NANA AKUFO- ADDO VERSUS MAHAMA: Dreams And Wild Dreams Collapse!

President John Dramani Mahama

By Ekow Mensah

Sometime in January this year, propagandists of the New Patriotic Party were busy. They were telling party faithful that by Easter their presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will be sworn in as President of Ghana.

Somehow they had managed to convince themselves that the elections petition filed before the Supreme Court by Nana, Jake Obetsebi Lamptey and Dr Bawumia would be determined by Easter.

They also imagined that the determination would be in favour of their candidate.

 Today is Friday, March 22, 2013 only a few days to Easter and the Supreme Court has not even started hearing the substantive case.

How long will it take to hear all the 11,000 witnesses of President John Dramani Mahama and any number of witnesses the NPP leaders may want to call?

It is obvious that the dreams and wild dreams of Sir John and Associates are crumbling like a pack of cards.

Defeated NPP Presidential Candidate Nana Akufo Addo

 Last Tuesday, Mr Akoto Ampaw of Akufo- Addo, Prempeh and Co. informed the Supreme Court that “…. following the order of court, counsel for all the parties met in an attempt at reaching an agreement  on the memorandum of issues as set out in the applications for direction and further directions.

“We however, regret to inform the court that with the exception of the relatively few number of issues agreed on, we are unable to reach a substantial agreement on the issues”.

Akoto Ampaw’s letter dated March 19, 2013 also said “we would accordingly be grateful if a short date could be fixed for the parties to appear in court to take directions as to the issues and mode of trial in order to expedite the trial of the petition”

As we went to bed, the Supreme Court had not yet set a date as requested by Mr Akoto Ampaw.

Those who love to dream and wildly too may continue but as the old saying goes sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly and for good purpose.

EDITORIAL

Gold For Nothing

When will the leaders of Ghana listen to the cries of the many who voted for them to enjoy their bountiful privileges?

56 long years after the proclamation of national independence, the vast majority of the people of Ghana continue to live in abject poverty in the midst of plenty.

Although rivers crisis cross the country which lies on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the people or most of them still do not have access to portable water.

Access to housing, education and health is shrinking by the day and one square meal a day has become a childhood dream which may never be realized.

What happened to the gold resources of Ghana? Who benefits from the exploitation of gold?

We are told that Ghana gets only five per cent of the total value of gold exported from the country in spite of the pollution and destruction that gold mining visits on the Ghanaian people.

Last year, the late President Mills started moves to get the gold mining companies to pay windfall tax but not much has been heard of the effort.

 As things stand now, Ghana is getting next to nothing from the exploitation of gold and perhaps we should be listening to the wise counsel of the counsel of the okyehene and leave metal in the soil.

After all it won’t ferment. 

VOLTA RIVER AUTHORITY: A STATEMENT ISSUED BY CHAIRMAN AT STAKEHOLDERS’ MEETING.

Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bid you welcome to the Third Annual Stakeholders’ Meeting of the Volta River Authority.  For the VRA, the year 2011 had two main features: on the one hand, very strong financial and operational performance by the Authority; on the other, worrying signals from the macro energy environment – for VRA, but also for the energy sector as a whole.

THE GOOD NEWS

Let me start with the positive.  Net Profit for VRA more than doubled, from GHS40.6 million in 2010 to GHS82.6 million in 2011, while operating profit stood at GHS140.5 million, making 2011 the third successive year with an operating profit, and the second year of triple-digit growth, (2009: GHS 11.3 million; 2010: GHS 53.3 million; 2011: GHS 140.5 million), altogether, a level of performance not seen in over two decades.  

Revenue from the sale of electricity increased modestly, from GHS1. 077 billion in 2010 to GHS1.11billion in 2011, while units of electricity sold increased marginally from 9,669 GWh in 2010 to 9,814GWh in 2011.  On the tariff side, the weighted average Bulk Generation Tariff (“BGT”) went up by 3%, ending the year at GHp 8.45/kWh, effective December 1, 2011.

Turning to generation and power supply, the Akosombo and Kpong plants combined to perform at 96.5% plant availability; the new Tema thermal plants posted over 80% plant availability; and the Takoradi gas turbines recorded 90% plant availability, the highest performance since the plant was put in service back in 1997. On the negative side, however, the Takoradi steam unit was out all year on repairs.

The arrival of gas from Nigeria made a significant contribution to the Authority’s healthy results in 2011; but so did the range of management interventions that we have introduced. Together, these factors enabled us to post the best operational performance in recent memory - increasing total plant availability, thereby decreasing the unit cost of every kilowatt of electricity produced.

For the immediate future, the Authority has made a stable supply of gas to its thermal plants a key priority.  We are, therefore, actively engaging with gas producers in Nigeria as well as the Ghana National Gas Company.  In addition, we are approaching suppliers of non-conventional sources of gas, such as Liquefied Natural Gas (“LNG”), to determine whether these supply sources could be made economically feasible.

Financial Health

Improved financial performance has meant a stronger balance sheet and increased liquidity.  The Authority’s debt levels dropped to 7% in 2011, down from 22% just four years earlier.  It was also better able to pay its bills timeously, with more cash on hand.  Finally, the Authority has developed a hedging programme for crude oil purchases to ensure budget stability, which will start once the National Risk Management Committee (“NRMC”), on which the Authority is represented, approves the programme and incorporates it into the larger Government framework.

Portfolio Growth

While no new capacity was brought into service in 2011, a number of on-going projects are expected to add 500 MW in new capacity in the near future.  These include: 

·      A 132MW (T3) (Magellan) plant at Aboadze, expected to be completed before the end of 2012;

·      Conversion of the 220MW Thermal Plant, Takoradi International Company (“TICo”), into a 330MW combined cycle plant – we are in the process of raising finance for this, with construction expected to start in the second half of 2012;

·   Development of 110MW renewable energy capacity - wind and solar – beginning with the construction of the first 2MW solar plant, and of one year of wind measurements, both to commence in 2012;

·         Commencement of feasibility studies for the development of 140 MW of hydro dams at Pwalugu and Juale in the Northern Region.

The Volta Lake Transport Project

 Commercialization of Non-Power Generation Functions

The year 2011 saw sharply improved performances in the Authority’s non-power areas. Our operating subsidiaries, Akosombo Hotels Limited (“AHL”) and Volta Lake Transport Company (“VLTC”), both recorded net profits: AHL for the first time in over ten years; VLTC for the first time in over twenty-four years.  Key to this improved performance was the appointment of professional managers in 2010 and 2011, which has brought years of industry experience to turn these operations around.

To the same end, business plans have been, or are in process of being, developed for all the other areas: Kpong Farms Limited (“KFL”); the schools; the health services; and the real estate department.  These business plans will serve as templates for the engagement of private investors that the Authority expects to partner with, as part of the on-going power sector reform.

Extensive staff sensitization was also undertaken as part of the transformation of the Northern Electricity Department (NED) into the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo), a standalone, wholly-owned, subsidiary of VRA.

Performance Management: The Balanced Scorecard

The current Board inherited a system under which an annual bonus of a month’s salary was automatically paid to staff at the end of each year. This has been replaced by a performance management system, with a built-in performance-related incentive scheme. The new system, the Balanced Scorecard, provides a framework for aligning individual performance with departmental and corporate goals, and assessing and rewarding performance accordingly. Launched in 2011 after a long period of preparation, the first year of the system has proved quite successful, already changing staff performance and motivation - despite the teething problems unavoidable at the start of a novel system.

Golden Anniversary: Fifty Years of the Volta River Authority

The year 2011 marked the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of the Volta River Authority.  In this Golden Jubilee Year, celebrated under the theme, Excellence through Commitment and Innovation, we acknowledged and paid tribute to the men and women of the Authority, past and present, whose commitment and hard work account for the achievements and growth of the Authority through the years. I, therefore, take this opportunity to salute VRA management and staff down the years, and dedicate this Jubilee Year report to them.

THE CHALLENGES

Despite the impressive financial and operational results outlined above, we had cause to be concerned in 2011 about several significant challenges within the Authority and in the power sector generally.   Foremost among these, is the insufficient capacity reserve margin available in Ghana's electricity system.  Over the last two years, the system capacity reserve margin has dwindled from about 15% to less than 5%, when an ideal reserve margin is over 20%.  Ghana’s rapid growth in electricity demand, at over 10% a year for the last three years, itself fuelled by significant GDP growth, is largely responsible for eroding this reserve margin.  However, the situation was compounded by the decision to jumpstart the aluminium sector by operating the VALCO plant during 2011, albeit at only 20% capacity, but requiring the baseloading of 70MW, further eroding the already limited reserves.  

Unfortunately, growth in new capacity has not kept pace with demand.  It has not helped that VRA’s own steam turbine was down for repairs for the whole of 2011- that would have supplemented reserves by 110 MW.  Nor, that the completion of the Takoradi 3 project was delayed by over 6 months, because unanticipated variation orders were critically questioned by Parliament - that would have added a further 132 MW.  

Again, several VRA and third party projects, though not intended to be completed in 2011, have been delayed for a variety of reasons.  This is not surprising, as these capital-intensive projects, which typically cost not less than US$100 million, and take 3-4 years to complete under the best of circumstances, typically take 5-7 years for all manner of reasons, despite the best of intentions.

At a more general level, in my Report to this forum last year, I drew attention to the need for

“. . . the articulation of a holistic and realistic national energy strategy, followed by the decisive deployment of appropriate and adequate institutional and human resources in its implementation. This, we believe, will include, but transcend, the establishment of the appropriate regulatory framework and pricing regime to ensure the timely closing of the country’s energy generation capacity gap.

“While this calls for the concerted effort of all stakeholders, leadership remains inescapably with Government and the public agencies with responsibility for sectoral and cross-sectoral policy making.”

Since then, have Independent Power Producers received appropriate guidance and clearly laid-out rules to encourage them to invest the large sums of money required?  Have steps been taken to plug our leaky distribution sector to ensure that any generation investment, public or private, can be adequately and easily financed, in the expectation of a fair return on invested capital? Has the VRA received a cost-reflective tariff, transparently administered, in order that the Authority can become genuinely financially self-sustaining? 

If these challenges are not addressed head-on, how can we be assured that the country’s anaemic energy capacity reserves will be brought up to industry standards to ensure sustainable provision in the coming years?  

Unfortunately, this year, 2012, is reflecting some our worst fears. Gas volumes from Nigeria fell by 45% in the first half of the year; and completely dried up in the second half of the year, the net result being the immediate reduction of 180 MW from the Sunon Asogli plant, and the subjection of VRA’s own plants to great stress, as they attempt to switch back and forth between the use of liquid fuels and natural gas.  With an already razor-thin 5% reserve margin, the unsurprising result has been load-shedding for a portion of the population, causing much inconvenience and understandable dissatisfaction all round.

VRA’s 2011 gains, impressive as they appear, thus, remain fragile within a utility sector in need of substantial on-going reform, overhaul, and co-ordination. If I may anticipate next year’s report, a 100% increase in the use of crude oil during 2012, procured at twice the price of natural gas, with the PURC tariff remaining unchanged over the period, immediately reverses the gains the Authority made in 2011. Thus, the prospect of a financially self-sustaining utility sector – not just the VRA - recedes from view, even as we recount the successes of 2011, and the promise of the more abundant electricity future that we all wish for is put at serious risk.

CONCLUSION

I have given a faithful account of the impressive results achieved by the VRA in 2011 and, indeed, throughout the tenure of the current Board. Yet, as signalled by the difficulties of 2012, as outlined above, these gains cannot be taken for granted. They remain extremely fragile, and need to be nurtured and protected.

VRA must play its part in this process by raising its game at all levels of the organization, in both the power and non-power areas.  For any effort by VRA to succeed, however, requires the formulation and better coordination of macro energy policy, as well as the firm and unwavering commitment and support from VRA's key stakeholders - its utility sector partners; its regulators; and above all, the government.

Ghana occupies a unique place on the energy map of the West African region.  Recent finds of natural gas offshore have positioned the country to supply inexpensive gas-fired power to its neighbours on a large scale.  But we will not be able to take advantage of these opportunities with a crippled and poorly-managed national electricity sector.

VRA has used the last 50 years to establish a firm foundation, and has generally served Ghana well.  It is the dedication of its management and staff, now 3,010 strong, that made it possible for us to end 2011 with a strong balance sheet and cash position, and, despite all the challenges and the uncertainties in the current economic environment, has kept open real possibilities for continued success in the coming years.

I am deeply conscious of the fact VRA cannot succeed without the collective support and commitment of all our key stakeholders.  We look forward to working with you to realize a brighter future for the VRA, the power sector, and for all of Ghana.

 Akilagpa Sawyerr 

3^RD October 2012

 

KENYA – HOW THE WEST LOST AN ELECTION

Defeated Raila Odinga and Joe Biden

 By Yaw Sakosablig

Future generations will look back on the 4 March 2013 elections in Kenya and ask how the coalition of the indomitable Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka could have lost this election? 

After all, all the opinion polls showed that their CORD alliance was leading. However, by  late February, 2013, certain trends were beginning to emerge, which showed that the alliance between the President elect, Honorable Uhuru Kenyatta, and his vice in the coalition, Hon William Ruto, were going to spring a surprise. I will hazard some guess here.

 Firstly, the Western alliance in Kenya, led by the US Embassy, is known to be vibrant and noisy. This alliance includes the British High Commission, the Canadian High Commission and other Security Council wanabeees of different sorts. 

Late last year, these Embassies held a press conference to complain that they had no access to President Mwai Kibaki, while the Chinese held all the glory. The Western alliance brought in a Deputy Minster known as John Carson (an African American) to warn Kenyans that electing Uhuru Kenyata and William Ruto, “will have consequences”. This emboldened other western Ambassadors who waded into the fray with threats of their own. “We are not even allowed to talk to them”, one said despondently.  Some commentators in Nairobi have said that this was the point at which neocolonial interventions have heir Achilles heel.

The International Criminal Court’s indictment of the two leading youthful contenders is seen in some sections of Kenyan society as engineered by the CORD alliance led by Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Some point to a letter written by the Secretary General of the Orange Democratic Movement, asking the Security Council not to defer the cases of the Ocampo 4 (now 3) as they are known in Kenya. 

Generally, it is felt that some sections of the Kenyan ruling class engineered to have the two most youthful political leaders encamped in the Hague to give Hon Raila  a free ride to power. Of course, he has denied this.

However, the sympathy coming from the “consequences” warning was palpable.  The West have never understood Africans. To get involved in an African in such direct way, was bound to rebound on their perceived supporter. They contributed to Hon Raila’s down fall in a major way. One weakness of the approach by Western alliance in Nairobi was the use of Nairobi based civil society organizations, who have no foothold in the rural areas, did not take part in either civic or voter education, and spent valuable time in writing pro ICC articles, taking court actions, etc. They have also tried to muzzle any discussion on the ICC which does not take their narrative on global justice. 

During the Kenyan elections, civic and voter education was left to small community and faith based organizations, which were invaluable in helping citizens to make the right choices. 

There were those who felt that television adverts could promote awareness. In the rural areas, radio was more effective. Incidentally, most of these Nairobi based organizations were sympathetic to the CORD Alliance, and will have to explain to their financiers how they helped to lose the elections; and how they have been unable to mobilise public opinion in support of the ICC despite the heavy western investment. 

President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya

 The Western interventionist approach allowed President elect Uhuru Kenyatta to position himself as pro Kenya, anti-neocolonial, and anti-imperialist, even if he did not use those words. He talked about Kenya being a sovereign state, about allowing Kenyans to choose their own destiny, and the youth of Kenya to be given a chance. This resonated with many Kenyan youth. 

The CORD alliance was therefore seen as protégés of the west, golden oldies doing the bidding of the West, with all its implications for the Kenyan economy and society. What is true is that the West is threatening to impose sanctions on the Kenyan economy because they made a democratic choice in the interest of Kenya. 

Some democrats indeed.

While these external factors were important, it is the internal dynamics of the parties that worked in favour of the winners. 

Firstly, the Jubilee Alliance of Uhuru and Ruto was much more youthful, had a dynamic, people focused programme, while the CORD Alliance was caught up in old excuses. For instance, during the Presidential debate, Uhuru Kenyatta was focused, clear, passionate, and charismatic. Prime Minister Raila Odinga, was still spouting history, and promising to bring the cases at The Hague ‘back home”. 

Another Presidential aspirant, Hon Martha Karua exposed this position. The Jubilee Alliance was also present in several parts of the country, working day and night to get the votes out. The Manifesto of the Jubilee Alliance had some substance, which also worked in their favour. Some people have attributed this to the huge budget available to the Jubilee Coalition, but history is replete with examples where the rich contestants have not been elected, so there is more to this victory than the riches of the Kenyatta family. 

Finally, a theory which has been discussed time and again in Kenya is the “Tyranny of numbers” theory, which before the elections, was seen as problematic. Yet there is evidence to show that ethnic groups’ tribes which are huge sometimes tend to use these numbers to win elections. The ‘tyranny of numbers’ theory therefore had it that because the Jubilee Alliance had supported among certain ethnic groups, they could rely on these numbers to win the election. Those who disputed this theory now have eggs on their faces. 

However, it is also true that some candidates for county positions were not elected on the bases of ethnicity. 

All said, the West has not learned that African has come of age. Old colonial type interventions used by the West in Kenya did not work and will not work. Threats of sanctions and threats against individuals who have rejected the western narrative on the ICC will not work either. 

Local issues were far more important than any other issue in this election. President elect Uhuru  Kenyata showed that the sovereign interest of Kenya is more important, and it appears that Kenyans agree with him.

Its Time For Obasanjo To Retire From Politics! 

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo

By Lawrence Chinedu Nwobu    

Olusegun Obasanjo has probably lost all common sense or is probably so mentally twisted  by delusions of false grandeur that he imagines himself  the ultimate godfather and hypocrite who must continuously lie through his teeth and at the same time dictate what should happen in the nation to the new misrulers whom he so callously imposed on the nation  knowing that nothing other than failure would be the consequence. 

If his mental faculties were still functional, he would have the wisdom to realise that he needs nothing other than to retire quietly, cease every political activity and go into charity to raise money for orphans, for the sick, disabled, poor and deprived as most leaders in saner climes do. That would at least have removed much of the undue attention accruing to him and dimmed the gravity of his destruction of the 4th republic and failure as president. 

Obasanjo has been so much of a disappointment that he needs to respect the citizens he has condemned to misrule and quietly retire. For starters,  his second coming in the aftermath of the retreat of the military carried much hope. There is every reason to have imagined or expected Obasanjo to be a transformational leader  particularly in his 2nd coming. He is after all, a man who lived through the election rigging saga, the violence and other tragedies that truncated the 1st republic and engendered a civil war.

He handed over to the fledgling democrats of the 2nd republic and lived through the tragedies that buried the 2nd republic. He is also a man who has been a victim of government persecution, spending many years on death row in Gen. Sanni Abacha’s gulag until Abacha expired and the new regime set him free.

General Sanni Abacha

 Such a man with a wealth of experience would in the least be expected to avoid the mistakes of the past and to provide focused and dedicated leadership. But for Obasanjo there was no learning from  the past . He was practically given the PDP on a platter of gold,  a political party that evolved from the G34 group of pro democracy activists headed by the former vice president Dr Alex Ekwueme, Solomon Lar and others who risked their necks insisting that Gen. Sanni Abacha must go at a time Abacha held the whole nation in a grip of assassinations and terror. 

Obasanjo  thus became the beneficiary of a party he had no hand in creating by virtue of the Northern cabal who rather than allow the normal evolution and transition of the democratic process choose the injustice of imposing a robot that they calculated would protect their vested interests.

After a long, arduous and bloody struggle to get the military out of power, many heaved a sigh of relief in spite of the irregularities of Obasanjo’s emergence in the hope that his experience would guide the new order and nurture a truly democratic,  just and prosperous nation.

That expectation proved to be a fluke as Obasanjo quickly began unleashing all the same demons that truncated earlier republics and experiments in democracy. From election rigging, thuggery, godfatherism, assassinations, political violence and general lawlessness, Obasanjo broke new records in organized violence and lawlessness to the extent of orchestrating the kipnap of governor Chris Ngige and of using thugs to chase governor Rashid Ladoja of Oyo state from office at the behest of the notorious godfather Lamidi Adedibu,  Ladoja  consequently became the first governor in the nation’s history to be kicked out of office by thugs at the behest of a godfather aided and abetted in such illegality by no other than the president in the person of Olusegun  Obasanjo who is supposed to maintain law and order.
 

Obasanjo’s 8 year tenure was a practical exercise in madness as he waged proxy wars with almost all the principal officers of his regime including the vice president. In spite of abundant resources accruing from an unprecedented oil boom, not a single infrastructure was built. The roads remained death traps; electricity remained epileptic and subject of a $16 billion scam. Pipe borne water remained a pipe dream, hospitals, schools and other public institutions continued their collapse, while unemployment, poverty and insecurity reached apocalyptic levels. 

He committed serial acts of mass murder and crimes against humanity by wiping out whole communities in Odi and Zaki Biam. At the end of his tenure after a failed third term bid, he consolidated his agenda of nation wrecking by orchestrating a record breaking fiesta of election rigging which ushered in a terminally ill, incompetent and clueless Yar Adua  who was not fit to herd a colony of goats together with a confused and bewildered vice president; both brazenly handpicked. The consequence of that conspiracy haunts the nation to date.

After a  shameful outing, marked most  significantly by misrule, lawlessness and corruption which is fast burying the 4th republic, Obasanjo wants to have no break from his evil plots and designs for the nation. He continues to plot intrigues that will lock the nation in a perpetual circle of misrule and self immolation. It is obvious that the Obasanjo’s of this world, while pretending to be patriots are actually the greatest  enemies of the nation. Obasanjo cannot claim to be ignorant of the fact that great nations cannot be built through injustice, hand picking of incompetent candidates, lawlessness, godfatherism, election rigging, thuggery and corruption. 

America became the greatest nation on earth through the rule of law and sustained democracy devoid of election rigging, hand picking of candidates, thuggery and other such vices, so also did the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other successful nations. By setting up the democratic experiment of the 4th republic with such vices, Obasanjo deliberately   plotted the ruin and ultimate collapse of the 4th republic.

Democratically -Elected President John Mahama of Ghana

 Nations such as Indonesia, South Africa, Chile, Ghana and others that became freed from military rule and Apartheid, some of them at about the same time as Nigeria have remained successful democracies devoid of election rigging, thuggery, godfatherism and other such corrupt acts that Obasanjo wilfully sponsored in Nigeria. While those nations as a consequence have become better for it with social stability and prosperity, Nigeria is sinking further into instability and social chaos which might in the end prove fatal for the nation.

Its time for Obasanjo to retire from politics and cease his assault on the sensibilities of the long suffering masses. Hosni Mubarak is serving life in jail just for alleged complicity in the police killing of three rioters during the Egyptian mass revolt. In saner climes around the world, many in the mould of Obasanjo are in jail for lesser crimes. 

He should consider himself lucky that Nigeria’s contradictions and national insanity have  kept him free thus far. But since there is nothing written in stone, being free today does not guarantee his being free in the future.Wisely retiring into charity and solitude are the only things that might mitigate his crimes when eventually the sword of Damocles falls.

Source:Ocnus.net 2013

How the Africa-China Romance is Killing Europe  

Xi Jinping

By Serginho Roosblad 

In the past decade the international media first focused on China’s economic boom, which was then followed by the Africa is rising narrative. The latter partly as a result of China’s investments. Many have wondered whether China’s interest in Africa would trigger a new wave of colonialism and exploitation of mineral resources, needed to keep Chinese factories going. 

On regular occasions one would find media analyses of the China-Africa romance (like here, here and here). And like a mother not too happy with her daughter’s choice of partner, the experts tended to be wary of the authenticity of the cute new couple. Even when South Africa became the country in BRICS, the rest of the world (read: the West) had its doubts. Was South Africa ready to play with the big boys?

As it now turns out, what the West, and Europe in particular, have been afraid of all the time is how much the Old World would lose because of the new relations between China and the African continent. A documentary on Dutch public television by broadcaster VPRO, that premiered recently, painfully shows the consequences for Europe now that it virtually has closed its borders, while China is welcoming African migrants with open arms.

Osagyefo and Chairman Mao of China

 The 45-minute documentary entitled Zwart geld: De toekomst komt uit Afrika Black money: The future comes from Africa (one could question the title) examines two things.

First, we see how migrants live in Nigeria Town in the Chinese city Guangzhou.

Four Africans, three Nigerian men and one Mozambican woman serve as living examples how life is like after having roamed across the globe in the hope to find employment or to do business. (Usually the latter.) It’s intriguing to watch the easiness with which the main subjects go about their daily life and interact with their Chinese business partners; there seem to be no signs of racism, a subject that inevitably needed to be covered by the filmmakers. It’s a totally different picture of the loneliness and hardships endured by African immigrants who came to Europe as seen for example in the documentary series Surprising Europe.

African migrants in China are far better off as we learn that one can make $5,000 a week in China, that an individual can make it in China and that on a daily basis twenty to thirty million dollar is sent from China to Nigeria in cash.

The second narrative of the documentary focuses on the losses for Europe as a result of the economic romance. This time no European experts, but South African economist Ian Goldin and Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe. Goldin, the former Director of Development Policy at the World Bank and now Director at the Oxford Martin School paints a clear picture for Europe: I predict that in 2030, Europe will be saying desperately: we want more Africans. A pretty grim picture for those political leaders in Europe who in recent years have been working hard to build the European fortress.

A lot of the analysis and facts Goldin presents about the economic dawn of Europe are not new. However the connection he draws between the liberal economic policies that have enabled free flow of people and goods in Europe for the economic good of the continent and the liberal politicians that have drafted these policies while also being the ones responsible for the strict immigration laws might be the most interesting.

As the main focus of the documentary is on the economic consequences (positive for Africa and China, negative for Europe), Mbembe seems to be given an appreciative nod rather than adding something substantial. His role here is merely to question Why is Europe unable to understand that the world we live in is a totally different world. And that the future of the world more and more won’t be decided in the West.

Video: http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1328426

Source:Ocnus.net 2013

Bones May Link Winnie to Killings

Winnie Mandela

 By Shaun Smillie 

The testimony of a father about an event that happened nearly a quarter of a century ago has linked Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to a double murder.

In 1996, Nicodemus Sono told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he last saw his son Lolo on November 13, 1988. He was in a kombi and had been badly beaten. With him was Madikizela-Mandela and members of the Mandela United Football Club.

On Tuesday, the Hawks said everyone in that blue kombi was a suspect in the murder of Lolo Sono and Siboniso Shabalala. They appealed to anyone who might have information about the murders to come forward.

The 25-year-old case heated up on Tuesday when members of the National Prosecuting Authority’s Missing Persons Task Team and the SAPS exhumed two skeletons at Avalon cemetery in Soweto.

The bones, excavated from two pauper graves about 50m apart, are believed to be those of Sono and Shabalala.

Hawks spokesman Captain Paul Ramaloko said two murder dockets were being investigated. They were opened in 1988 when two bodies were discovered with multiple stab wounds in Diepkloof Extension. At the time, they were unidentified.

He said the Hawks began re-examining the case early this year, when they received information from the Missing Persons Task Team that the two activists might be buried in Avalon cemetery.

Ramaloko would not say if Madikizela-Mandela was a suspect, but singled out occupants of the kombi.

At this stage of the investigation we can’t go pointing fingers at people. But we are interested in what transpired that November.

He said there might have been other victims in the kombi.

Nicodemus, Lolo’s father, told the TRC in 1996 that his son was taken away on November 13, 1988, in a blue kombi.

Later that night, he was told that Madikizela-Mandela wanted to see him. He climbed into a kombi parked on the street.

Cold Case Link

When I got into the kombi, there was Mrs Mandela, Winnie, with the driver Michael and a few other young men, who I did not recognise. My son Lolo was in the kombi. He appeared badly beaten, his face was bruised and he was shivering.

Madikizela-Mandela told Nicodemus she was taking his son away because he was a spy.

Shabalala, who lived two houses from Sono, was abducted the following day. On November 15, the bodies of two men were found in a field in Diepkloof Extension and taken to the state mortuary.

Madikizela-Mandela was on Tuesday unavailable for comment.

On Tuesday, relatives of the two men watched as the excavation of the graves began. The Sono family sprinkled snuff on the graves, while the Shabalala family prayed for their loved one.

For both families, the discovery of the skeletons marked the beginning of the end of a long search.

Reality is unfolding, what we never thought we would see, will we see, said Lolo’s uncle, John Sono.

We’ve been knocking on walls, mine dumps and mortuaries.

But there was a hint of anger.

I am so cross, said Shabalala’s brother Pilani. They must pursue this case.

By early afternoon, the bones of two skeletons had been uncovered at the bottom of the graves. The families were allowed to see them.

It was then that Sono’s mother Dorothy told the excavators that one skeleton wasn’t that of her son. There was a length of red rope lying among the bones, traditionally used for protection. Her son hadn’t worn that, she said.

In the next few weeks, the head of the task team, Madeleine Fullard, hopes to get forensic anthropologist Professor Steven Symes to examine the remains.

The ICC, NATO and Mali

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

The International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands, has decided to open a case to try war crimes in Mali, supposedly committed in the last year since rebel groups broke through Government forces in the North of the country. Let us tests the "independence" of this "court".

Remember when Slobodan Milosevic was kidnapped illegally against every fibre of international, Federal Yugoslav and the Republic of Serbia's laws, was flown to the Hague, held captive without any due legal process (which would have released him as an illegal detainee); then pronounced guilty by the Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte before the trial began and held in illegal captivity until his death conveniently ended the process before he could become embarrassing?

Did the ICC try the Albanian mafia criminals from Kosovo who were sawing off the heads of Serbian bank employees when they were screaming for their lives, then walking around grinning holding the head or throwing parts of human skulls at each other? Did the ICC try the Kosovo Albanian mafia engaging in trafficking of organs?

Did the ICC try the Kosovo Albanian mafia selling girls into prostitution rings in Italy?

Did the ICC try NATO for war crimes in Iraq? Did the ICC try NATO for leaving vast swathes of Iraqi territory uninhabitable, poisoned with Depleted Uranium, leaving hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children physically and mentally handicapped?

Did the ICC try NATO in general and the FUKUS Axis (France, UK, US) in particular for war crimes in Libya, targeting the country's water supply "to break their backs" and then destroying the factory which made the pipes so that it could not be repaired? Did the ICC try the terrorist scourge aided, abetted, trained, equipped and financed by the same FUKUS Axis (present in Benghazi since late 2011), for "murder; mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; intentionally directing attacks against protected objects; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court; pillaging; and rape"?

ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda

 No? Why these are the precise words of ICC Chief Prosecutor for Mali, Fatou Bensouda.

So the conclusion is, the ICC is not an independent organism as it claims to be, it is a political monster controlled by NATO in general and the FUKUS Axis in particular, a kangaroo court with zero credibility, a carbuncle on the face of international law and a farce.

Speaking of Mali, who is the ICC going to prosecute, the Jihadis or the Malian Armed Forces which themselves committed human rights atrocities?

When Jihad Came To Mali

By Joshua Hammer

The town of Konna lies along the eastern bank of the Niger River in central Mali, a semi-desert, speckled with thorn trees, that turns vibrantly green during the brief summer rains. For nearly a year, since rebel Tuaregs the nomadic Berber people who live in the interior Sahara region of North Africa and Islamic militants seized control of northern Mali, this settlement of 20,000 marked the limit of government-held territory. Five hundred troops in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns stood guard in the bush just north of the town. Beyond lay empty scrubland and a paved road to Timbuktu and Gao, the two main population centers under the jihadists control.

On Wednesday night, January 9, forty pickup trucks filled with Islamist fighters and heavy weaponry descended on Konna. Taken by surprise, government forces managed to repel the initial onslaught. Around midnight, however, another 150 armed jihadist vehicles arrived. A thousand fighters attacked the town’s defenders from three sides, using rocket-propelled grenades and large-caliber machine guns. After an eight-hour battle, the government lines broke. Hundreds of soldiers retreated in panic through the dirt streets of Konna, some of them stripping off their dark-green camouflage uniforms and begging locals for civilian clothes.

Ousmane Bah, a truck driver, watched the Islamists roll into town at 3:45 on Thursday afternoon. Dressed in desert khakis, they blew up a handful of military installations, and herded people to Konna mosques. A local street preacher who had joined the militants last year commanded them to gather the corpses of government troops. Bury your dead dogs, he told them. The jihadists ordered Konna’s imams to inform the people, Bah said, that Sharia law is now introduced in Konna, and all women must be covered.

On Friday morning, according to Bah, the chief jihadist arrived to claim his prize. Iyad Ag Ghali is a burly Tuareg whose black-bearded face is well known in the country. A former diplomat, smuggler, and hostage negotiator, Ghali had now taken on a new identity: the founder and commander of Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, a radical Islamist organization allied with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a force financed partly by the ransoming of Western hostages. He was wearing a black turban, and a long blue robe, Bah told me. He gathered people together and declared that Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda would run things now.

A market in Mali

 Until recently Mali, a nation of 15.8 million people in the Sahel the arid belt that extends across North Africa was widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy, a favorite of low- budget tourists and world music fans alike. The Festival in the Desert, a kind of African Woodstock in the dunes near Timbuktu, drew thousands of Western and local visitors every January. Timbuktu itself, in the last few years, underwent an unlikely renaissance as a cultural oasis in the Sahara, with half a dozen libraries that preserved a trove of Arabic manuscripts from a millennium ago that had recently been rediscovered.

But the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion. Mali ranked 178th out of 182 countries assessed by the United Nations Development Program for a World Development Report in 2009. According to UNICEF, it had a 26 percent adult literacy rate in 2010, and a per capita annual income of $600. The Sahara desert, beset by droughts and avoided by governments, is a zone of discontent and lawlessness. Between 1963 and 2006, the region’s Tuareg population mounted four armed uprisings. Each time the government promised more development projects, but the pledges fell short. The Sahara also became a sanctuary for outlaws including narco traffickers, cigarette smugglers, and, in the last ten years, jihadists bent on creating a Caliphate across the desert.

In late 2011, the combustible mix exploded. Following the downfall of the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Tuareg mercenaries in his army returned to Mali laden with heavy weapons. Allied with Islamic militants, they seized control of the north of Mali, bordering on Algeria. Soon the Tuaregs were pushed aside and the jihadists took over. Seemingly overnight, northern Mali, a region the size of France long ignored by the West, became perhaps the globe’s most significant terrorist threat. In September, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called northern Mali a safe haven that could allow terrorists to extend their reach and their networks in multiple directions.

The threat became more acute after the fall of Konna in January. Although some say that the jihadists main goal was the Mopti airport in Svar, thirty miles south of Konna, Ghali reportedly urged his followers to take the capital, Bamako. Adam Thiam, the country’s best-known investigative journalist, told me that had the French not intervened, the Islamists could have seized all of Mali in two or three days. Thiam said that many Westerners would have been killed.

Former Libyan leader Muammar l Gaddafi

The rise of Ghali and his jihadists is partly a fallout from the Arab Spring, which set off a chain of events that few could have anticipated. But many observers I talked to say that blame also lies with regional governments and Mali’s Western benefactors. According to leaked US diplomatic cables, high ranking Malian officials and Muslim militants worked together in the drug trade turning part of the Sahara desert into a transit point for cocaine between South America and Europe.

 (In 2009 a cargo plane was found burned in the desert near Gao; UN investigators believe Islamists torched it after unloading the drugs.) Meanwhile, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a military aid program in the Sahara that bore almost no tangible results. The US passed up opportunities to act against the extremists, and ignored obvious signs that Mali’s army was completely outmatched.

In late January, I arrived in Bamako, Mali’s dusty capital, straddling the banks of the Niger River. French forces had gotten there ten days earlier, and people were feeling relieved and elated; an American friend who has lived in Bamako for twelve years told me that she had packed her bags and prepared to evacuate to Paris after fighters left their northern enclaves and streamed toward the south. Last year many Malians had bitterly blamed France for the loss of half of the country. Now, however, the tricouleur hung from windows, draped over side mirrors, fluttered from poles. One Bamako newspaper celebrated the French troops as agents of God.

I paid a visit to Imam Chrif Ousmane Mandani Haidara, the first Muslim leader to denounce jihadist rule in the north. His headquarters is a green-domed mosque on a sealed-off street in Bamako, protected by metal detectors and a battalion of private guards wearing red berets. Pilgrims crammed the courtyard for a one-week festival commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. Upstairs in his opulent quarters, Haidara told me that he was on edge. The city had been infiltrated by jihadist sympathizers, including some powerful imams, he said.

He was worried about his safety. His moderate Islamic organizationAnsar Dine had been tainted by Iyad Ag Ghali’s appropriation of the name. Iyad Ag Ghali is a Wahhabi, his Ansar Dine is not the same as my Ansar Dine, I am a pacifist, said the imam, an imposing figure swathed in a golden bubu, a traditional Malian robe, and a green wool scarf. They created Ansar Dine to make trouble for me. The imam told me with exasperation that some of his adherents had recently been thrown into jail in the Republic of Congo. The police said, Ansar Dine? Oh, that’s Iyad’s violent group.

The next day, I set out for the north. The tarmac quickly turned to dirt, and I fell in behind a half-mile-long French military convoy. In 1994 I had traveled with the French army in Rwanda, and the scenes were familiar. French flags hung from mud-brick huts, jeeps and trucks kicked up clouds of dust, and children waved from the roadside. The French intervention in Rwanda had been clouded in ambiguity, but the mission in Mali was moving ahead with what seemed like near-universal approval, although some officers I met made it clear that they didn’t want to be photographed.

After ten grueling hours and 390 miles, I pulled into Mopti, by the Niger River, which was once favored by backpackers but has now fallen on difficult times. Once-popular cafes such as the Restaurant Bar Bozo noted for its views of sunset over the river had shut down, following a series of kidnappings and killings of Westerners a year ago. Here the signs of the war became more apparent. At the gendarmerie, a bright pink and blue stucco building in the center of town, Malian police showed me a sullen teenager wearing too-short khaki pants and a dirty olive parka that hung down below his knees an Ansar Dine fighter who had been captured the day before in Douentza, on the road to Gao. He claimed he’d been a cook, and swore that he had never picked up a gun. I asked the police what would become of him, and the men shrugged and said nothing.

Malian Soldiers

 The next morning, under a slate-gray sky, I drove toward Konna. Malian soldiers at a roadblock outside Svar refused to let me go any further. I waited at the checkpoint for six hours, along with fifteen other frustrated journalists, then gave up. Some speculated that the Malian army was determined to impede the Western media, after French TV reported that soldiers had murdered suspected Islamists on the eve of the intervention and thrown their bodies down a well in Svar. A friendly French commander from the Fifth Helicopter Regiment promised to intervene on our behalf with the Malian army. We learned that as the French units advanced, the jihadists were moving out of Gao and Timbuktu.

Iyad Ag Ghali first rebelled against the state in 1990, when he and Tuareg followers from the northeast Malian town of Kidal attacked Malian military bases across the Sahara. But in 1991, he flew to Bamako and signed a peace deal. For years everybody respected him because he kept the peace, said Manny Ansar, a Tuareg music promoter from Timbuktu who had a long friendship with the former rebel. Ghali, who was then a moderate Muslim, and Ansar bonded over music. He loved Malian music, he’d even written a song for [the Tuareg group] Tinariwen, he went to their concerts, he smoked cigarettes, Ansar told me.

Over the next decade, Ghali became a kind of Tuareg elder statesman, cutting lucrative business deals, dabbling in smuggling, serving as an intermediary for the government with bandits and jihadists. In 2003 he was dispatched to the mountains to negotiate the release of dozens of European hikers who had been seized by Islamic militants; Ghali was said to have gotten a cut of the $6 million ransom reportedly paid by the German government.

Around 2005, however, a new wave of fundamentalism began sweeping the country. Ghali fell in with a group of Pakistani Salafists who had come to Mali to win adherents. He became harder and harder, said Ansar. He lived like a monk, eating only dates, with a little milk and tea. He demanded that his wife stay at home. With me, he said, Manny, go to the mosque, read the Koran.

Eventually the onetime friends clashed bitterly about the Festival in the Desert, produced by Ansar at Essakane, an oasis of sand dunes and acacia groves forty miles west of Timbuktu. Iyad would tell me, You have to stop this festival, there are people drinking alcohol. Men and women who are not married are together, Ansar recounted. I said, This [cultural exchange] is good for the locals, it’s good for the economy, I’m not listening to you. After Ghali accepted a two-year posting as Mali’s consul general in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2007, the two men drifted apart. Ansar last encountered Ghali in February 2011. I was on the way to another music festival in Segou, and I saw him en route. He was on his way to Kidal. We stopped and said hello, but he was very cold.

In the fall of 2011, a four-hundred-man Tuareg regiment crossed the Sahara from Libya and set up camp in the desert near Kidal. The Tuareg warriors declared themselves the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a secular group seeking the independence of the traditional Tuareg territory they call Azawad and that takes up about 60 percent of Mali’s total area. The commander rebuffed Ghali’s demands to take over. He told Iyad, “You are too much of an Islamist, and you are too close to the government of Mali, Ansar said to me.

It was at that point that Ghali made a fateful decision: he founded a rival movement, appealing to disaffected Tuaregs seeking an Islamic alternative to the secular group. Algerian intelligence officials so I learned in Algiers saw Ghali as a stabilizing force and a counterweight to the Tuareg independence fighters. They cultivated him and provided his followers with food, gasoline, and other supplies. In fact, Ghali was already meeting with a counterpart in al-Qaeda, and planning jihad.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a one-eyed native of the Algerian Sahara, and now Ghali’s ally, is one of the desert’s most charismatic and dangerous characters. He is a former Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and an ex-fighter for the Armed Islamic Group of Algeri the most brutal group to battle Algeria’s secular regime during the 1990s civil war. He and Ghali first met in 2003, during negotiations to free the European hikers. They had been captured by Belmokhtar’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which sought to bring down secular Arab regimes and establish a Caliphate in the Sahara.

Over the next decade, Belmokhtar organized further kidnappings in Mali of Westerners for ransom and oversaw a lucrative cigarette-smuggling business an operation that earned him the nickname Mr. Marlboro. In 2003, according to The Washington Post, US military commanders planned air strikes against Belmokhtar and a group of Arab militants in the Malian desert. The US ambassador to Mali at the time, Vicki J. Huddleston, vetoed the plan, warning of a backlash against Americans.

In recent years, Belmokhtar had established himself in northern Mali. He married into an Arab family in a village outside Timbuktu, prayed at a Wahhabi mosque on the city’s outskirts, and constructed wells to win local support. We would see him coming in his 4 x 4 to pick up gas, food, and other supplies, I was told by Azima Ag Mohammed Ali, a tour guide in Timbuktu. It was an open city for him. In early 2007, Belmokhtar and fellow GSPC leaders, with the approval of the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, changed the name of their group to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

In his book A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda, Robert R. Fowler, a Canadian diplomat kidnapped by Belmokhtar’s men near Niamey, Niger, in 2008, describes a revered leader who exuded a sinister magnetism:

He was relatively slight, with a heavily weathered and deeply lined face and curly black hair. He looked older than what we were told were his thirty-seven years. He had thin lips set in a straight line, and his mouth twisted from time to time into a ghost of a cold, almost wry smile. His most distinguishing feature was a deep almost vertical scar that began above the middle of his right eyebrow, crossed his right eyelid, and continued across his right cheek, disappearing into his moustache. 

The discussions between Ghali and Belmokhtar, which also involved the secular MNLA, resulted in a bargain: the jihadists would gain legitimacy by attaching themselves to the Tuaregs cause, and the Tuaregs would get a hardened fighting force. Government envoys made repeated trips to the Sahara to forestall an attack by making payoffs. A special delegation met them in Kidal, and gave them $100,000 and forty tons of food, and they saw all the weapons, I was told by Imam Chrif Ousmane Mandani Haidara. They hoped they would go away.

Mary Leonard

 Mary Beth Leonard, the US ambassador to Mali, told me that the US had no way of knowing the strength of the fighting force. There was a lot of discussion about what kinds of weapons might be coming from Libya but no clarity, she said. It is a big and remote place. The degree of military acumen and weapons that the other side had was a surprise even to the Malians. The US trained and provided supplies to Malian troops between 2005 and 2011 an important part of a $500 million regional program called the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative. But according to Leonard, the assistance was given only to a handful of elite tactical units and didn’t include weapons. Nobody could foresee a conventional attack from a heavily armed foe. Our interactions were not with the larger army of Mali, she said. We gave vehicles and communications equipment.

The Malian journalist Adam Thiam told me that the US was well aware that the Malian military was in bad shape and would likely collapse if confronted by a full-scale attack. The soldiers didn’t receive per diems, they didn’t get ammunition, and if you gave them ammunition they would sell it to al-Qaeda, he says. It was terrible.

On January 24, 2012, militants attacked Agulock, the army’s main base in the Sahara. The troops fought back with aging Bulgarian weapons and ammunition and soon ran out of bullets. Tuareg fighters overran the base and executed 160 soldiers; many were found with their hands tied behind their backs and their throats cut. Six weeks later, after a two-month siege, militant Tuaregs and Muslim jihadists took control of Tessalit, another base in the far north. 

Most of the five hundred government soldiers escaped across the border to Algeria, and were flown in a cargo plane back to Bamako. In the capital junior military officers then ousted Mali’s president, accusing him of failing to support the army. In the ensuing chaos, Gao fell on March 31; Tuareg fighters from the MNLA swept into Timbuktu the next morning. Al-Qaeda and Ansar Dine fighters arrived hours later from desert camps, in trucks flying black jihadist flags. They quickly sent the secular Tuaregs to the airport, about four miles outside town.

Hamidou Ag Issa, a Timbuktu resident, told me that in the first days after the militants takeover, they created a favorable impression. The gunmen stopped, without violence, a wave of looting that had followed the flight of the Malian army and the Arab militias that had been requested by the Malian government. They presented themselves as moderate. They won the confidence of the people, Issa said.

But in late June 2012, Ghalis and Belmokhtar’s men swept aside their secular Tuareg rivals killing some of them and declared Sharia law across the north. The La Maison Hotel in Timbuktu, where the rock star and philanthropist Bono and his entourage had stayed in January 2012 while attending the Festival in the Desert, became Timbuktu’s Sharia Court.

Mahamen Bebao, twenty-three, a slim man with a wispy beard, was that court’s first victim. During the looting that followed the Islamist takeover, he told me, holding up an empty sleeve, he had purchased a stolen mattress from a friend for $22. Last September, the Islamic police summoned Bebao to the court and sentenced him to a month in jail and a $750 fine for possession of stolen property. On the day before Bebao’s scheduled liberation, he was given a new sentence: amputation.

The police, Bebao recalled, bound him to a chair with bicycle inner tubes. They dispatched a volunteer to the market to purchase a kitchen knife. Bebao received an injection that put him in a semi-conscious state, he said. He was carried in the chair to a public square, where his hand was sawed off. People think it’s done with a single stroke, but it’s with a knife, slowly cut, as if you’re an animal, said Hamidou Ag Issa, who witnessed the amputation of a cousin’s hand two months earlier, near Gao. In a Timbuktu clinic, a local physician nursed Bebao back to health. Then he fled to Bamako, walking and getting rides, one of about 300,000 people from the north who sought refuge in Mauritania and southern Mali.

On December 12, 2012, at Essakane in northern Mali, where Ali Farka Toure and Robert Plant once played guitar beneath the desert stars and Western girls danced in the dunes with their Tuareg guides, six hundred jihadists gathered for a war conference. By selecting the oasis once used for the Festival in the Desert, Iyad Ag Ghali was sending his erstwhile friend Manny Ansar a message. 

A Malian political figure told me, He was saying, “The place is for jihad now”. Among those present were Belmokhtar, then based in Gao, and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, Belmokhtar’s co-commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Two years earlier, Abou Zeid had ordered the beheading of a sixty-one-year-old British hostage, Edwin Dyer, after the British government refused to pay a ransom. In Essakane, the men slaughtered goats and roasted them on spits. Then, drinking tea and eating traditional kebabs, known as mishwee, they very joyfully, an insider told me, set a date of mid-January for the invasion of southern Mali from the north.

According to Adam Thiam, Ghali had decided to attack Konna partly out of pride. He had been humiliated by Abou Zeid, who said, You are not a jihadist, you are not a Muslim. If you were, you would have declared Sharia law in Kidal, but it is not happening there. They even told him, We know that Tuaregs are not real Muslims.

But Ghali had little time to savor victory. Mali’s interim president Dioncounda Traore’s appealed to French President Francois Hollande for military assistance, warning him that the entire country was in danger of falling to the rebels. On Friday afternoon, January 11, a helicopter swept in low over Konna, and began firing rockets at the militant’s positions.

At first we thought it belonged to the Malian army, said Ousmane Bah, who was burying the corpses of soldiers in a trench when the chopper arrived. Bah returned to Konna and climbed onto his rooftop, but all I could see was dust. Militants fired back at the helicopter, fatally injuring the pilot. A second helicopter arrived early in the evening. By Friday night, says Bah, everyone knew that they were French. Ghali and his militants vanished into the desert, dragging the bodies of their dead comrades.

 On my second morning in Mopti, the French seized Timbuktu. Fighters from al-Qaeda and Ansar Dine paused before fleeing to commit one last act of desecration: they set fire to hundreds of manuscripts at the city’s Ahmed Baba Center, a library that I had visited in 2006 and 2009. Timbuktu’s citizens had buried thousands of other ancient books in holes in the desert and elsewhere, and prevented a far graver loss. 

We are joyful, I was told by Azima Ag Mohammed Ali, the Tuareg who had been my guide in 2009. In November 2011 Azimas last client, a German back packer, had been shot dead outside a Timbuktu hotel after resisting gunmen’s attempts to kidnap him. Azima got there a few minutes later and saw his body lying in the street. Three other Europeans had been dragged off and still remain hostages in the desert. After nearly a year’s absence, Azima was preparing to return home to Timbuktu with his wife and children to try to start his life again in the city.

Back at the Hotel Kanaga on the river in Mopti”the only functioning hotel for Westerners in the city I listened to radio reports about a related hostage drama that was just winding down. Forty al-Qaeda militants had seized dozens of Western employees at the extensive In Amenas gasworks in the Algerian Sahara, and made plans to blow them up. Algerian security forces attacked the terrorists, and thirty-eight hostages and twenty-nine Islamists were killed. The militant behind the attack was identified as Mokhtar Belmokhtar, seeking revenge for the French intervention in Mali.

Today, four thousand French troops occupy Timbuktu, Gao, and other northern towns, supported by 1,800 soldiers from Chad and small contingents from other African countries. The jihadists have taken refuge in the canyons and dunes of the Sahara. Many are believed to be in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, a near-impenetrable range north of the small and very poor town of Kidal, near the Algerian border. 

The French say that they will begin to withdraw in March and turn their operations over to a 12,000-man African force mandated last year by the UN Security Council. Few have discounted the possibility of a long insurgency. The speed with which the French have gone through the cities has been surprising to people, we are all waiting to see what’s next, Ambassador Leonard told me in Bamako. If you are not doing well in the traditional theater, then you worry about the asymmetric issue. Where does that pop up? The Paris Metro?  Or Bamako?

My American friend living in Bamako shares those concerns. On my last night in Mali she took me out to dinner at a popular cafe on the Route de Bla Bla, in the capital’s ramshackle entertainment district. The place was filled with French embassy workers, UN diplomats, and Western journalists, but there wasn’t a metal detector or a security guard anywhere. How easy would it be to plant a bomb here, she said.

In A Season in Hell, Fowler portrayed his captors as committed jihadists, skilled at surviving and fighting in the Sahara. They camped in well-protected redoubts, drove enormous distances at night to avoid detection, and carefully planted caches of fuel, water, and food at strategic points across the desert. They were also sustained by a fanaticism that impressed Fowler:

They will not, in my opinion, soon be defeated. They seemed to have no trouble recruiting. The youngest among them was seven and the voices of three of the others had yet to break. Parents, we were proudly informed, brought them their sons as gifts to God. I know of no argument that would convince them to abandon their chosen path.

Some militants have already vowed to continue the fight. The [foreign troops] will lose interest, and we will wait them out, a Tuareg rebel told one of my colleagues by satellite phone from the desert two weeks ago. On February 8, a suicide bomber from Mujao, another Islamist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, blew himself up near a group of Malian soldiers in Gao, killing one of them.

 

 One day later gunmen infiltrated the heart of that city and pinned down French and Malian forces for hours before melting away. The fighters are believed to have entered Gao from nearby villages along the Niger River, which have long been breeding grounds for extremist ideology and now provide sanctuary for the militants. The jihadists are still in the environs, a Malian commander told The New York Times. There are small caches of them, in hiding, forty, eighty miles from here.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar remains elusive; in mid-February, French fighter jets bombed a suspected hideout deep in the Sahara, only to learn, according to the French military, that Belmokhtar had fooled them by setting up a decoy camp using wrecked cars and empty houses. The other figure most responsible for the brutality and bloodshed in the north has apparently decided that he has had enough violence for the while. 

Around February 10, there were reports that Iyad Ag Ghali had dispatched twelve Tuareg envoys across the desert in four-wheel drive cars to request political asylum for him in Mauritania. Ghali was still in hiding, but the Malians I know will not be surprised if he does take refuge in Mauritania then moves back across the border in a four-wheel drive when he decides the time is right.

Source:Ocnus.net 2013