Africa News Wrap for February 2023

Over 700,000 people have been internally displaced in Sudan since April 15, when an armed conflict began between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The IOM spokesperson, Paul Dillon, said at a press briefing in Geneva on May 9 that the number has doubled in the prior week after IOM had previously estimated on May 3 that 334,053 had been displaced, 72 percent of them in West Darfur and South Darfur States.

In the states of South Darfur, North Darfur, and Central Darfur, clashes between the SAF and RAF began soon after they started fighting in Khartoum, killing many civilians, as Mohammed Alamaldin, a civil society activist from West Darfur’s capital Genena, told Peoples Dispatch.

However, in his own state, community members—including youth, women, and elders—had managed to secure a local agreement between SAF and RSF “to wait until the winner is determined in Khartoum.”

The locally negotiated truce lasted for a little over a week before forces clashed on April 24. Amid the ensuing insecurity, the armed conflict between West Darfur’s ethnic militias escalated, killing over 250 and wounding 300 civilians between April 27 and May 3, according to Alamaldin. On May 12 and May 13 alone, 280 were killed and over 160 were injured.

Only a handful of European countries have refused to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation after the United States called for them once Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began on February 24. Serbia is one such outlier. As a result, the West is pressuring the Balkan nation to change its foreign-policy vector and pick a side in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

Ever since the war in Ukraine broke out, Serbia has been trying to preserve its neutral position. Belgrade condemned the Russian invasion, but did not join in on anti-Russia sanctions. That led Moscow to keep Serbia off its list of “unfriendly countries.” That means the Balkan nation—unlike European Union members—can continue purchasing Russian natural gas and oil in U.S. dollars, rather than opening ruble accounts at Gazprombank, a privately owned Russian bank. The problem, however, is the EU could indirectly punish Serbia for not imposing sanctions.

According to reports, transport of crude oil from Croatia for Serbian oil corporation Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS) will cease May 15 due to the EU’s sanctions against Russian companies. Russia’s Gazprom Neft owns 56.15 percent of shares, while the Serbian state owns 29.87 percent. The fourth package of EU sanctions prohibits European companies from cooperating with a number of Russian companies, including Gazprom Neft and its subsidiaries, in which Russia has more than 50 percent ownership.

Getting Around Sanctions

What are Serbia’s options? According to Jelica Putnikovic, editor in chief of the Energija Balkana web portal, the alternative to oil supplies from Croatia is transporting crude oil by rail from the Adriatic ports of Durres in Albania and Bar in Montenegro, or by barge from the Greek port of Thessaloniki and the Black Sea port of Romania’s Constanța.

“It is, however, a longer and more expensive transport. The good thing is that Romania and Bulgaria still have not announced that they plan to impose similar sanctions on NIS, which opens the possibility for various oil deliveries to Serbia,” Putnikovic stressed in an interview with a Serbian publication. Her analyses show Serbia produces about 23 percent of its oil needs, while 45 percent of imports come from Iraq, 10 percent from Kazakhstan, 1 percent from Norway and about 16 percent from Russia. Russian gas is relatively cheap for Serbia. It costs $270 per 1,000 cubic meters, while gas prices broke all records at the end of February in Europe and reached $3,900 per cubic meters.

“For us, oil and gas supplies are the most important issues,” Vladimir Djukanovic, a Serbian lawmaker and the top official of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) said in an interview with Toward Freedom. The SNS won the majority of parliamentary seats in elections held Sunday, and the party’s leader, Aleksandar Vucic has been re-elected for a second presidential term.

Djukanovic claims Serbia—despite strong pressure from the EU—does not intend to join anti-Russia sanctions.

“If the EU decides to impose energy sanctions on Russia, then we can think about joining sanctions,” Djukanovic added.

Despite sanctions, the EU continues to import Russian oil and gas, although it has radically cut economic ties with Moscow. Presently, the only European air corridor left open to Russia is via Serbia, which is now acting as a gateway. However, Air Serbia—the country’s national airline—has been facing anonymous bomb threats on an almost daily basis. “The author has expressed their dissatisfaction with Serbia’s diplomatic relations with Russia,” reported one news agency on an alleged threat.

“Serbia is politically very important to the West. The EU is not pressuring other European countries—namely Moldova, Georgia and Turkey—to impose sanctions on Russia, because those nations already pursue unfriendly and hostile policies toward Russia,” Djukanovic said. “We have good relations with Moscow, and they aim to portray us as an enemy of Russia.” He added Belgrade must preserve the military neutrality it declared in 2007 in response to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

In spite of that, the Serbian Army cooperates with the United States’ Ohio National Guard. Moreover, according to Gabriel Escobar, the U.S. State Department’s deputy assistant secretary overseeing U.S. policy toward the countries of the so-called “Western Balkans,” Serbian Armed Forces have conducted far more military exercises with NATO members than with Russia.

Serbia’s Uncomfortable Position

But can Serbia really preserve its military neutrality? According to Serbian journalist and analyst Zeljko Pantelic, if Belgrade continues to insist on its “non-aligned” status, it risks cooling down relations with the EU.

“Brussels expects Serbia to harmonize its foreign policy with that of the EU,” Pantelic explained. “If Belgrade, however, attempts to destabilize the region at the expense of Russia, and agrees to be used as the Kremlin’s ‘useful idiot’, the consequences for Serbia will be serious.”

Serbian Parliament Speaker Ivica Dacic, on the other hand, insists imposing sanctions on Russia would be tantamount to “political suicide.”

“If we are ready to give up Kosovo, then we can impose sanctions on Russia,” Dacic said in an interview. “But if we are not ready, then we cannot.”

Indeed, Serbia relies on Russia’s veto power in the United Nations Security Council, as the only way to prevent the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo—which is the subject of a long-running political and territorial dispute between the Serbian government and ethnic Albanian Kosovo leaders based in the city of Pristina—from becoming a UN member state. Pantelic, however, believes Belgrade’s justification for not imposing sanctions on Russia because of Kosovo is ridiculous. “Only people acting in bad faith, or those who are total illiterates in geopolitics, can believe in it.”

For Serbia, energy cooperation with Russia plays a very important role—possibly even more important than the Kosovo issue—given the country, according to Vucic’s recent statement, depends 100 percent on Russian gas. Still, in Pantelic’s opinion, Serbia will have to carry out “de-russification” of the Kremlin-owned companies operating in the Balkan nation.

“Otherwise, Belgrade will de facto impose sanctions on itself, because Russian-owned companies in Serbia will not be allowed to do business with the EU,” Pantelic concluded.

One thing is for sure: If Belgrade joins anti-Russia sanctions, or decides to nationalize NIS, relatively cheap Russian gas will become a thing of the past.

Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.

The Black Agenda by Glen Ford (OR Books: New York and London, 2021)

Tomorrow, July 28, marks the 1-year anniversary of the passing of Glen Ford, founding executive editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR), an independent online publication that aims to provide “news, commentary and analysis from the Black left.”

Before Ford died at 71, he was able to publish a selection of his articles as a book, The Black Agenda.

While reading, I highlighted words and phrases Ford invented to help burn the impact of injustice into people’s minds. If he wanted to, he could have published a dictionary of the new vocabulary. It is that numerous.

He made clear in his writings it was not enough to be against injustice. One had to explain it in a way so people would be inspired to organize a liberation movement. In Ford’s case, he was trying to encourage poor and working-class Black people to struggle against the “Black misleadership class,” a group of turncoat Black people who had aligned with the ruling class. Ford viewed former U.S. President Barack Obama and many Black members of the U.S. Congress as working against the interests of the 48 million people of African descent in the United States and the close to 2 billion Africans throughout the world.

Take, for example, what Ford wrote in a 2020 article left out of the book. In it, he compared the relationship the Black misleadership class has with white capital to a toxic marriage one would see in a soap opera. He dubbed that fictional soap opera, “The Black and the Powerless,” in a play on the long-running CBS mid-day drama, “The Young and the Restless.” I cackled at his wit.

“Black misleadership class” has been associated with Ford. But he and other BAR contributors only popularized it, he said. Writer James Warren first used the term in 2005 in Black Commentator, another publication Ford co-founded before leaving to launch BAR with others (page 56).

In advocating for the 72 percent of the Black population that is poor and working class, he wrote in a piece published a few months before Obama was elected (page 33):

Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black folks can expect—and must find ways to resist and defeat—from the ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no Obama. There will be no “age” named after the handsome, articulate, and oh-so-slick but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, and Barry is part of the problem.

‘Bifurcated Brain’

A child of communists, Ford grew up surrounded by his Irish mother’s door-to-door grassroots activism in New Jersey and his father, the first Black host of a non-religious television program in Georgia. In a 2013 interview with journalist Paul Jay, Ford said those experiences aided in developing his “bifurcated brain.” That might explain Ford’s ability to merge the art of storytelling with a revolutionary conscience.

“Glen Ford is irreplaceable not just because his writing was so sharp and so clear,” BAR co-founder Margaret Kimberley wrote in the foreword to the book (page xii), “but also because his politics were so clearly of the left. He was not a liberal, or a Democrat, or a progressive. He was a Marxist, and he brought that ideology to all that he did. In doing so he revealed important information that is regularly disregarded or disappeared. He also had a talent for making every issue understandable and making connections with the reality of people’s lives.”

After stints in the U.S. Army, on the radio in rural Georgia, writing for the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States, and helping out the Black Panther Party’s Jersey City chapter in New Jersey, Ford led and/or launched several efforts in radio, TV, print, and online. The most memorable feat appears to be the 2006 co-founding of Black Agenda Report.

Blueprint for Liberation

In Ford’s writing, everything is minced and fried up for consumption. Once I start reading one of his articles, I follow it all the way, tickled at the imagery he uses and his climactic endings. For example, chew on phrases like:

• Black Prison Nation (referring to the 2 million incarcerated Black people)
• Black American Gulag (referring to U.S. policies that led to mass incarceration)
• ObamaL’aid (like Kool Aid)
• Bernie-bear (referring to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders)
• Old Man Biden (referring to U.S. President Joe Biden)
  
• Great Corporate Black Hope (that’s referring to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris)

Ford’s depth of analysis and the breadth of topics he analyzed is awe-inspiring, too. How could someone know so much about… so much? Because the man did not get distracted. Plus, he was an internationalist. And so, Ford could go from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the surge of Western-armed jihadists into Syria, and the NATO invasion of Libya, the corporate takeover of Black Lives Matter, reparations for Black people, Hurricane Katrina’s impact on Black people, the Detroit hijacking of pensions, the origins of “Thanksgiving,” billionaires and millionaires running for elected office, Occupy Wall Street, and much more.

Journalists like Ford are hard to find. Not only does it not pay to tell the truth, some journalists risk their lives doing so (check out Mumia Abu-Jamal, Julian Assange and Shireen Abu Akleh). And so, Ford led a humble existence, as one of his friends told me.

In the final piece compiled for The Black Agenda, Ford paid tribute to George Floyd, the Black man whom Minneapolis police murdered in 2020. It led to the largest popular uprising in U.S. history. But because of his political training, Ford included a blueprint for liberation in searing language (page 326):

Community control is how we build socialism within the framework of people’s right to self-determination—the principles by which, along with solidarity, we decolonize and dis-imperialize our world. “Power to the People” means disempowering the capitalist and white supremacist. Everything else is a diversion, conjured up by the Kente cloth-soiling Black misleadership class in service to their bosses, the oligarchs. They have betrayed us repeatedly and laughed at our willingness to trust them yet again. In George Floyd’s name, let this be the end of it.

May more people be inspired to do the honest journalism Ford modeled.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.