By Ola Usman
Over the last three years the Africa terror-stricken Sahel region has witnessed a wave of coups in seven countries that extend from Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan on the Red sea. Five military coups succeeded in five countries- Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, and Gabon, while three other nations-Tunisia, Chad, and Sudan- had constitutional coups.
These coups have revived some of the most important debates regarding Africa’s sovereignty, compelling both Western and Africa powers to re-examine the conditions that have led to the security challenges and instability that have crippled the Sahel for many years destabilizing some of the most resource-rich African states, many of who are still listed by the United Nations and the World Bank as some of the world’s poorest countries.
The current events compels us to reflect on the Libyan war to expose the togetherness felt between Islamist rebels – al-Qaeda and other terrorist affiliates in Libya and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and their Intelligence outfits as the CIA and others of the French and Britain when the NATO-led coalition began military intervention in Libya to remove the country’s leader, Col. Muhammar Gaddafi. Informed critics cautioned that a military action in Libya would establish a terror emirate and cause a tidal wave of militant destabilization throughout Northern Africa and beyond.
But NATO went ahead with the intervention because it was a strategic move by Western powers to secure their economic interests and slow down Russia and China’s undertaking in Africa by destabilizing not only Libya, but the entire West African sub-region, and of course Yemen and Syria too.
And in direct violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973, the United States was at the time reportedly funneling modern weapons to the Libyan rebels through Saudi Arabia and across Egyptian border – with the assistance of the Egyptian Army led by the newly installed junta. This anti- Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) reportedly merged with Al-Queda in 2007 and was used by the U.S. France and others to sack Gaddafi from power.
Geopolitical Analysts say that the fingerprints of France, US and other members of NATO are all over the crime scenes left behind by terrorist factions operating in the Sahel. Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso inherited them from the Libyan debacle with a growing jihadist cauldron allegedly financed by the CIA and its associate agencies prior to NATO’s bombing and decapitation of Libya.
The cauldron became so hot that it has been branching out into the Sahel, the Middle East and in Syria, becoming mire powerful and more organized by the day. Looking back at the tragic history of US attempts to organize Afghans against Soviet occupation in the years following 1979, it becomes clearer that the Reagan administration’s decision to provide the Afghan Mujahedin with cutting-edge weapons ultimately proved to be extremely damaging to the US.
Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, essentially admits in his autobiography that the US founded al-Qaeda during those years to fight the Soviet occupation as a type of Arab Foreign Legion. Thus many of al-qaeda’s top officials were reportedly on the pay roll of Western intelligence. It is believed that the Western powers are covertly using these so-called rebel jihadists factions to destabilize the entire regions in Africa in view of harvesting and controlling the fruits of the minerals, oil and gas rich nations.
An observer noted that al-Qaeda’s fundamental belief is that the existing Arab and Muslim governments should all be overthrown because they do not represent the caliphate. Thus to a certain degree, al-Qaeda was waging war against independent Muslim countries which coincidentally suited the interests of the US and its allies. So it was not Gaddafi who destabilized the Sahel region as generally believed, but the US and its allies with the help of their intelligence agencies.
Given the continuous insurgency in the West African sub-region, there seem to be a foreign political design of some sort, or some kind of long-term Pan-African economic and geopolitical strategy at the service of an increasing greedy neo-colonial western power bloc using (voluntarily or not) those very insurgents groups to create a constant climate of fear and uncertainty amongst the populations.
In this scenario , the engineered threat would force African governments to accept foreign military presence in their countries to promote stability out of fear, packaging those Africa’s puppet governments into advantageous and very lucrative partnerships with the promise of a long-reigning power and fortunes, whilst the looting of their nation’s rich grounds is actually taking place. Already the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has an extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in at least 34 countries in Africa, in the name of countering insurgency which along with its allies create d.
Ola Usman writes from Abeokuta.
