Claudia Amikwa (left) and Shepheline Achuo live in Adagom, the refugee settlement in southeastern Nigeria where about 5,000 Cameroonians reside / credit: Philip Obaji, Jr.
MAMFE, Cameroon—One Saturday morning in March 2021, 17-year-old Beatrice* and 19-year-old Patience* stepped out of a single-room apartment they shared to buy food near the Adagom refugee settlement in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River State.
That’s when a young man they knew as “Mr. Patrick” approached them.
He asked the teenagers if they were interested in moving to the United States to work as caregivers for a monthly salary.
The two wasted no time in accepting the offer, which came with the condition that they would have to work in a bar in Cameroon, their home country, for at least a year to earn enough to make the journey.
“We immediately began to pack our bags and, after two days, we left for Cameroon,” Beatrice, now 19, said. “We were excited to hear that our stay in Cameroon was temporary and, after a year, we would be traveling to America.”
A little over three years ago, both women, who used to live close to each other, fled their homes in the southwestern Cameroonian town of Akwaya after soldiers stormed their compounds and began to burn houses as the war between English-speaking separatists and government forces in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions intensified. After spending days struggling through thick forests and grasslands, they arrived in Nigeria in November 2019, quickly seeking refuge in the Adagom refugee settlement, where about 5,000 Cameroonians now live. The site is on the outskirts of Ogoja town in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River State.
For the two days this reporter spoke with the petite women, they were dressed in the same outfit: Blue jean trousers and faded t-shirts. They also appeared emaciated.
According to sources this reporter interviewed, trafficking of adults and children has become rampant as a war rages in Cameroon between the Francophone government and Anglophone forces.
Map of Cameroon-Nigeria border depicting cities of Calabar, Mamfe and Oguja / map: Google; illustration: Toward Freedom
‘We Just Had to Leave’
Both women fled Cameroon on their own, leaving behind relatives, some of whom later fled to Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Cameroon’s southwest and to other refugee settlements in southeastern Nigeria.
An Emergency Food Security Assessment that the United Nations conducted a year ago found more than 80 percent of Cameroonian households in refugee settlements and those in host communities are “severely or moderately food insecure.” Three in four refugees may be engaging in child labor and survival sex, according to the UN.
Beatrice and Patience, who spent three years at Adagom on a $2-per-day allowance they earned, jumped at the chance of paid jobs in Cameroon and an eventual trip to the United States.
“At Adagom, we only earned money during planting and harvesting seasons and, once these seasons are over, we go back to begging for survival,” Beatrice said. “When we heard there was something better waiting for us outside Nigeria, we just had to leave.”
Beatrice and Patience had no time to tell anyone they were going.
They arrived in the southwestern Cameroonian town of Mamfe alongside Mr. Patrick, who drove them in his red Volkswagen Passat car. That is when the women said they met a couple of other girls from the same refugee settlement in Nigeria at a bar where they quickly began to work as waiters. Later, they labored as cooks when a restaurant was added to the bar, which was run by three young men, including Mr. Patrick himself, according to the women.
“Behind the bar is a three-bedroom apartment, where everyone who worked there lived,” Patience said. “At some point it was only us (Beatrice and Patience), who remained as workers at the bar. The other two girls we met there were taken away from the apartment one morning.”
Less than a week after they arrived, each of the three men began to make advances at them, demanding sex and threatening to lie to Cameroonian authorities that the teenagers worked for the Ambazonia Defense Forces (ADF) one of the two biggest armed English-speaking separatist groups.
“They said if we didn’t do what they asked us to do, they’d make our lives miserable,” Patience said. “We had to choose between doing what they wanted or having our lives turned upside down.”
Fearing that they could lose everything that was offered to them and even end up in jail, they gave in. Within weeks, the teenagers were pregnant. But after they gave birth to two boys in February, the traffickers took away their babies. They told the women that they needed to prepare for their trip to the United States and that U.S. authorities wouldn’t admit them if they went with children.
But the trip never happened. Instead, the bar closed in April and its owners fled with the babies.
“They sent us to the market one afternoon to buy baby toiletries and when we returned, we found that both the bar and our apartment had been locked,” Patience said. “The men had left with our children.”
Not having anywhere to stay, a Mamfe trader whom Beatrice and Patience often bought baby toiletries from took both of them into her home, where they remain for now.
Water spouts at the Adagom refugee settlement / credit: Philip Obaji, Jr.
‘No Mother Can Rest Until She Finds Her Child’
The women have solicited help from local activists and a Nigerian NGO to find their babies.
“We reported the incident to the police in Mamfe but haven’t heard anything positive from them since then,” Beatrice said. “We also informed [local] pastors and human rights activists, and they’ve been going ‘round the [southwest] area, asking people if they know anything about the men who took the children.”
A senior police officer, who was unauthorized to speak on the matter, told Toward Freedom human trafficking is growing in the city and traffickers are hard to track.
“They receive protection from armed groups,” the officer said. These groups control certain areas in the southwest. “[The police] isn’t equipped enough to engage these elements.”
In Nigeria’s Cross River State, from where Beatrice and Patience were trafficked, authorities explained policing in Adagom is difficult because of its distance from the state’s capital, Calabar, about 304 kilometers (188 miles) south of Adagom.
“Things can only change if funding improves,” said Godwin Eyake, who heads the Cross River State command of Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
A local NGO is helping Beatrice and Patience find their sons by visiting orphanages and writing advertisements.
“It’s hard when you are not sure where the babies were taken to,” said Salome Gambo, a researcher at human-rights group Caprecon Development and Peace Initiative. “We are doing what we are doing just in case it happened that the children were trafficked to Nigeria.”
Gambo admitted recovering the children will be difficult.
However, for the mothers of the babies, there’ll be no stop in their search.
“We will not rest until we find our children,” Patience said. “No mother can rest until she finds her child.”
*Names have been changed
Philip Obaji, Jr., is a journalist based in Nigeria. He won the Future Awards Africa Prize in Education in 2014, and the Future Awards Africa Prize for Young Person of the Year in 2015. Follow him on Twitter at @PhilipObaji.
Tunisian navy personnels aboard USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) on May 23 when the Phoenix Express 2021 was underway / credit: AFRICOM
Phoenix Express 2021 (PE21), a 12-day US-Africa Command (AFRICOM)-sponsored military exercise involving 13 states in the Mediterranean Sea, concluded on Friday, May 28. It had kicked off from the naval base in Tunis, Tunisia, on May 16. The drills in this exercise covered naval maneuvers across the stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, including on the territorial waters of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania.
The regimes in these countries, which cover the entire northern and northwestern coastline of Africa, participated in the drill – one of the three regional maritime exercises conducted by the US Naval Forces Africa (NAVAF). Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain were the European states that participated in the drill.
Among the heavyweights deployed in the exercises was the US navy’s USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4). The 784-feet-long warship is a mobile military base which “provides for accommodations for up to 250 personnel, a 52,000-square-foot flight deck.. and supports MH-53 and MH-60 helicopters with an option to support MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft,” according to the Woody Williams Foundation. “The platform has an aviation hangar and flight deck that include four operating spots capable of landing MV-22 and MH-53E equivalent helicopters.”
When the warship entered into its maiden service with the US navy in 2017, Capt. Scot Searles, strategic and theater sealift program manager at the Program Executive Office (PEO) Ships, said, “The delivery of this ship marks an enhancement in the Navy’s forward presence and ability to execute a variety of expeditionary warfare missions.
According to a press release by the US navy, the purpose of this exercise was to test the ability of the participants “to respond to irregular migration and combat illicit trafficking and the movement of illegal goods and materials.”
Smugglers moving goods across the border also illicitly traffic migrants fleeing war or economic crisis in their home countries. AFRICOM has on multiple occasions acknowledged that instability in Libya is the driving force behind the migration crisis.
Who Is Destabilizing the Region?
While ‘Russian intervention’ is blamed for the instability in Libya, AFRICOM played a key military role in the Libyan war in 2012, deposing Muammar Gaddafi, who was a staunch opponent of expanding US military footprint in the region, with the help of radical Islamist organizations. With the exception of Algeria, all the other north African states which participated in PE21 had supported this war in Libya, which has led to mass distress migration.
Many Islamist organizations which emerged amid the anarchy caused by the war were also used by the US and its allies in the Syrian war in a bid to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad, triggering another major wave of destabilization and migration.
Noting that “Syrians.. have (also) entered Libya from neighboring Arab states seeking onward transit to refuge in Europe and beyond,” a US Congressional Research Service report states: “The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that nearly 654,000 migrants are in Libya, alongside more than 401,000 internally displaced persons and more than 48,000 refugees and asylum seekers from other countries identified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).”
The report in 2020 acknowledged that with “human trafficking and migrant smuggling.. trade has all but collapsed compared with the pre-2018 period.”
This migration wave, caused in no small part by AFRICOM-coordinated military interventions in Libya, has since been purported as a reason for further militarization of the region through such exercises as PE21 sponsored by AFRICOM.
The hysteria surrounding migration whipped up by right-wing parties has provided politically fertile ground for the US to mobilize state militaries for such drills. This is despite a fall in undocumented migration.
The need to respond to ‘irregular migration’ with warships is one of the official pretexts which, like the ‘war on terror’, has been used to further the militarization of Africa through AFRICOM since it was established in 2007.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding the fact that the main cause behind the explosion of terrorist organizations in the region was the 2011 Libyan war in which AFRICOM itself was an aggressor, it continues to be portrayed as a bulwark against terrorist organizations. Its operations in Africa over the last decade, including hundreds of drone strikes, correlate with a 500% spike in incidents of violence attributed to Islamist terrorist organizations.
Credit: Africa Center for Strategic Studies / U.S. Department of Defense
The Chinese Boogeyman
Another justification given by the US for AFRICOM is the perception of a growing Chinese influence. “Chinese are outmaneuvering the U.S. in select countries in Africa,” General Stephen Townsend, commander of AFRICOM, told Associated Press late in April, less than three weeks before the start of PE21.
He went on to claim that the Chinese are “looking for a place where they can rearm and repair warships. That becomes militarily useful in conflict. They’re a long way toward establishing that in Djibouti. Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there.”
Calling out the lack of credibility of this claim, Eric Olander, a veteran journalist and co-founder of The China-Africa Project, wrote: “The Chinese are looking for a base but he doesn’t provide any specifics or any evidence to back up the claim. Again, we’ve heard this before… for years in fact. For all we know the general doesn’t have any more refined intelligence than the same speculation that’s been floating around African social media all these years about a new Chinese base in Namibia or was it Kenya or maybe Angola?”
Townsend also pointed to the Chinese investments in several development projects in Africa. “Port projects, economic endeavors, infrastructure and their agreements and contracts will lead to greater access in the future. They are hedging their bets and making big bets on Africa,” he claimed.
This has been disputed by Deborah Bräutigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who concluded that China’s economic engagements in Africa are not of a predatory nature.
Bräutigam argues that Chinese economic engagements on the continent are very much in line with the economic interests of these African states, providing jobs to locals and improving public infrastructure.
Neither the concocted threat of Chinese domination of Africa, nor terrorism and irregular migration add up to the raison d’etre of AFRICOM. As former AFRICOM commander Thomas Waldhauser explained to the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, the purpose of AFRICOM is to enable military intervention to propagate “US interests” across the continent, “without creating the optic that U. S. Africa Command is militarizing Africa.” However, the 5,000 US military personnel and 1,000 odd Pentagon employees deployed across a network of 29 bases of AFRICOM in north, east, west and central Africa present a different picture.
Editor’s Note: The following was originally published in Peoples Dispatch.
Amid the ongoing war for the liberation of Western Sahara from Morocco, which is illegally occupying 80% of its territory, the UN Security Council (UNSC) is reportedly scheduled to discuss the conflict for the second time this month on Monday, October 10. Two more sessions are scheduled for October 17 and 27.
The “Council is expected to renew the mandate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which expires on 31 October,” states the UNSC’s monthly forecast for October.
Known officially as the Sahrawi Democratic Republic (SADR), Western Sahara—a founding and full member-state of the African Union (AU)—is Africa’s last colony. It is listed by the UN among the last countries awaiting complete decolonization.
Its former colonizer, Spain, ceded the country to Morocco at the persuasion of the Unite in 1976, despite the fact that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had dismissed Morocco’s territorial claims. The position supporting the Sahrawi peoples’ right to self-determination has since been upheld by the UN, the AU, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR).
MINURSO was established by the UNSC in April 1991 to facilitate the realization of this right by organizing a referendum. In August that year, a ceasefire was secured between the Polisario Front (PF), recognized by the UN as the international representative of the people of Sahrawi, and Morocco.
However, with the backing of the United States and France, Morocco has been able to subvert the organization of this referendum till date. On November 13, 2020, the ceasefire fell apart after 29 years. That day, Moroccan troops crossed the occupied territory into the UN-patrolled buffer zone in the southeastern town of Guerguerat to remove unarmed Sahrawi demonstrators blockading an illegal road that Morocco had built through the territory to Mauritania
“Morocco’s armed incursion was a flagrant violation of the terms of the ceasefire that was declared under UN auspices in 1991,” Kamal Fadel, SADR’s representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The Sahrawi army had to react in self-defense and to protect the Sahrawi civilians that were attacked by the Moroccan army.”
Hugh Lovatt and Jacob Mundy, in their policy brief to the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) published in May 2021, observed that “Self-determination for the Sahrawi people appears more remote than when MINURSO was first launched in 1991.” ” With its mandate renewed well over 40 times, the UN “has little to show” for three decades of MINURSO, they said.
“With no power and no support from the UNSC,” MINURSO became “hostage to the Moroccan authorities,” unable even “to report on the human rights situation in the territory, unlike any other UN peace-keeping mission,” Fadel noted.
“We wasted 30 years waiting for MINURSO to deliver the promised referendum. MINURSO’s failure seriously damages the UN’s credibility and encourages authoritarian regimes to defy the international community,” he argued.
While reiterating that “we still believe in a peaceful, just and durable solution under the auspices of the UN,” Fadel maintained that “the UN has to work hard to repair its badly damaged reputation in Western Sahara.”
The position of the UN Secretary General’s former Personal Envoy for Western Sahara was left vacant for more than two years after the resignation of Horst Köhler in May 2019. It was only in October 2021 that Staffan de Mistura was appointed to the post. Mistura, who will be briefing the UNSC member states in the sessions scheduled this month to discuss Western Sahara, is yet to pay a visit to the territory in question. His plan to visit Western Sahara earlier this year was canceled without any reasons stated.
“We hope Mr. Mistura will be able to visit the occupied areas of Western Sahara soon and meet with the Saharawi people freely. It is odd that he has not yet set foot in the territory he is supposed to deal with,” remarked Fadel. Mistura has already met with Foreign Ministers of Morocco and Spain, European officials, and U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken.
U.S. and European Powers Facilitated Moroccan Occupation of Western Sahara
Western Sahara was colonized by Spain in the early 1880s. Faced with an armed rebellion by the Polisario Front (PF) from 1973, the Spanish government of fascist dictator Francisco Franco agreed in 1974 to hold a referendum. It was an obligation on Spain to fulfill the Sahrawi right to self-determination, in line with the UN’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries.
The neighboring former French colonies of Morocco and Mauritania, eyeing Sahrawi’s mineral wealth and a vast coastline, had already laid claim over the territory since their independence. With about $20 million-worth of weapons supplied by the United States, Morocco began preparation for an armed invasion. Informing the then Spanish Foreign Minister Pedro Cortina about this impending attack in a meeting on October 4, 1975, U.S. State Secretary Henry Kissinger had nudged him to negotiate an agreement with Morocco.
“We are ready to do so.. However, it is important to maintain the form of a referendum on self-determination… Self-determination does not mean independence, although that is one of the options included to give it credibility, but what the people of the area will be called on to do is to show their preference either for Morocco or for Mauritania,” Cortina had responded.
“The problem is the people won’t know what Morocco is, or what Mauritania is,” said Kissinger, with his characteristic cynicism. Cortina corrected him, saying, “Unfortunately, they have learned well from experience what those countries are and they know what all the possibilities are.”
In a subsequent meeting on October 9, Cortina confronted Kissinger about U.S. support for an imminent Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi, then known as Spanish Sahara. He was told that if Spain failed to reach an agreement with Morocco, “it’s not an American concern.” In effect, Kissinger had told Cortina that if Moroccan forces invaded Spanish Sahara using American weapons, the United States would not intervene to stop it.
“We have no particular view about the future of the Spanish Sahara,” Kissinger elaborated on the U.S. position. “I told you privately that… the future of Spanish Sahara doesn’t seem particularly great. I feel the same way about Guinea-Bissau, or Upper Volta. The world can survive without a Spanish Sahara; it won’t be among the countries making a great contribution. There was a period in my life when I didn’t know where the Spanish Sahara was, and I was as happy as I am today.”
“Before phosphates were discovered,” Cortina exclaimed. He was referring to the large deposits found in the territory. Phosphates are the main mineral needed to make fertilizers, of which Morocco went on to become one of the world’s largest producers.
On securing guarantees on access to phosphate and fishing rights, the Spanish government – which had by then also realized that it would not be able to install a puppet Sahrawi elite under Spanish control in power after independence – signed the Madrid Accords. With this treaty, signed on November 14, 1975, only days before the death of Franco who had already slipped into coma, Spain ceded its colony to Morocco and Mauritania.
‘No Tie of Territorial Sovereignty’: ICJ
The UN does not recognize this treaty, which had disregarded the advisory opinion given by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The advisory opinion was given on the request of the UN General Assembly only a month before, on October 16, 1975. The ICJ, which had also been approached by Morocco, stated that “the materials and information presented.. do not establish any tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco or the Mauritanian entity.”
However, the United States and its Western allies calculated that an independent Western Sahara under the rule of PF, supported by Algeria which was perceived as inclined toward the Soviet Union, would be against their Cold War interests. And so, the aspirations of the Sahrawi people to realize their internationally recognized right to self-determination, which was pitied as ‘unfortunate’ by the Spanish foreign minister at the time, was trampled over for imperial interests.
By the start of 1976, Moroccan forces occupied the western coastal region of Sahrawi, while Mauritanian forces took over the eastern interior region, forcing 40% of the Sahrawi population to flee to Algeria, where they continue to reside in refugee camps in the border town of Tindouf.
Guerrillas of the PF fought back, quickly regaining the eastern territory from Mauritania, which made peace with SADR and withdrew all its claims by 1979. However, “[b]acked by France and the United States, and financed by Saudi Arabia, Morocco’s armed forces eventually countered Polisario by building a heavily mined and patrolled 2,700-kilometer berm,” Lovatt and Mundy recount in their policy brief to ECFR.
Constructed with the help of U.S. companies Northrop and Westinghouse, the berm is the second longest wall in the world, reinforced with the world’s longest minefield consisting of about seven million landmines. It is among the largest military infrastructures on earth.
Although the Moroccan forces managed to bring about a stalemate by the 1980s with the completion of the construction of the berm, PF’s forces continued to antagonize their positions along the wall. By the time the ceasefire was agreed upon in 1991 following the establishment of MINURSO with a mandate to conduct a referendum, over a thousand enforced disappearances had been reported from the territory under Moroccan occupation. Yet, the protests were unrelenting.
In the meantime, SADR’s cause was gaining increasing support. In 1980, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) recognized the PF as the international representative of Western Sahara. In 1984, after SADR was welcomed as a member of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the African Union (AU), Morocco quit the organization in protest.
Three years later, Morocco applied for membership of the European Communities, which later evolved into the European Union (EU). However, not considered a European country, Morocco’s application was turned down. It was only in 2017 that Morocco joined the AU, to which it was admitted without recognition of any territorial rights over SADR, which is a founding and full member-state of the AU.
In this context of the increasing isolation it faced in the 1990s over its occupation of SADR – except for the backing of the United States, France and Spain – Morocco agreed to hold a referendum, and eventually signed the Houston Agreement with the PF in 1997. This remains till date the only agreement signed between the two. Voter lists were then prepared by MINURSO, and SADR seemed to be on the verge of holding the long-due referendum to realize its decolonization in accordance with the UN Declaration of 1960.
However, more concerned about the stability of the Moroccan monarchy—whose throne had passed from King Hassan II after his death in 1999 to his son Mohammed VI—the United States and France nudged the new King to renege on the Houston agreement, Lovatt and Mundy recount.
The United States’ facade of neutrality on the Sahrawi issue and support for the UN Declaration on decolonization—even while antagonizing the Sahrawi liberation struggle all these decades—was officially removed on December 10, 2020.
The White House, under Donald Trump’s presidency, announced that day that “the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory.” Arguing that “an independent Sahrawi State is not a realistic option for resolving the conflict” the United States declared that autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is “the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the dispute.”
EU and UK Are Invested in Morocco’s Occupation of Western Sahara
This decision of Spain was quickly welcomed by the EU. Its Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell’s spokesperson remarked that stronger bilateral relations between any of its member-states and Morocco “can only be beneficial for the implementation of the Euro-Moroccan partnership.”
94% of the fisheries caught by the European fleets from 2014-18 under this “partnership” with Morocco was from Sahrawi waters. When the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in 2018 that the fisheries agreement with Morocco cannot extend to Sahrawi waters over which Morocco had no sovereignty, the EU simply renegotiated the agreement specifying the inclusion of Sahrawi territory.
A total of 124,000 tonnes of fishery, worth EUR 447 million, was extracted by Europe from Sahrawi waters in 2019, and another 140,500 tonnes, valued EUR 412 million, in 2020. Ruling on Polisario’s challenge to this continuation of European fishing under a new agreement, the General Court of the European Union annulled the same in September 2021.
The European Commission appealed this decision of the court in December 2021. In March 2022, the European Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans, and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkervicius reiterated in a response to a question in the EU parliament that “the Commission confirms its commitment to the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement.”
Fadel said that the “EU fishing fleets are still finding ways to continue the illegal fishing in the Sahrawi waters with the complicity of the occupying power.”
The United Kingdom High Court of Justice (UKHCJ) had also upheld CJEU’s reasoning in 2019 while ruling in favor of the Western Sahara Campaign UK (WSCUK). The court ruled that the WSCUK “has been completely successful in its litigation” that the preferential treatment given by UK’s Revenue and Customs Service to goods coming from Western Sahara under the EU’s agreement with Morocco went against the international law. The court also concluded the same about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ granting quotas to British vessels fishing in Sahrawi waters.
On October 5, 2022, the High Court held the first hearing of the WSCUK’s case against the Department for International Trade and the Treasury over the UK-Morocco Association Agreement (UKMAA), which was signed in October 2019 post-Brexit.
Three of the five permanent seats with veto power in the UNSC are held by the United States, UK and France, all of which have worked against the Sahrawi liberation struggle. Under the watch of the UNSC, “self-determination and decolonization were replaced with a peace process that has given Morocco veto power over how the Sahrawi people fulfill their internationally recognized rights,” observed Lovatt and Mundy.
“We can only ask the UNSC to stop its pretense about human rights and democracy; to stop its hypocrisy,” Hamza Lakhal, a dissident Arabic poet from Laayoune, the largest city in occupied territory, told Peoples Dispatch. “They will move NATO for Ukraine because they hate Russia, but occupation of Western Sahara against all international laws and resolutions is okay because the occupying power here is a friend.”
‘A Collective Shame’
Morocco’s ‘friendship’ with the West has not necessarily won support for its occupation from fellow African countries. Its attempt to get Kenya’s new President William Ruto to withdraw the country’s decade-long support to the Sahrawi cause and endorse Moroccan claims of sovereignty over the occupied territory back-fired last month, embarrassing both Ruto and Morocco’s foreign ministry.
In a judgment on the same day, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights reiterated that “both the UN and the AU recognize the situation of SADR as one of occupation and consider its territory as one of those territories whose decolonization process is not yet fully complete.”
Stating that “although Morocco has always laid claim on the territory it occupies, its assertion has never been accepted by the international community,” the court reiterated the ICJ’s 1975 advisory opinion.
Describing Sahrawis’ right to self determination as “inalienable, non-negotiable, and not subject to statutory limitations,” Algeria’s Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, in his address to UNGA on September 27, called on the UN “to assume their legal responsibilities towards the Sahrawi people.”
The UN-promised “organization of a free and fair referendum in order to enable these courageous people… to decide on their political future cannot forever be taken hostage by the intransigence of an occupying state, which has failed several times with regards to its international obligations,” he said.
Namibian President Hage Geingob said in his address to the UNGA that the “lack of progress in implementing UN resolutions to resolve the question of Western Sahara should be something we must all have a collective shame for.”
On left: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. On right: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Background: National Unity Platform presidential candidate Bobi Wine / photo illustration: Toward Freedom
SILVER SPRING, Maryland—The United States and its European allies only care about human-rights violations when it benefits them.
That’s what a few dozen members of the Horn of Africa and East Africa diaspora agreed upon as they gathered August 13 outside Washington, D.C.
A regional conference of the National Unity Platform, a political party in Uganda, brought together members of the country’s diaspora from the New York City and Washington metro areas to strategize on how to tackle U.S. meddling that props up leaders.
“The West wants to change regimes for itself, not for Africans—we remember Libya,” said Dr. Berhanu T. Taye, chair of the Global Ethiopian Advocacy Nexus (GLEAN) and member of the Ethiopian American Public Affairs Committee (AEPAC). He was referring to the 2011 U.S./NATO invasion that turned the most prosperous African country into a war zone that hosts slave markets.
‘Aid An Instrument of Western Neocolonialism’
While the conference’s theme was “Democracy & Security In East Africa & the Horn of Africa,” a series of protests the group staged the day prior was called, “No to Neo-Colonial African Dictators.”
Neocolonialism refers to the stage of colonialism in which a colonial power continues to control a country or a nation of people by supporting the rise to leadership of those within the oppressed nation who serve the colonial master. This continues the process of extracting material wealth for the benefit of the colonial powers. Loan programs through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are seen as tools to subjugate and profit off oppressed countries.
Taye referred to Western aid as “opium.” He encouraged conference attendees to get better organized for the struggle. “Aid is not only an instrument of Western neocolonialism, but of underdevelopment.”
The party’s regional conference included attendees and speakers from countries outside East Africa and the Horn of Africa, including Chad, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.
The Horn of Africa highlighted in yellow / credit: Wikimedia
Some party members and attendees from other countries expressed frustration with non-governmental organizations and the U.S. government not taking their concerns seriously.
“The likes of [Ugandan President Yoweri] Museveni and [Rwandan President Paul] Kagame… would not be able to do what they do without the backing of the United States and the United Kingdom,” said Maurice Carney, who spoke remotely to the audience via Zoom. Carney is founder and executive director of U.S.-based nonprofit organization Friends of the Congo.
Among the violations the group denounced were Museveni’s government being partly responsible for destabilizing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by sending arms and proxy fighters.
Meeting notes from an August 8 convening of the United Nations Security Council show officials pointing out the Ugandan government’s support for a Daesh affiliate group.
The violence in the DRC has internally displaced 5.6 million Congolese, while 990,000 take shelter across the African continent. In February, the International Court of Justice ordered Uganda to pay $325 million in reparations to the DRC.
‘Billions Go Out the Back Door’
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s International Trade Administration encourages U.S. companies to do business in the DRC, citing “tens of trillions of dollars” in mineral wealth.
“The DRC is one of the most blessed places on Earth,” said Taye. “Sadly, the agents in the neighborhood—Kagame and Museveni—are facilitating the looting of Congo for the West.”
Non-governmental organization Global Witness reported in April that 90 percent of minerals coming out of one DRC mining area were shown to have come from mines that did not meet security and human-rights standards. Companies relying on minerals from such mines include U.S.-based Apple, Intel and Tesla.
“Aid that comes in the front door with tens of millions of dollars is a mirage,” Carney said. The United States has disbursed $618 billion in aid to Uganda since 2001. “Billions go out the back door in the form of extractions [of resources].”
‘Africa Is Going to Be Punished’
Conference moderator Joseph Senyonjo said the NUPUSA (the party’s U.S. arm) has attempted to engage U.S. Representative Karen Bass (D-CA), chair of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
“She has done nothing,” he said.
Senyonjo added Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) has been unhelpful. Meeks chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and has introduced a U.S. House bill that would punish African countries for bypassing U.S. sanctions on Russia. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an August 5 speech in Ghana that U.S. sanctions are not to blame for the global wheat shortage, all while threatening action if African countries buy Russian fossil fuels. However, cutting off Russia from the SWIFT global payments system prevents it from trading wheat, a major Russian export.
What does that mean for African countries that have relied on Russia for 32 percent of their wheat imports?
“Africa is going to be punished,” Senyonjo told conference attendees.
“Internationalism is the Achilles’ heel of U.S. imperialism,” said Netfa Freeman, keynote speaker at the August 13 regional conference of the National Unity Platform (Uganda) held outside Washington, D.C. / credit: Julie Varughese
‘We Can’t Be Timid’
Netfa Freeman, the keynote speaker, warned attendees of approaching the U.S. government from a weak position and with the intent of appealing to the conscience. He said the United States cannot recognize human rights because it was built by violating the human rights of the Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. Now, it holds one-fifth of the world’s prisoners, including the longest-held political prisoners in the world.
“Convincing them cannot be the goal,” said Freeman, an organizer with Pan-African Community Action, a grassroots organization based in southeast Washington. He also is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating Committee and hosts a local radio program.
Freeman added officials such as Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Secretary of Defense Austin Lloyd mirror the comprador class that holds power in various African countries. A comprador appears to independently operate as a leader, but answers to colonial powers.
Freeman encouraged conference attendees to widen the scope of their solidarity to include Afro-descendants in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example, because they, too, suffer under U.S. sanctions and threats of invasion. He connected events that took place during the same timeframe on the continent—the assassination of DRC Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the driving into exile of Ghanian Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah—with the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Internationalism is the Achilles’ heel of U.S. imperialism,” Freeman said.
Freeman added the struggle must be waged against the system, not against individual leaders.
“We can’t be timid. We don’t ask for anything. We demand.”
