Tag: africa

The UN’s peacekeeping nightmare in Africa – BBC News

One of the key issues facing Antonio Guterres, the UN’s newly installed secretary-general, will be to address critical failures in African peacekeeping operations.

With this is mind, he will surely be asking himself whether the vast organisation he is now leading needs to chart a different course.

The UN spends close to $8bn (£6.5bn) every year on peacekeeping around the world, with the bulk going to missions in Africa.A new report by the Geneva-based research group Small Arms Survey has accused the UN’s mission in South Sudan (Unmiss) of lacking neutrality by giving arms to rebels in the town of Bentiu in 2013.

It blames Unmiss for underreporting arms confiscated from fleeing soldiers and handing over the weapons to soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) on more than one occasion.

The report also claims that shortly after this transfer of arms, the rebels went on to carry out a massacre of civilians.Failure to protectThe operations of the UN’s mission in South Sudan came into sharp focus after embarrassing revelations that its troops failed to protect civilians following clashes between government forces and former rebels in July 2016.A damning internal investigation found that its peacekeeping mission in the capital, Juba had failed to achieve one of its core mandates, namely “to protect civilians under threat of physical violence […] with specific protection for women and children”.

It described the troops’ response as chaotic and ineffective.

Eyewitnesses said women and girls were raped near UN compounds with no action from peacekeepers.

Not far away, foreign aid workers suffered similar sexual violence at their residence. Their case gained much international condemnation, but it is dwarfed by the scale of the atrocities South Sudanese civilians have long experienced.

In a recent report to the Security Council, the outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-moon offered little hope.

“There is a very real risk of mass atrocities being committed in South Sudan,” he said.

“[…] The secretariat will continue to make every effort to implement the mandated task of protecting civilians through the use of ‘all necessary means’.

“[But] it must be clearly understood that United Nations peacekeeping operations do not have the appropriate reach, manpower or capabilities to stop mass atrocities,” his statement said.

In February, gunmen killed 30 internally displaced people and wounded more than 120 others within one of the UN’s designated Protection of Civilian compounds in the north-western South Sudanese town of Malakal.

The peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast is held up by UN figures as an example of success AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The irony of the facility failing to live up to its name was not lost on the mission’s critics.

The UN later accepted responsibility for its failure to prevent the bloodbath.

In the Central African Republic (CAR), the UN mission (Minusca) has also been accused of inaction when, for example, more than 75 people including civilians were killed in the north during an outbreak of violence in September 2016.

The rights group, Amnesty International, reflected on this case, saying Minusca was poorly trained and “lacks the resources it needs to adequately protect civilians.”

Jean-Serge Bokassa, the Interior Minister of CAR, accused the peacekeepers of colluding with armed militias.

“What is the role of the Pakistani contingent in Kaga-Bandoro?” he asked. “Their collusion with armed groups has gone too long.”

A week later, four people died in the capital Bangui during anti-UN protests.

In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, similar disdain for the UN and its peacekeeping mission Monusco (which replaced the dysfunctional Monuc), has led to violent demonstrations and attacks by civilians in the past.

Most of the anti-UN protests have taken place in the eastern region of Kivu, where armed groups continue to commit massacres, especially in the Beni region.

Peacekeepers have often been referred to as tourists because they are associated with helicopters and 4×4 vehicles.

Charles Bambara, the spokesman for Monusco, says the task of the mission is so enormous that it’s easy to underestimate progress being made.

“This country was divided into three: one armed group was controlling Goma area, another one controlling Kisangani and another one controlling the capital city and the west of the country,” he says.

“So the aim when this mission was established was to reunite the country. This has now been done, with the support of the DRC armed forces. We need the support of the international community.

“This is a very difficult mission. There are probably 40 or 50 armed groups present in this country, which is as big as Western Europe, so we cannot be everywhere and that’s why we’re targeting these groups one after the other.”

One notorious and repeated blight on the UN peacekeeping scorecard has been that of the discipline – or the lack of it – of troops.

A UN inquiry has named 41 peacekeepers in relation to alleged sexual abuse and exploitation in the Central African Republic between 2014 and 2015.

Women and even minors were reportedly abused in exchange for food and clothing. The UN has taken very little action against the individual soldiers.

Prosecutors in Paris said this week that charges would not be brought against six French peacekeepers following a criminal investigation into similar allegations.

Each country is responsible for charging its implicated troops but guilty verdicts might not be in a nation’s best interests as that would taint its reputation in peacekeeping – although these track records are not officially considered when selecting which countries contribute to the missions.

The UN undersecretary for peacekeeping operations, Herve Ladsous, recently denied there was a crisis in UN peacekeeping.

“Some operations are working very well. For instance, we are a few months away from an end to the operations in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia. Their success enables us to withdraw,” he said.

“However, some operations are working less well, frequently because of factors linked to the local political situation and local players, rather than to the shortcomings of our operations themselves.”

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The take of an ex-UN insider

Keep reding at: The UN’s peacekeeping nightmare in Africa – BBC News

Why the Resilience of Islamist Militants Will Threaten Security Across Africa in 2017

The violence of ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliates threatens to spread far beyond Nigeria and Somalia.

BY  ON 12/30/16 AT 9:00 AM

On December 23 the Nigerian army achieved a significant milestone in its long war against Boko Haram, capturing what was described as the Islamist militant group’s last stronghold in the remote Sambisa Forest in the country’s northeast near the border with Cameroon. On Christmas Eve, President Muhammadu Buhari triumphantly tweeted that it was the “final crushing of the Boko Haram terrorists” who were “on the run and no longer have a place to hide.” The remarkable turnaround of the conflict in less than two years deserves to be applauded, but the latest victory is unlikely to put an end to terrorist attacks in Africa’s most populous country, much less extinguish the flame of militancy and violence that presents one of the biggest obstacles to the otherwise the buoyant economic prospects for the continent, with 2016’s moderate average growth expected to accelerate to 4.5 percent in 2017. Nigeria’s struggle against Boko Haram illustrates both the resilience of the threat and what might be done to counter it.

After years of ceding ground to Boko Haram, so much so that by 2014 the group had consolidated its hold over a territory larger than Belgium and proclaimed a self-styled “emirate,” the Nigerian armed forces adopted a new strategy and began fighting back. While the counterattack began in the waning days of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, things began to change after Buhari, a retired major-general, won a historic (and decisive) election victory over the incumbent in March 2015, in part by promising to defeat the militants.

Cashiering his predecessor’s military chiefs shortly after taking office, Buhari installed new commanders, including a chief of army staff, Lieutenant-General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, who is a native of Borno, the epicenter of the insurgency. He also moved command headquarters close to the fighting. Since then, in concert with a multinational force from neighboring countries, the Nigerian military has pursued an aggressive strategy, combining an intensive air campaign with a surge of troops on the ground, gradually pushing Boko Haram out of the towns it occupied and, increasingly, in remote hideouts like “Camp Zero,” the base that fell on December 23.

Along the way, as I had the opportunity to witness firsthand in November when I toured the battlefront, the Nigerian army also took on the task of not only providing security to the populations it liberated, but also, until aid groups and development organizations returned, providing humanitarian relief, medical assistance, and even education and livelihood training. For example, the civil-military operations carried out by the battalion I spent time with in Pulka, just a few kilometers from what were at the time Boko Haram positions in the Sambisa Forest, were critical to the wellbeing of the community and served to rally the population to support the government’s push against the militant group.

Notwithstanding the success of the military operations, Boko Haram remains a force to be reckoned with. In response to defeats, the militants shifted tactics, expanding their use of suicide bombings, most of which have targeted the civilian population. Just days before the capture of its forest bastion, Boko Haram staged a pair of attacks on a busy market in the town of Madagali that left 56 people dead and more than 120 wounded. Nor does its most recent setback seem to be having much effect on the terrorists’ operational tempo: two suicide bombers struck in northern Cameroon on Christmas Day and another attacked a busy cattle market in Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, the next day. Moreover, Boko Haram’s elusive longtime leader Abubakar Shekau surfaced this week in a new video in which he claimed that he and his followers were “safe” and would continue their fight “to establish an Islamic Caliphate” separate from Nigeria. Alongside the strengths of Boko Haram, the Nigerian military faced its own frustration in its attempts to purchase aircraft and other military platforms from the United States; it recently turned to Russia and Pakistan to obtain warplanes after a proposal to buy American-made A-29 Super Tucano attack planes stalled.

Meanwhile, the schism within Boko Haram may be contributing to the intensification, rather than diminution, of violence as both factions try to outdo each other in staging attacks. In early 2015, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and formally rebranded itself as the “Islamic State West Africa Province;” however, the group split between those loyal to Shekau and those now following Abu Musab al-Barnawi, whom ISIS appointed as the new “governor” (wali) of its “province” in August. Even if the group was weakened in Nigeria, militants still spilled into neighboring countries, causing Cameroon and Niger, for example, to rise in the 2016 edition of the Global Terrorism Index to 13th place and 16th place, respectively.

Resilience is a characteristic shared not only by ISIS-aligned groups in Africa like Boko Haram, but also al-Qaeda affiliates such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Somalia’s al-Shabaab. Despite being mauled by the French-led intervention in Mali in 2013, AQIM has bounced back to stage a series of deadly attacks in 2016, including hits on luxury hotels in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, countries that had not previously not been hit by terrorism.

In Somalia, despite punishing U.S. airstrikes, al-Shabab appears far from finished. Notwithstanding the presence of a 20,000-strong African Union force in the country to prop up the weak but internationally backed government, al-Shabab continues to be able to regularly seize control of towns like Mahadaay, a strategic crossroads the militants took over on December 19 after driving out regime soldiers. This came just days after the militants briefly overran El Wak, a town near the border with Kenya, a country that has repeatedly suffered attacks by al-Shabab in the last year.

The continuing threat posed by these varied militant groups is the result of their exploitation of local conflicts and social, economic, and political marginalization, as well as the fragile condition of many of the states affected. This weakness often manifests in a low capacity to resist militants overall and a tendency towards ham-fisted responses that aggravate grievances. In some cases, defeat spurs the extremists to adapt new strategies that result in renewed vigor—an example is the fragmentation of AQIM’s organization in the Sahel in the wake of the Mali intervention. The multiplication of factions along ethnic lines facilitated both the members’ blending into local populations and their making inroads among them; one splinter group, the ethnic-Fulani jihadist Macina Liberation Front, freed 93 suspected militants in a jailbreak in early December.

In other instances, the manifest failure to achieve political settlements propels the resurgence of otherwise weakened militant groups—in Somalia, the utter fiasco of the process for selecting a new government in Somalia, including the sale of electoral seats for up to $1.3 million and the recent postponement for the fourth time of the presidential vote, serves as an example. New instability, such as the crisis now underway in the Democratic Republic of the Congo thanks to President Joseph Kabila’s decision to hold on to power despite his term of office expiring on December 19, presents armed movements with additional opportunities, underscored by the recent massacre of civilians in the country’s east.

Even where they do not pose an existential threat to the states affected, the various militant jihadists currently active across Africa can have a disproportionate impact on their fortunes. Counterinsurgency campaigns are expensive affairs that divert resources from the investments in infrastructure, education, and health, which Africa’s emerging economies need to make if they are position themselves to take advantage of the current growth opportunities. Ivory Coast may be Africa’s new economic powerhouse, with a diversified economy and growth in 2016 expected to hit 8.5 percent, the second-highest in the world, but more attacks such as the one in March by AQIM can still scare off foreign investors who are just beginning to discover its potential. The stakes are even higher for country like Nigeria: Africa’s biggest economy slipped into recession this year and continued insecurity—not just from Boko Haram, but also militant groups in the oil-producing southeast such as the Niger Delta Avengers —doesn’t help.

            …CONTINUE READING AT

Why the Resilience of Islamist Militants Will Threaten Security Across Africa in 2017

Bandits abduct 35 women in Zamfara

Suspected armed bandits today abducted about 35 women working on a farm at Matankari village in Dansadau district of Maru local government area of Zamfara state.

Residents told Daily Trust that the armed bandits arrived at the farm in the forest on motorbikes carried the women and dashed in to the forest.

The incident came barely one month after 40 residents were abducted in Maru local government area of the state and released in a cows- for- persons swap deal with the state government.

The armed bandits are now in to kidnapping in Zamfara state and dozens of residents were abducted and millions of Naira paid in ransom to regain their freedom.

The abducted  women were threshing sorghum on a farm belonging to one Alhaji Adamu when the gunmen invaded the farmland and whisked them away. It was not clear whether they had demanded or would demand for ransom.

A resident Alhaji Mu’awuya told our reporter that after going deep inside the forest with the women the armed bandits decided to release the aged ones among them,  while the young ladies remained with them.

“One of my neighbours called Alhaji Garba Matankari whose aged mother was among the abducted  women but later released just left here I would have given him the phone for you to talk to him.” Alhaji Mu’a wuya said.

He further explained that the residents have mobilized and followed the armed bandits in search of the women adding that even those released by gunmen are still missing.

“My neighbour’s mother is at home now she is being treated after her feet became swollen because of the long distance trek inside the forest. The armed bandits were heard saying that they would descend on other villages around the area.” He added.

The spokesman of the state police command DSP Muhammad Shehu could not be reached for comments as at the time of filing this report.

Source: Bandits abduct 35 women in Zamfara

CIBSPOL Institut Pist.

E MENTRE L’EUROPA LOTTA CONTRO L’INVASIONE DI CLANDESTINI, LA CINA COSTRUISCE CITTÀ FANTASMA IN AFRICA… Quindi?!?!

 

 

Ebbene si, come leggerete dall’articolo che segue questo mio breve commento, o come potrete vedere dal video, la Cina si sta creando una nuova terra dove mandare i milioni di cittadini in esubero… Tutti ormai abbiamo visto come i Cinesi abbiano conquistato silenziosamente i mercati e le piazze occidentali (sia Europee che Americane), e tutti (più o meno) alimentiamo il “brusio” della protesta.  Ma nessuno (o quasi) si sofferma a guardare fuori dagli schemi, e chiedersi “perché”? oppure “quindi”?

Cercherò velocemente di stuzzicare la vostra curiosità o attenzione, nella speranza che qualche voce in più (oltre alla mia ed a quella dal quale ho “preso in prestito l’articolo”) posano iniziare a riecheggiare nel web!

Vediamo quindi quali sono i punti salienti di questa migrazione e delle recenti azioni dei nostri governi Europei:

  • se avete letto il mio precedente articolo “IMMIGRAZIONE: L’EVOLUZIONE DELLE GUERRE DI TRINCEA” già saprete motivi e durata di questa migrazione di massa… detto  nuovamente in parole povere, la caduta di Syria e Libia hanno creato un corridoio naturale privo di controlli, che permette e/o spinge centinaia di migliaia (se non milioni) di persone a cercare una nuovo inizio nel vecchio continente.
  • Se il buco venutosi a creare con la situazione Siriana potrebbe essere visto da molti come causa di un problema interno Siriano (poi degenerato in conflitto), il buco che si è venuto a creare nella Libia e di sola responsabilità Europea: infatti fu la Francia (seguita a breve dalle altre nazioni europee e dagli USA) a decidere di bombardare la Libia per “liberarla dal dittatore Mu’ammar Gheddafi (vi consiglio di cliccare sul link ed andare a leggere il trafiletto sul perché “sembra” che L’uccisione di Gheddafi sarebbe nata per evitare la divulgazione delle notizie degli stretti rapporti che legavano l’ex leader libico a Nicolas Sarkozy).
  • Tra i migranti, come evidenziato dall’immagine seguente, si trovano molte etnie e nazionalità, ma con i proclami politici recenti, l’Europa ed i suoi “governanti” sembrano interessarsi solo ai Syriani, i quali legittimamente “scappano da una guerra”, mentre si disinteressano completamente di quelli provenienti da ogni altra nazione illustrata nell’immagine.  Eppure loro, come potrete leggere nell’articolo che segue, scappano da schiavitù e governi corrotti!

    http://e.infogr.am/nazionalita_dei_migranti_sbarcati?src=embed
    http://e.infogr.am/nazionalita_dei_migranti_sbarcati?src=embed

Alla luce di quanto sopra, e dell’articolo che segue, mi viene da chiedermi il perché di queste azioni e politiche scellerate.  Certamente io non sarò mai la persona che dice che non dobbiamo ospitare rifugiati di guerra, ma non sarò nemmeno mai la persona che ignora che all’esterno dell’immagine che ci vogliono trasmettere politici e media pilotati c’è ben di più.  Queste città fantasma costruite dai Cinesi, lo sfruttamento selvaggio che stanno operando in Africa, la questione dei migranti e dell’inarrestabile invasione che stiamo subendo, e tutti i proclami politici e mediatici di questi tempi recenti, non possono essere semplici fattori singoli, ma fanno tutti parte di un disegno più grande!

Lascio quindi a voi la facoltà di trovare risposta a questa somma di fattori, sicuro che nemmeno uno di voi finirà di leggere questo articolo pensando che sia “giusto un caso”.

Danilo Amelotti  (P.S. segue l’articolo sulle città fantasma)

I palazzinari cinesi si stanno dando molto da fare in Africa. Nova Cidade de Kalimba è una moderna città africana costruita da investitori cinesi in Angola e composta da circa 750 edifici di otto piani.Nei progetti degli investitori, la città doveva raccogliere circa 500 mila abitanti, ma un inquietante filmato mostra come la selvaggia urbanizzazione cinese rischia di creare la prima “città fantasma” dell’Africa. Il costo dell’operazione si aggira sui 2,5 miliardi di euro, ma si tratta solo di una frazione del fiume di denaro che la Cina sta investendo in Africa.Costruita alla periferia di Luanda, la capitale angolana, Nova Cidade de Kalimba, oltre ai 750 blocchi di appartamenti, conta una dozzina di scuole e più di 100 locali commerciali, ma non ci sono abitanti! Come mai? Pare che il prezzo di un appartamento si aggiri sui 90 mila euro, una cifra esorbitante rispetto al magro reddito medio della popolazione locale che ancora vive nelle baraccopoli. Città fantasma … Come riporta il Daily Mail, numerose “Chinatown” stanno nascendo in tutta l’Africa, dalla Nigeria alla Guinea equatoriale, nel Ciad, nel Sudan, ma anche in Zambia, Zimbawe e Mozambico. Insomma, la Cina considera il continente nero un investimento cruciale per il futuro, stringendo una vera e propria morsa sul continente dal sapore neo coloniale che in futuro potrebbe fare dell’Africa un continente satellite.

Source: PERCHÈ LA CINA STA COSTRUENDO CITTÀ FANTASMA IN AFRICA? | Verita’ Globale