America’s ‘great hope is that the African Union’s forces can be subordinated to a chain of command headed by AFRICOM.’”

Two years later, Foreign Policy in Focus reported,

“While the media attention in the United States is riveted on the Israeli war against Gaza, on the ISIS offensive in Iraq and Syria, accomplished for the most part with guerrillas trained by U.S. allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel), and the ongoing attempts to consolidate the neoliberal hold on the Ukraine in the name of “democracy,” some other global developments have gone largely unnoticed.

Among them is the August 6, 2014 announcement of a new Obama Administration “initiative” for Africa. Actually there are two: the so-called “Security Governance Initiative for Africa” (SGI) on the one hand and “the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership, called A-PREP for short, on the other. 

SGI involves providing aid – with strings attached as usual – to Ghana, Kenya, Mali Niger, Nigeria and Tunisia. On one level SGI is a response to the threat to African development posed by Islamic radical groups Al Qaeda of the Maghreb (AQIM), Al Shabbab, and Boko Haram. But its ulterior motive – actually quite openly stated – is to make the targeted African countries more secure for foreign investment, thus, as the old cliché goes, killing two birds with one stone. The stated goal of the program is to insure the security environment of these countries as a way of encouraging future U.S. investment, and as Tunisian commentator Yassine Bellamine notes in a recent article at the Tunisian website Nawaat.org  “as a way to play a more active role in what is shaping up to be a new investor El dorado in the near future, Africa.” (Author’s translation.)

A-PREP has a somewhat different, but related goal: to “address short-falls in Africa-based peace keeping forces.” Noting that a number of recent crises (Central African Republic, Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Kenya, even Algeria to name a few) have exposed the weaknesses of emergency-ready African forces, A-PREP will focus uniquely on military training and assistance to six African countries: Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to try to improve “rapid peace keeping.”

Both poorly funded and in competition with other U.S. sponsored initiatives, A-PREP is essentially an attempt to make African militaries more responsive to security emergencies. The funding of SGI in the first year entails a mere $33 million to be divided between the six countries involved. Not much really. A-PREP will disperse some $110 million to the countries it covers, perhaps a bit more that SGI funding, but in the end, not all that much. Perhaps the funding will increase in the coming years?

SGI is in some ways a more classic counter-insurgency program whose goal is to strengthen economic development by strengthening security. At least “in principle” it tries to coordinate private sector foreign investors with the African militaries and U.S. military advisers so as to make security measures a kind of team effort, thus sharing the financial and human risks. These programs appear to be a way to somewhat soften U.S. security moves into Africa after a period in which African nations have become somewhat wary of what might be called “the AFRICOM approach.” It comes after a several year effort to find an African home to host AFRICOM has failed.

To sweeten the pot, allay fears and to involve the corporations themselves in the business of securing their own profits, these initiatives have been undertaken. . . .

Both initiative were announced at the tail end of a Brookings’ Institute conference held two days prior, on August 4, 2014 entitled, “The Game Has Changed: The New Landscape for Innovation and Business in Africa” that featured a gathering of international business people, government officials, and academics concerned with Africa. The main concern of this corporate-state-academic shindig was to insure possible investors – U.S. companies, it is claimed, have already invested some $33 billion in Africa – that the security situation on the continent will be assured. As a part of this “happy think” the conference assured its participants, a bit too often it appears, that the economic and social situation on the continent is improving some and that life in general is getting better, a position that requires considerable public relations skills to substantiate.

No one stated it better than Mirangi Kimenyi, Brookings’ own Africa specialist in opening the conference:

“The game indeed has changed. We have a new Africa and the focus is no longer clamoring for aid. Today we are talking about investment, entrepreneurial-ship, innovation and so-on.”

The basis for this untoward optimism was sketched out by Yassine Bellamine (cited above)  that gives projected growth rates (based mostly on African Development Bank stats) for a number of African countries. Projected growth rates for Ghana in 2015 today stand at 8%, Kenya in 2014 at 5.7%, Mali at 6.7%. The African Development Bank also predicts a turnaround in the Tunisian economy from its -1.8% shrinkage in the coming years. . . .

Bellaine goes on to indicate that initiatives like SGI have ulterior motives, noting that they have more to do with providing a safe environment for multinational corporate investment, than providing security for the nations involved. It is true that SGI gives priority to U.S. economic interests and strategic goals in Africa and at the same time, will press the governments involved to make the necessary legal and economic reforms to make foreign investment “more efficient,” with all that this implies. . . .

In the case of Africa, strengthening the “efficiency” (think of what that has meant historically) of African militaries is a part of a strategy of minimizing U.S. “boots on the ground” – to use the cliche to avoid the term “military intervention” – by trying to give Africans more of a role in supporting foreign corporate penetration of the continent as if it were in their own interest. It is based on what is now a well-worn fact that Third World militaries love getting high-tech military toys that kill. It is also based on another well-worn tradition: if a world power cannot win “the hearts and minds” of the people of Third World countries that might have some economic or strategic importance, at least through military aid, the countries’ generals – a thorough corrupt and undemocratic lot – can be bought off.

De Waal and Mohammad rightly point out that as a result of SGI-, A-PREP- type programs that the United States is “in effect providing foreign tutelage to the militarization of Africa’s politics, which undermines peace and democracy throughout the continent. American diplomacy is becoming a handmaiden to Africa’s generals.” And they might have added to multi-national energy and mining interests that are tripping over each other’s feet to exploit an already over-exploited continent.

For the second time in eight years, a U.S.-trained military officer has emerged as the leader of a coup in Mali, sparking new questions about the effectiveness of security training programs that Canada has repeatedly supported.

Colonel Assimi Goita, who participated in a U.S.-led training exercise last year and graduated from a separate U.S. training course in 2016, has declared himself the chairman of the junta that arrested Mali’s president and prime minister and seized control of the West African country this week (august 20, 2020).

A coup in Mali in 2012 was led by Captain Amadou Sanogo, who received U.S. training on six separate occasions. His involvement in that coup was “very worrisome for us,” the commander of the U.S. Africa Command acknowledged later. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-for-second-time-in-eight-years-a-coup-in-mali-has-been-led-by-a-us/

This analysis is, as the British say, “spot on.” It builds on at least two other political and human rights failures of the post-World War II period: U.S. policy in support of Latin American military dictators in the 1970s and 1980s – the Pinochets, the Argentinian, Brazilian, Paraguayan juntas, the El Salvadoran death squads of which Ronald Reagan was so fond. The other example is what is referred to as “Francafrique”, the French effort to keep the fruits of its colonial heritage in Africa alive by supporting military dictatorships in such places as Chad, Mauritania, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, to say nothing of Algeria.

De Waal and Mohammed don’t stop here. They underline the dangers to development and democracy of supporting the armed forces in Africa, concerns that have not resonated in a Washington, DC fixated on competing with China, India, and European allies like France, Italy and others in that mad race to control Africa’s oil, gas and mineral wealth. Using South Sudan and Nigeria as examples, they remind NY Times readers, and Washington policymakers the degree to which U.S. military aid to Africa have disappeared down “black holes,” essentially referencing the extraordinary levels of corruption, outright government theft that has accompanied such programs where aid money is shuttled into the private accounts of ruling generals, siphoning off millions “while much of the population (of the countries involved) lives in deep poverty.” Frankly there is a whole list of other African countries that could have been cited, the recipients of military aid from the United States, France and other countries.”

Here it would be helpful to recall Obama’s family connection to the CIA. Stanley Armour Dunham (March 23, 1918 – February 8, 1992) was the maternal grandfather of the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama. He and his wife Madelyn Payne Dunham raised Obama from the age of 10 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Stanley Dunham's distant cousins include six U.S. presidents: James Madison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Through a common ancestor, Mareen Duvall, a wealthy Huguenot merchant who emigrated to Maryland in the 1650s, Dunham is related to former Vice-President Dick Cheney (an eighth cousin once removed). Through another common ancestor, Hans Gutknecht, a German Swiss from Bischwiller, Alsace whose three sons resettled in Germantown, Pennsylvania as well as the Kentucky frontier in the mid-18th century, Dunham is President Harry S. Truman's fourth cousin, twice removed.

How did Barack Obama, who shares no lineage history with African Americans, become the African American hero? Something's going on here.

The Story of Obama: All in The Company states,

“From 1983-84, Barack Obama worked as Editor at Business Internation Corporation, a Business International Corporation, a known CIA front company.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.

CIA-airlifted to Hawaii, Barack Obama Sr., with leis, stands with Stanley Dunham, President Obama’s grandfather, on his right.

The CIA allegedly recruited Tom M’Boya in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”
KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. . . .

Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother. . . .

In 1967, after arriving in Indonesia with Obama, Jr., Dunham began teaching English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra. Jones left as East-West Center chancellor in 1968.

In fact, Obama’s mother was teaching English for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. The USAID program was known as Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen. Obama’s mother, painted as a free spirit and a “sixties child” by President Obama and people who claimed they knew her in Hawaii and Indonesia, had a curriculum vitae in Indonesia that contradicts the perception that Ann Dunham Soetoro was a “hippy.”

Dunham Soetoro’s Russian language training at the University of Hawaii may have been useful to the CIA in Indonesia. An August 2, 1966, formerly Secret memorandum from the National Security Council’s Executive Secretary Bromley Smith states that, in addition to Japan, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Suharto coup was welcomed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies because its created a non-aligned Indonesia that “represents an Asian counterweight to Communist China.” Records indicate that a number of CIA agents posted in Jakarta before and after the 1965 coup were, like Dunham Soetoro, conversant in Russian.

Dunham Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan.

USAID was involved in a number of CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia. The February 9, 1971, Washington Star reported that USAID officials in Laos were aware that rice supplied to the Laotian Army by USAID was being re-sold to North Vietnamese army divisions in the country. The report stated that the U.S. tolerated the USAID rice sales to the North Vietnamese since the Laotian Army units that sold the rice found themselves protected from Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese attack. USAID and the CIA also used the supply of rice to force Laotian Meo tribesmen to support the United States in the war against the Communists. USAID funds programmed for civilians injured in the war in Laos and public health care were actually diverted for military purposes.

In 1971, the USAID-funded Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was accused of being a CIA front. USAID-funded projects through the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA) — comprising the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Michigan State — were accused of being CIA front projects, including those for “agricultural education” in Indonesia, as well as other “projects” in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Vietnam. The charge was made in 1971, the same year that Ann Dunham was working for USAID in the country.

In a July 10, 1971, New York Times report, USAID and the CIA were accused of “losing” $1.7 billion appropriated for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in South Vietnam. CORDS was part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program, which involved CIA assassination and torture of South Vietnamese village elders and Buddhist clerics. USAID money was also directed to the CIA’s proprietary airline in Southeast Asia, Air America. In Thailand, USAID funds for the Accelerated Rural Development Program in Thailand were actually masking a CIA anti-Communist counter-insurgency operation. USAID funds programmed for public works projects in East Pakistan in 1971 were used for East Pakistan’s military fortifications on its border with India, in the months before the outbreak of war with India, in contravention of U.S. law that prohibited USAID money for military purposes.

In 1972, USAID administrator Dr. John Hannah admitted to Metromedia News that USAID was being used as a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos. Hannah only admitted to Laos as a USAID cover for the CIA. However, it was also reported that USAID was being used by the CIA in Indonesia, Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea. USAID projects in Southeast Asia had to be approved by the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an Asia Society group that was, in fact, answerable to the CIA.

The U.S. Food for Peace program, jointly administered by USAID and the Department of Agriculture, was found in 1972 to be used for military purposes in Cambodia, South Korea, Turkey, South Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, and Greece. In 1972, USAID funneled aid money only to the southern part of North Yemen, in order to aid North Yemeni forces against the government of South Yemen, then ruled by a socialist government opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region.

One of the entities affiliated with the USAID work in Indonesia was the Asia Foundation, a 1950s creation formed with the help of the CIA to oppose the expansion of communism in Asia. The East-West Center guest house in Hawaii was funded by the Asia Foundation. The guest house is also where Barack Obama Sr. first stayed after his airlift from Kenya to Hawaii, arranged by the one of the CIA’s major agents of influence in Africa, Mboya.

Dunham would also travel to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand working on micro-financing projects. In 1965, Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard, with another American wife. The senior Obama linked up with his old friend and the CIA’s “golden boy” Mboya and other fellow Luo politicians. The CIA station chief in Nairobi from 1964 to 1967 was Philip Cherry. In 1975, Cherry was the CIA station chief in Dacca, Bangladesh. Cherry was linked by the then-U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Booster, to the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family. . . . .

Meanwhile, Dunham Soetoro’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised young Obama when he returned to Hawaii in 1971 while his mother stayed in Indonesia, was the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu. Various CIA front entities used the bank. Madelyn Dunham handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments to U.S.-supported Asian dictators like Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia. In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to covertly prop up its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region. . . .

In the 1970s and 80s, Dunham was active in micro-loan projects for the Ford Foundation, the CIA-linked East-West Center, and USAID in Indonesia. One of the individuals assigned to the U.S. embassy and helped barricade the compound during a violent anti-U.S. student demonstration during the 1965 Suharto coup against Sukarno was Dr. Gordon Donald, Jr. Assigned to the embassy’s Economic Section, Donald was responsible for USAID micro-financing for Indonesian farmers, the same project that Dunham Soetoro would work on for USAID in the 1970s, after her USAID job of teaching English in Indonesia. In a 1968 book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” published in West Berlin, Donald is identified as a CIA officer who was also assigned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Dunham would eventually live for five years in the Hilton International Hotel while working on microfinancing for the Asian Development Bank.

Another “Who’s Who in the CIA” Jakarta alumnus is Robert F. Grealy, who later became the director for international relations for the Asia-Pacific for J P Morgan Chase and a director for the American-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. J P Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is being mentioned as a potential replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose father, Peter Geithner, was the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-selector who funneled the money to Ann Dunham’s Indonesian projects. . . .

It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama’s step-father, were closely involved in the CIA’s operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit during the “years of living dangerously” after the overthrow of Sukarno. WMR has discovered that some of the CIA’s top case officers were assigned to various official and non-official cover assignments in Indonesia during this time frame, including under the cover of USAID, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). . . .

Not much is known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who Obama mistakenly referred to as “his father” in two speeches, one recently to the Disabled American Veterans.

What is officially known about Stanley Armour Dunham is that he served with the 9th Air Force in Britain and France prior to and after the D-Day invasion. After the war, Dunham and his wife, Madelyn and his daughter Stanley Ann — Obama’s mother — moved to Berkeley, California; El Dorado, Kansas; Seattle; and Honolulu. . . .

There is a strong reason to believe that Armour Dunham worked in the 1950s for the CIA in the Middle East. An FBI file on Armour Dunham existed but the bureau claimed it destroyed the file on May 1, 1997. Considering the sour relations between the FBI and CIA during the Cold War, it is likely that Armour Dunham was being monitored by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the same manner as a number of other CIA officials and agents were being surveilled. Similarly, the pre-1968 passport records of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, were destroyed by the State Department.”

IS TURKEY THE NEW COLONIAL POWER IN

WEST AFRICA?

According to African Intelligence:

"The Turkish government is working all out to win favour with Guinea Buissau and Senegal. It aims to create a pro-Turkish African bloc stretching from Saint Louis in the north to the Nimba mountains in the south.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has hosted his Guinea-Bissauan opposite number Umaro Sissoco Embalo twice in the last six months, is developing Ankara's relations with the small African country on all fronts as he tries to create a pro-Turkish arc along the Guinean coast.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has hosted his Guinea-Bissauan opposite number Umaro Sissoco Embalo twice in the last six months (Africa Intelligence, 26/06/20), is developing Ankara's relations with the small African country on all fronts as he tries to create a pro-Turkish arc along the Guinean coast.

Last month, 36 gendarmes travelled from Bissau to Ankara to take part in a training course on intervention techniques with their Turkish counterparts. Turkey is also providing the aircraft in Guinea Bissau's colours which Embalo uses for his official voyages. He used it recently to travel to Bamako, where he was the sole head of state to attend the ceremony to install new transition president Bah N'Daw (Africa Intelligence, 01/10/20). Coincidentally, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu travelled to Bamako on 9 September to meet the putschists of the Comité National pour le Salut du People."

Atlantic opening

The arc Erdogan is seeking to create includes Gambia and Guinea, the two African countries most closely aligned to Turkey (Africa Intelligence, 06/11/19) and both of which share a border with Guinea Bissau. Turkish diplomats are also working flat out to extend the arc to Senegal, which was guest of honour at the Turkey-Africa Economic and Business Forum in Istanbul on 8 and 9 October. Erdogan visited Senegal in the early part of the year (Africa Intelligence, 05/02/20).

Moving eastward, Turkey wants Mali and Niger to be part of the African bloc. This would give Turkey an opening on to the Atlantic Ocean and a major area of expansion for the conglomerates most closely connected to Erdogan's entourage (Africa Intelligence, 24/08/20). On 8 October, in an illustration of Turkey's wish to expand its influence eastwards, the Turkish parliament authorized the Ministry of Defence to send troops to join the UN's peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA."

The Arab Weekly recently reported that:

"There is no longer any doubt about Turkey's role in dispatching jihadists and mercenaries to Libya. The latest confirmation came from French President Emmanuel Macron January 29 at a news conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

"I want to express my concerns with regard to the behaviour of Turkey at the moment, which is in complete contradiction with what President [Recep] Tayyip Erdoğan committed to at the Berlin conference," Macron said.

"We have seen during these last days Turkish warships accompanied by Syrian mercenaries arrive on Libyan soil. This is an explicit and serious infringement of what was agreed in Berlin. It's a broken promise.”

Macron confirmed the presence of Turkish ships off the Libyan coast and accused Ankara of "violating Libya's sovereignty and endangering European and West African security."

Erdoğan is sending Syrian jihadists and mercenaries to Libya to back the Islamist militias and other forces loyal to the Government of National Accord of Fayez al-Sarraj. Why is Macron talking of Turkish threats to "West African security"?

There are suspicions that some militants and mercenaries have been departing Islamist strongholds in Tripoli and Misrata for West Africa, known as an area of French influence but now infested with terrorist groups, cross-border and transcontinental smuggling organisations (Colombia-Gulf of Guinea-Sahel and Europe) and organised crime. There is also talk of Ankara seeking to establish a military base in West Africa.

There have been reports that some Syrian fighters were headed to Western Europe.

Macron has repeatedly confirmed his wariness about Ankara's designs, including in Berlin during the conference on Libya.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted at a news conference January 28 in Moscow with his South Sudanese Foreign Affair Minister Awut Deng Achuil that he had asked Erdoğan to stop sending terrorists from Syria to Libya.

The question that torments Western governments is how far will Erdoğan go in this devious confrontation in West Africa after the Middle East and the Maghreb? Is this a form of revenge against Europe in general and France in particular for slamming the gates of the European Union shut in the face of Turkey?

It has been clear, for at least a decade, that France would not accept the accession of Muslim, let alone Islamist, Turkey to this "Christian" group, even if it fulfils all required conditions. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was the most outspoken on this subject.

“To let Turkey think that it can join the EU is a monumental error,” he declared on December 2, 2015, on Europe 1 radio. “I stand by my words. Turkey is in Asia Minor, not in Europe.”

As a reminder, negotiations on Turkey's hypothetical accession to the European Union were relaunched in 2013, after a sudden interruption in 2010.

In 1963, Turkey, a central member of NATO, became an associate member of the European Common Market. Turkey was officially recognised as a candidate for EU membership in 1999 at the Helsinki summit and negotiations began in 2005 but Turkey has been knocking on the door of the union for more than 50 years, in vain.

The reasons for European distrust of Ankara are legion: Turkey’s worrisome drift, particularly after the failed coup in 2016, towards an authoritarian presidential regime; its crackdown on the media and public liberties; its support for Islamist networks; its complacency with terrorist groups in Syria and Libya; its blackmail-type policies about migratory flows to Europe; its occupation of part of Cyprus since 1974; and, most recently, its signing of a military agreement with the government of Sarraj, coupled with a memorandum of understanding on the delimitation of maritime jurisdictions in the Mediterranean Sea, the latter in clear violation of international maritime law and the U.N. Charter.

Erdoğan's possible involvement in the Sahel and West Africa could be another step on the road to the global confrontation that Turkey is waging against French and European interests. French security experts see this as a step fraught with consequences insofar as it endangers the lives of the French soldiers involved in Operation Barkhane (4,500 troops) and the U.N.-peacekeeping MINUSMA (13,500 soldiers), as well as the stability of all the Sahel countries badly damaged by militant networks and terrorist groups.

Erdoğan’s latest trip to West Africa (Senegal and Gambia) shows to what extent Africa, particularly French-speaking countries with a Muslim majority, constitutes for Erdoğan a venue for a showdown with the former European colonial powers.

If it were only a race to open new markets for the Turkish economy, which is going through difficult times, Ankara's encroachment in West Africa could be less worrisome, especially when is the known that Turkey has had an economic presence in Africa for about 20 years.

However, as shown before in other parts of the continent, such as the Horn of Africa, Turkish encroachment follows a multifaceted strategy including military bases, the establishment of intelligence networks and the promotion of Turkish economic interests.

All of this is couched in the instrumentalisation of Islamism in the colours of the Muslim Brotherhood, in alliance with Qatar. Turkey's project is much more ambitious than mere conquest of markets.

Turkey claims to offer Africans a deal more equitable than that of Western countries but many of them not convinced.

Turkey's interventions, old and recent, in the continent, follow an expansionist and aggressive agenda without many scruples. Its recent role in Libya has hardly reassured Africans who are doubtful of Turkey’s designs after Ankara's abrupt abandonment of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

ome see Turkey's African policy as a way for Erdoğan to find new inroads outside his country when Ankara finds itself increasingly isolated on the international scene because of its troubled game in the Syrian crisis, in the Gulf, Somalia, Sudan and mounting evidence of its support for jihadist groups in Syria.

1. Europeans, who are also attentive to Turkey’s attempts to take hold of Islam in Europe itself, have not shown a clear strategy of how to deal with Ankara's dangerous game of igniting fires everywhere but the European Union is not without possible recourse. For starters, the European Union could re-examine its economic ties with Turkey, which remains Europe's first trading partner. When this re-examination starts, worry could change sides.”