RT
Boko Haram has
massacred thousands of civilians in Nigeria, but US officials' response
towards the horrific crimes have been strangely muted. RT’s Manila Chan
explores a potential link to oil, which the US no longer receives from
Nigeria.
To many, the lack of
Washington's strive to aid the people of Nigeria – the biggest
African economy – seems to follow simple geostrategic logic: no
oil, no security support. While diverting funds to fight the
Islamic State in Iraq, the US seems unwilling to address Boko
Haram insurgents in Nigeria.
READ MORE: Satellite images reveal ‘horrific’
scale of Boko Haram attack in Nigeria
As US is trying to master shale gas exploitation; it has moved
away from some of its traditional trade partners, with Nigeria –
an OPEC-member state – becoming the first country to stop selling
oil to the US, statistics from the US Department of Energy
reveal. Nigeria was one of the top five suppliers to the US at
the height of trade, less than a decade ago supplying it with 1.3
million barrels of oil every day.
Yet despite Boko Haram’s territorial gains and promising outlook
for jihadi domination of the whole region, the US – and the world
– focuses on terror attacks in Europe and IS advances, completely
neglecting the imminent threat stemming from the Nigerian
terrorist network.
Read more
21st Century Wire
Whenever a First Lady tries to astro-turf over a political event to boost White House approval ratings – it never ends well. Remember Michelle’s foray in the Knucklehead issue?
Michelle
Obama made a big splash on Twitter and Facebook this week, but it only
took a few days before the predictable blow-back to her PR stunt has
turned into a storm of ridicule.
Her detractors are right point
out how her own husband has sanctioned the murders of thousands of
innocents across central Asia and Africa with his shiny new drone toys, but is immune from giving any testimony, nor any prosecution as he claim Presidential privilege.
It
should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain in America and
further afield, that no amount of tweeting and hash-tagging will
speed-up to rescue, or recovery of hostages. In fact, excessive
political and military meddling by Washington in Lagos could do the
opposite – and create a powder keg which could cost lives and fray
international relations.
What is obvious, however, is how the seemingly authentic ‘Boko Haram Terror Crisis’
in Nigeria is being used by the White House to swing public opinion
back in favour of a walking wounded Obama Administration mired in
multiple scandals, and also guilty of backing a NeoNazi fascist military coup in the Ukraine
this past winter, and further seeking to capitalise financially in the
arms, oil and gas sector through a permanent stand-off with former ally
Russia.
Add to this Obama’s under the radar pledge of $1.7 billion of US taxpayer money to armed Islamic terrorist fighters in Syria this week
– and it’s not hard at all to see the benefits of a Boko Haram comic
book crisis at this moment in time. If the White can somehow stage – and
take credit, for some kind of rescue of the African school girls, then
it will have all been worth it. Beltway insiders are already saying that
plans are already underway for a White House repeat of the dramatic Bin Laden/Navy SEAL Raid.
Although the May 2011 raid in Abbotabad, Pakistan failed to produce an
actual body of the deceased Osama bin Laden, ironically, it gave the
President the only real bounce in the polls he ever had during his two
terms.
By cynically targeting school children, the #Bring Our Girls Home campaign is merely a picking up where the globalised ‘Kony 2012′ social zeitgeist movement left off. Kony 2012
was a state-of-the-art, multimillion dollar, US State Department-backed
media effort – disguised as a grassroots ‘schools campaign’, designed
to engage US school children in the process lobbying Washington for US
military intervention in Uganda to hunt down a non-existent villain who
hasn’t been seen for 8 years.
Read more
Black Agenda Report
The “humanitarian” U.S. military occupation of Africa has been very
successful, thus far. “The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S.
foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa.”
Imagine: the superpower that financed the genocide of six million in
Congo, claims to be a defender of teenage girls and human rights on the
continent. If you believe that, then you are probably a member of the
Congressional Black Caucus.
A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the “international
community” and the Nigerian military “Do something!” about the abduction
by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the
average U.S. consumer of packaged “news” products for knowing next to
nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been “doing” to
suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed
out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks
carried “not a single television news story about Boko Haram” in all of
2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of
coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where
thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting
over the past year.) But, that doesn’t mean the Nigerian army hasn’t
been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of,
mainly, young men in the country’s mostly Muslim north.
The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood,
but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans
who read – which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who
took her husband’s place on radio last
weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls – would have
learned in the New York Times of the army’s savage offensive near the
Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army
killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb “Without Asking
Who They Are,” according to the NYT headline.
“They don’t ask any questions,” said a witness who later fled for his
life, like thousands of others. “When they see young men in traditional
robes, they shoot them on the spot,” said a student. “They catch many of
the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.”
The Times’ Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army’s
“all-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency.” He
reported:
“All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the
thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert,
sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram — a shadowy, rarely
glimpsed presence for most residents — for the violence. But the
overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their
country because of it.”
In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.
In March of this year,
fighters who were assumed to be from Boko Haram attacked a barracks and
jail in the northern city of Maiduguri. Hundreds of prisoners fled, but
200 youths were rounded up and made to lie on the ground. A witness
told the Times: “The soldiers made some calls and a few minutes later
they started shooting the people on the ground. I counted 198 people
killed at that checkpoint.”
All told, according to Amnesty International, more than 600 people
were extrajudicially murdered, “most of them unarmed, escaped detainees,
around Maiduguri.” An additional 950 prisoners were killed in
the first half of 2013 in detention facilities run by Nigeria’s
military Joint Task Force, many at the same barracks in Maiduguri.
Amnesty International quotes a senior officer in the Nigerian Army,
speaking anonymously: “Hundreds have been killed in detention either by
shooting them or by suffocation,” he said. “There are times when people
are brought out on a daily basis and killed. About five people, on
average, are killed nearly on a daily basis.”
Chibok, where the teenage girls were abducted, is 80 miles from Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.
In 2009, when the Boko Haram had not yet been transformed into a
fully armed opposition, the military summarily executed their handcuffed
leader and killed at least 1,000 accused members in the states of
Borno, Yobe, Kano and Bauchi, many of them apparently simply youths from
suspect neighborhoods. A gruesome video shows
the military at work. “In the video, a number of unarmed men are seen
being made to lie down in the road outside a building before they are
shot,” Al Jazeera reports in text accompanying the video. “As one man is
brought out to face death, one of the officers can be heard urging his
colleague to ‘shoot him in the chest not the head – I want his hat.’”
These are only snapshots of the army’s response to Boko Haram –
atrocities that are part of the context of Boko Haram’s ghastly
behavior. The military has refused the group’s offer to exchange the
kidnapped girls for imprisoned Boko Haram members. (We should not assume
that everyone detained as Boko Haram is actually a member – only that
all detainees face imminent and arbitrary execution.)
None of the above is meant to tell Boko Haram’s “side” in this grisly
story (fundamentalist religious jihadists find no favor at BAR), but to
emphasize the Nigerian military’s culpability in the group’s mad
trajectory – the same military that many newly-minted “Save Our Girls”
activists demand take more decisive action in Borno.
The bush to which the Boko Haram retreated with their captives was
already a free-fire zone, where anything that moves is subject to
obliteration by government aircraft. Nigerian air forces have now been
joined by U.S. surveillance planesoperating
out of the new U.S. drone base in neighboring Niger, further
entrenching AFRICOM/CIA in the continental landscape. Last week it was
announced that, for the first time, AFRICOM troops will train a Nigerian
ranger battalion in counterinsurgency warfare.
The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy
purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa, which were
conjured-up to justify the permanent stationing of U.S Special Forces in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African
Republic and South Sudan, in 2011, on humanitarian interventionist
grounds. (This past March, the U.S. sent150 more Special Ops troops
to the region, claiming to have again spotted Kony, who is said to be
deathly ill, holed up with a small band of followers somewhere in the
Central African Republic.) The United States (and France and Britain,
plus the rest of NATO, if need be) must maintain a deepening and
permanent presence in Africa to defend the continent from…Africans.
When the crowd yells that America “Do something!” somewhere in Africa, the U.S. military is likely to already be there.
Barack Obama certainly needs no encouragement to intervention; his
presidency is roughly coterminous with AFRICOM’s founding and explosive
expansion. Obama broadened the war against Somalia that was launched by
George Bush in partnership with the genocidal Ethiopian regime, in 2006
(an invasion that led directly to what the United Nations called “the
worst humanitarian crisis is Africa”). He built on Bill Clinton and
George Bush’s legacies in the Congo, where U.S. client states Uganda and
Rwanda caused the slaughter of 6 million people since 1996 – the
greatest genocide of the post War World II era. He welcomed South Sudan
as the world’s newest nation – the culmination of a decades-long project
of the U.S., Britain and Israel to dismember Africa’s largest country,
but which has now fallen into a bloody chaos, as does everything the
U.S. touches, these days.
Most relevant to the plight of Chibok’s young women, Obama led “from
behind” NATO’s regime change in Libya, removing the anti-jihadist
bulwark Muamar Gaddafi (“We came, we saw, he died,” said Hillary
Clinton) and destabilizing the whole Sahelian tier of the continent, all
the way down to northern Nigeria. As BAR editor and columnist Ajamu
Baraka writes in the current issue, “Boko Haram benefited from the
destabilization of various countries across the Sahel following the
Libya conflict.” The once-“shadowy” group now sported new weapons and
vehicles and was clearly better trained and disciplined. In short, the
Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a
post-Gaddafi Africa – thus justifying a larger military presence for the
same Americans and (mainly French) Europeans who had brought these
convulsions to the region.
If Obama has his way, it will be a very long war – the better to grow
AFRICOM – with some very unsavory allies (from both the Nigerian and
American perspectives).
Whatever Obama does to deepen the U.S. presence in Nigeria and the
rest of the continent, he can count on the Congressional Black Caucus,
including its most “progressive” member, Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only
member of the U.S. Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan,
in 2001. Lee, along with Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Sheila Jackson
Lee (D-Texas) and fellow Californian Karen Bass, who is the ranking
member on the House Subcommittee on African, gave cart blanch to Obama to
“Do something!” in Nigeria. “And so our first command and demand is to
use all resources to bring the terrorist thugs to justice,” they said.
A year and a half ago, when then UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s prospects
for promotion to top U.S. diplomat were being torpedoed by the Benghazi
controversy, a dozen Black congresspersons scurried to her defense. “We
will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut
off her consideration to be secretary of state,” said Washington, DC
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
As persons who are presumed to read, Black Caucus members were
certainly aware of the messy diplomatic scandal around Rice’s role in
suppressing United Nation’s reports on U.S. allies’ Rwanda and Uganda’s
genocidal acts against the Congolese people. Of all the high profile
politicians from both the corporate parties, Rice – the rabid
interventionist – is most intimately implicated in the Congo holocaust,
dating back to the policy’s formulation under Clinton. Apparently,
that’s not the part of Rice’s record that counts to Delegate Norton and
the rest of the Black Caucus. Genocide against Africans does not move
them one bit.
So, why are we to believe that they are really so concerned about the girls of Chibok?
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted atGlen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
CNS News
The whereabouts of around 100 Nigerian schoolgirls
kidnapped by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram on Monday remain
unknown, after the military was forced on Thursday to retract an earlier
statement that most had been released.
The retraction drew an angry response from parents of the missing
teens, and according to Nigerian media reports some parents have now
resorted to launch a search themselves in a forested area where Boko
Haram is known to have hideouts.
The embarrassing reversal by the military’s spokesman is yet another
setback in its campaign against the terrorists. Last May President
Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in three northern states, granting armed forces sweeping powers and vowing to “win this war against terror.”
Almost a year on, however, the situation looks more dire than ever.
The first few months of 2014 have witnessed more than 1,500 deaths,
making this year already the deadliest yet in Boko Haram’s jihad, which
began escalating in 2009.
The seizure of 129 secondary schoolgirls occurred in Borno, one of
the three state of emergency states, just hours after a bombing, also
blamed on Boko Haram, killed 75 people in the capital, Abuja – the
deadliest terrorist attack ever in the city.
Read more
