America's New Frontline - Diplomats or Warriors? - Part 1
Al Jazeera documentary on AFRICOM.
Moderator Adds
Link to this 2009 documentary:http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/...135544650.html
Padlocks have no purpose. The vast majority never do or accomplish much.
However, they do help keep people sort of honest so perhaps I should've said they have "next to no purpose..."
About like SSN Patrols. ;)
Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century
This is the last time I'm going to post this sort of thing. To understand where the unease about American military / quasi military organisations comes from, read articles like this.
These articles are written by intelligent, well-educated people and they are discussed whenever educated, politically-aware Africans meet (like in Nigeria's many beer parlours). The other reviled and vilified US-dominated organisations are the World Bank and the IMF. (That's a topic for another forum and another day).
Excerpt:
Quote:
The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today
Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-dev...-assassination
It's also instructive to note that there are very few, if any emphatically pro-Western African public intellectuals. If you read Ali Mazrui, Julius Nyerere, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and George Ayittey, you'd understand that immediately. Chinua Achebe's seminal novel Things Fall Apart has an interesting theme. George Ayittey is of the opinion that the West cynically uses to prop up dictators and Nyerere's views are well known.
These men are widely read.
Now we have a better understanding of where the perception problem comes from.