The Communist Party of Swaziland says Mswati police shot 21-year-old party member Mvuselelo Mkhabela at close range, as the monarchy attempts to enforce what the party refers to as “unpopular sham election processes.” / credit: Twitter / CPSwaziland
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.
The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) reported on February 28 that the police force of Africa’s last absolute monarchy has shot and disappeared one of their members, Mvuselelo Mkhabela, age 21. “Comrade Mvuselelo was badly shot at and dragged to the police van helplessly and his whereabouts and condition is unknown and the armed to teeth police force continued its attacks to the protesting community,” CPS tweeted. Reportedly this abduction happened at around 13:00h (local time) on February 28.
This latest act of violence by the Swaziland police force comes amid an uptick in police repression of recent protests against the “farcical” parliamentary elections. CPS claims that the elections are a farce because the parliament itself is under the control of the monarchy, so the electoral process constitutes “a tool used by the absolute monarchy to sanctify King Mswati’s decision.” Mvuselelo himself was arrested and tortured earlier this month for protesting these elections, which are set to occur this August. Shortly after his arrest, Mvuselelo told Peoples Dispatch, “Often, when [police] invade communities, there is no one to defend the family or the individual from the wrath of the regime. This cannot go on.” Mvuselelo was abducted today in one such police invasion.
Communists in Swaziland have been involved in a struggle against the monarchy for decades. In recent months, the regime led by King Mswati III has intensified attacks against pro-democracy activists, including the assassination of human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko, threats against union leader Sticks Nkambule, torture of union leader Mbhekeni Dlamini, and more.
“Mvuselelo’s consciousness and commitment to the just course of the people of Swaziland fighting for democracy in the face of a militarized system of oppression presided by Mswati and his political elites remains unwavering,” CPS wrote in a tweet.
The annual anti-imperialism march in Washington, D.C., on African Liberation Day was a rallying point for various groups and organizations. On May 27, 1972, an estimated 60,000 people gathered for the first march in cities across the United States, the Caribbean and Canada / Rasasi Zachariah Dais
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from the Black Alliance for Peace’s AFRICOM Watch Bulletin.
African Liberation Day (ALD), celebrated on May 25, has its origins in the long struggle of African people to liberate themselves from European domination and white supremacy. It is a time in which we emphasize our oneness as a people with a common past, common set of problems and a common future.
The capture of millions of African people, who were enslaved and introduced into the Western Hemisphere as property and commodities, is the backdrop upon which we commemorate ALD. The colonial-capitalist system imposes a divide between the millions of Africans kidnapped to the Americas during the Transatlantic slave trade and those left on the African continent.
ALD is a vehicle to continue to highlight the problems, challenges and the future of African people everywhere. The challenges facing Africa and African people worldwide require that we remain dedicated to the cause of Africa’s liberation. We can continue to showcase that dedication by actively participating in ALD activities held throughout the world.
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
Gamal Nkrumah is a Ghanaian journalist, a Pan-Africanist and an editor of Al Ahram Weekly newspaper. He is the eldest son of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Could you speak about the history of African Liberation Day?
Gamal Nkrumah: May 25th is celebrated as African Liberation Day. The day marks the foundation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963. The formation of the OAU was a key moment in a centuries-long struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.
For more than 500 years, African people have been dehumanized and degraded, with their bodies and labor commodified to enrich a ruling elite. From slave labor on cotton and sugar plantations to the extraction of gold and diamonds from the earth, the development of Europe and the Americas happened through the rapid exploitation of African people.
Through the collective experiences of deprivation, African people in the diaspora and continent developed a resistance movement. There were many milestones in this process: the formation of independent, maroon communities by former slaves and Afro-Caribbean people, the first Pan-African congress held in 1900, the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, 1945.
Over the decades, political consciousness grew around the necessity to wage a revolutionary, Pan-African struggle against colonial and imperial rule in the 20th century. The revolutionary anti-colonial movements culminated in the mid-century with the independence of several African nations from European powers and the formation of the Organization of African Unity.
AWB: How does ALD relate to the struggles of African people today?
Gamal Nkrumah: African Liberation Day, as it came to be known, was born from the fierce fight for a new society. As Kwame Nkrumah said, “The African Revolution, while still concentrating its main effort on the destruction of imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, aims at the same time to bring about a radical transformation of society. The choice has already been made by the workers and peasants of Africa. They have chosen liberation and unification… for the political unification of Africa and socialism are synonymous. One cannot be achieved without the other.”
Today, capitalism continues to brutally ravage and exploit Africa and its people. The West, through their militaries as well as the IMF and World Bank, have consistently imposed a neocolonial agenda on the continent, and the Organization of African Unity, now known as the African Union, is a puppet of capital and elite interests.
African people on May 25 celebrate the victories of revolutionary Pan-Africanism. African Liberation Day recalls the long history of struggles against class exploitation, colonialism and imperialism.
Revolutionary Africans know that attaining full emancipation demands a revolution from below, in the interests of people over profit. The only antidote to this colonial-capitalist system that continues to impoverish African people is an organized force in Africa ready to pursue Pan-Africanism under scientific socialism.
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.
Rising out of the shadows of the Andean highlands, schoolteacher and trade unionist Pedro Castillo appears on the verge of winning the presidency and catapulting Perú toward a future free of neoliberal austerity and U.S. meddling after rallying the oppressed masses of the South American country to support his candidacy.
Castillo leaped into the spotlight of Peruvian national politics when the candidate topped all other competitors in the first round of elections held April 11. Castillo’s party, Free Perú (Perú Libre), also won 18.92 percent of congressional seats, more than other competing parties. Then Peruvians in the country and in the diaspora throughout the world cast their ballots June 6 to determine who would be the country’s leader for the next five years. The election became one of the most contentious in Peruvian history, featuring two candidates who personify polar opposite interests and visions for Perú’s future. Castillo is leading this week with a margin of less than 1 percent after 99.8 percent of votes have been counted.
Keiko Fujimori / credit: Congreso de la República del Perú
A trade unionist and native of the Cajamarca region, Pedro Castillo held a lead over Keiko Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of a former despot and currently incarcerated ex-president, Alberto Fujimori. If Keiko Fujimori loses this race, it would be her third time missing the mark in a presidential election.
Fujimori, head of the right-wing Popular Force party, had seen success in Peru’s northern coastal provinces and from foreign votes. But Castillo received a majority of his votes from provinces in the Andean countryside, the Amazon and the southern coast, regions historically neglected and suffering from acute economic exploitation.
When official results first began rolling out to the public, Fujimori held a slight lead over Castillo. But near the end of counting, Castillo surpassed with enough votes to win him the presidency. Fujimori and her attorneys are now asking for a recount on 100,000 Castillo votes, claiming fraud and refusing to recognize Castillo’s victory.
Who is Pedro Castillo?
Nestled in the Andean mountains on the shores of Lake Titicaca lies the town of Puno, where Pedro Castillo was born in 1969. His parents were illiterate peasants, both of whom spent much of their lives working on plantations.
In his youth, Castillo joined the ronda campesinos, or ronderos, a local peasant-based police force launched in place of official Peruvian police, who often were absent and—when they were around—harmed peasant communities. While the ronderos generally exhibited left-wing tendencies, in the Chota district, ronderos found themselves combatting Shining Path insurgents, who were trying to seize control of towns. The Shining Path was a Maoist guerilla insurgency formed out of a split from the Peruvian Communist Party. The organization took up arms against the Peruvian state and against other communist and progressive groups. While the Shining Path committed atrocities, such as the massacre at Lucanamarca, the Peruvian military committed unprecedented human-rights violations in the name of counterinsurgency, leaving peasants in precarious conditions.
Castillo later went on to study at Cesar Vallejo University, named after the Peruvian communist poet. He received a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in psychology, eventually becoming an elementary school teacher. In 2017, he garnered esteem in Peruvian politics by leading a teacher’s strike against the underfunding of public education as well as teacher’s salaries.
Despite actively defending the Chota district from the Shining Path’s incursions, major Peruvian media conglomerates El Comercio and La República led a media campaign against Castillo, red-baiting the candidate as a “Shining Path terrorist” because of his links with the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef).
Movadef had campaigned for the release of ex-Shining Path guerillas, an act that led former Interior Minister Carlos Basombrío to label the group an arm of the Shining Path. In the 2017 teacher’s protest Castillo headed, Movadef had been involved in the broad coalition. To the Peruvian media and political elite, that implied Castillo was a Shining Path terrorist.
Castillo’s party, Free Perú (Perú Libre), identifies as Marxist-Leninist-Mariáteguist, upholding socialism and the power of the working class. While Castillo himself does not openly label himself a communist, he has said he plans to create a new constitution with stronger market regulations, break up monopolies, initiate a second agrarian reform, and revise contracts with multinational companies for stronger labor rights and a greater share of profits for the Peruvian state.
Perú Libre’s plans for governance include the eradication of the neoliberal economic model, set forth by the current constitution that was written under Alberto Fujimori. They seek to replace it with what they call a “Popular Economy with Markets,” a model that would allow private sectors and capital to exist under stronger state regulation. Both Castillo and Perú Libre have reaffirmed they will nationalize those companies that have exploited “strategic resources, particularly in foreign hands [corporations]”.
Who is Keiko Fujimori?
At just 19 years old, Keiko Fujimori became the First Lady of Perú—the youngest in Peruvian history—as her father and ex-President Alberto Fujimori stripped his wife Susana Higuchi of her title and threw her into prison when she accused her husband of crimes against humanity.
Fujimori now sits in prison for crimes including organizing the death squad, Colina Group, overseeing disappearances, and a slew of human-rights violations. Then in 2009, he was convicted of an embezzlement charge and sentenced to an additional 7-1⁄2 years. Alberto Fujimori / credit: Staff Sergeant Karen L. Sanders, United States Air Force
Fujimori is currently facing another trial under charges of forced sterilizations that occurred through his Family Planning Program. This program reportedly sought to target Indigenous women in Perú’s countryside. Despite all this, his daughter, Keiko, has promised that, if elected, she will pardon her father.
Yet, Keiko Fujimori’s legacy isn’t stained only by the crimes of her father. In 2011, Fujimori admitted to having received donations from known narco traffickers. Fujimori also was implicated in the Panama Papers, which exposed illegal donations to her 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Later, in 2018, she was arrested on charges of embezzlement that occurred during her unsuccessful 2011 bid for the presidency.
She left prison in April 2020 on a conditional release due to COVID-19. If Fujimori fails to win the presidency, she faces a 31-year sentence for money laundering.
Frente a la difusión en redes sociales con llamados a la intervención de las Fuerzas Armadas en asuntos netamente electorales o políticos. pic.twitter.com/xEvGmDc139
The Peruvian Ministry of Defense released a statement Wednesday afternoon stating it will not intervene, citing the constitution and claiming it must maintain a neutral role so it can respect the sovereignty of the Peruvian people.
Since the start of the pandemic, Peru has seen mass unemployment, the highest COVID-19 death rates per capita in the world and a significant increase in national poverty. In the first week of November alone, the country had three presidents, and erupted in national strikes and protests that led to the police-sanctioned murders of Inti Sotelo and Bryan Pintado. Not only that, but in the past 30 years, the country has experienced political instability and brutal repression at the hands of the state.
The Future of U.S.-Perú Relations
Castillo’s victory also would upend U.S. interests in South America. For example, it could help kickstart the process of re-building a coalition of Latin American left-ruled states. Castillo has promised to withdraw Perú from the Lima Group, an organization of countries dedicated to subverting the democratically elected Bolivarian government of Venezuela.
Besides that, the Perú Libre party calls for booting U.S. military bases and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), notorious for using humanitarian aid to undermine democratic processes in other countries, including during the Fujimori dictatorship. While Castillo has publicly opposed the Organization of American States (OAS), he has said he wants to fortify two regional groups: The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
Over the next few years, Brazil, Chile and Colombia will hold presidential elections. With the turn of events in favor of the left in countries like Bolivia and Perú, the future looks hopeful for people’s movements in South America.
The victory of Castillo and Perú Libre, as well as the adoption of a new constitution, could open a path for the country reminiscent of the progressive military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado. But these elections also have highlighted the deep divide permeating through Perú, one that remains to be resolved whether a Fujimori administration or a Castillo administration comes to fruition.
Kayla Popuchet, a Peruvian national of Perúvian-Haitian descent, studies and writes about Latin America and eastern Europe. She was a 2019 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow.
