The Dying Sahara

Jeremy Keenan

Description

Washington's expansion of the War on Terror to the African continent substantiated claims that the U.S. fabricated terrorism in order to justify their military campaign. This book chronicles the effect of this warmongering and the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of terror and instability in the Sahara.



Beginning in 2004, with what local people called the US 'invasion' of the Sahel, the book shows how repressive, authoritarian regimes - cashing in on US terrorism 'rents' - provoked Tuareg rebellions in both Niger and Mali, caused a new narco-trafficking branch of Al-Qaeda and created instability in a region the size of western Europe. Exposing the suspected complicity of the World Bank, the tumult caused by US's new new combatant African command (AFRICOM), and the chilling tactics used to perpetuate the myth that Africa is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, Jeremy Keenan proves his resolve to 'defeat the lie'.

1. P2OG: A Long History of False-Flag Terrorism

2. The US Invasion of the Sahara-Sahel

3. Repression and Terrorism Rents

4. Footing the Bill. Did the World Bank Fund State Terrorism?

5. Putting the GWOT Back on Track

6. New Tuareg Rebellions

7. Uranium Goes Critical: Why the Tuareg Took Up Arms

8. The Fifth Anniversary of 2003: Another Kidnap

9. The Creation of AFRICOM

10. The Future Ground Zero

11. Perfidious Albion: the Murder of Edwin Dyer

12. Drugs and the Threat of Western Intervention

13. Al Qaeda in the West for the West

14. ‘Washing the Mountain’. Desert Borders, Corruption and the DRS

15. Sarkozy Declares War on Al Qaeda

16. Opening the Gates of Hell

17. The Past Catches Up: Pressures on Algeria

18. The ‘Arab Spring’ and Gaddafi Intervene

19. War crime?

20. Preparing for the ‘Long War’

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Desierto del Sahara
• Sahara
• Africa
• Colonialism
• Political Science
• Post-Colonialism

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849648271
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Dying Sahara

First published 2013 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Jeremy Keenan 2013
The right of the Jeremy Keenan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 2962 8 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 2961 1 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 8496 4826 4 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 8496 4828 8 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 8496 4827 1 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
To Jan Burgess whose courage and professionalism as an editor did much to lay bare the truths of American imperialism and its GWOT in Africa.
And in memory of Claude Meillassoux.
CONTENTS


Preface and Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Timeline
Maps

1 P2OG: A Long History of False-Flag Terrorism
2 The US Invasion of the Sahara-Sahel
3 Repression and Terrorism Rents
4 Footing the Bill: Did the World Bank Fund State Terrorism?
5 Putting the GWOT Back on Track
6 New Tuareg Rebellions
7 Uranium Goes Critical: Why the Tuareg Took Up Arms
8 The Fifth Anniversary of 2003: Another Kidnap
9 The Creation of AFRICOM
10 The Future Ground Zero
11 Perfidious Albion: The Murder of Edwin Dyer
12 Drugs and the Threat of Western Intervention
13 Al-Qaeda in the West for the West
14 ‘Washing the Mountain’: Desert Borders, Corruption and the DRS
15 Sarkozy Declares War on al-Qaeda
16 Opening the Gates of Hell
17 The Past Catches Up: Pressure on Algeria
18 The Arab Spring and Gaddafi Intervene
19 War Crime?
20 Preparing for the ‘Long War’

Notes
Index
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is the second of my two volumes on the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). The first, The Dark Sahara (Pluto Press, 2009), was completed shortly before the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom I quoted in saying that writers and artists, amongst whom I include academics, had greater responsibilities than to not merely ‘participate in lies’. To paraphrase his words, we have to do much more: we have to ‘defeat the lie’. Much that has been written about the GWOT has merely reiterated and reinforced what Solzhenitsyn would call ‘the lie’. This volume, by taking The Dark Sahara much further, both chronologically and in terms of evidence, defeats the lie, at least as far as it pertains to much of North Africa, the Sahara and Sahel.
Since the publication of The Dark Sahara , Western governments have made no attempt either to engage in argument over its central message – that the US, since 9/11, has fabricated terrorism to justify the GWOT – or even to try and rebut what I said. Rather, their response has been either to try and ignore it, even to the extent of striking from the record works that have cited The Dark Sahara (and my other writings) as a source reference, or, when pressed, to try and disparage it as a ‘conspiracy theory’. That, too, is not surprising, as a ‘conspiracy’ no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy but is simply any explanation or ‘fact’ that is out of step with government explanation. This volume, at least in the language of governments and their compliant media, is even more of a ‘conspiracy’ than The Dark Sahara in that it provides ‘evidence-based’ explanations – ‘truths’ – that are wholly out of step with what Western governments would want us to believe.
As with The Dark Sahara , I am unable to thank any funding agencies or research councils for support, as I have been able to do so often in the past. There are, however, at least two positive aspects to this. First, it helps other academics, young researchers in particular, to understand that research that threatens government ‘conspiracies’ (what Solzhenitsyn would call ‘lies’) is unlikely to be funded. Indeed, the scandal which Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) brought upon itself in 2006 is described in Chapter 11. Second, these two volumes, which are the outcome of twelve years’ continuous research, show that significant and important research can be done without funding. It involves sacrifice and at times can be extremely difficult, but it is by no means impossible. Indeed, the ‘alternative university’ is not far way.
Nevertheless, in spite of these background difficulties, I am especially grateful to a number of people and institutions. In particular, I would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology and colleagues at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), London University, for providing me with an academic home since 2008. Amongst many Algerian friends and colleagues, I would like to give special thanks to Mohamed Larbi Zitout, former Algerian Deputy Ambassador to Libya and co-founder in 2007 of the Rachad Movement. He defected from his post in 1995 after learning that the atrocities being committed by alleged Islamists were in many cases being committed by groups under the control of the Algerian regime.
I am, as always, grateful to my publisher, Roger van Zwanenberg, and all those at Pluto Press. Dr Penny Nicholls did much appreciated work in editing an initial draft, helping me to reduce its length by some 30,000 words. I am also indebted to Martha Farley who has been exceptionally generous in sharing her expertise on much of this region of Africa.
In The Dark Sahara , I expressed my appreciation to a number of academic journal editors for inviting me to write for them. Since then, I would like to thank especially Penny Green of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) and the State Crime Journal , Robert Weiss of Social Justice , Fatiha Talahite of Revue Tiers Monde and Gustaf Houtman of Anthropology Today. I would also like to thank Jude McCulloch, Sharon Pickering, Kenneth Omeje, Scott Poynting and David Whyte for inviting me to contribute chapters to books they have edited. In 2009, I singled out ROAPE ( Review of African Political Economy ), for whom I had written 14 articles in the previous five years. Sadly, that has come to a stop. Following the editorial board’s shameful removal of Jan Burgess as managing editor, to whom this book is dedicated, I, along with a number of other scholars, am no longer prepared to write for ROAPE.
There are also many journalists and media editors with whom I have worked in one way or another on Saharan and North African matters. I am very grateful to them for helping to tell the appalling story of the Sahara and its peoples over the last few years. Above all, however, I would like to thank the editorial staff at Al Jazeera , for whom I have written some 15 articles over the last two years, in addition to broadcast contributions. Sadly, Al Jazeera appears to have succumbed recently to the pressures of Qatar’s ruling family to keep the spotlight off Algeria.
This is the sixth book I have written on the Sahara and its peoples. In my preface to The Dark Sahara , I explained how they have all been written for the peoples of the Sahara, especially the Tuareg whom I first visited in 1964, in order to document their history and explain the circumstances of their lives. While that remains true for both The Dark Sahara and The Dying Sahara , there has been another and equally important purpose in writing them. This is to document how US foreign policy since 9/11, through its GWOT, has led to the worst and most prolonged human catastrophe that this part of Africa has yet experienced. And it is likely to get much worse.
Those who read this book will at least be able to understand the complexities of what is happening in the Sahara: why tens of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods; why almost 500,000 Malians have had to flee their homes and why hundreds, if not thousands, more local people may die – and for reasons they are unlikely to understand. Those who read this depressing story will be shocked at both the nature and consequences of the lies and deceptions that have been perpetrated by the West – notably the US, the EU, the UK and France – and its main proxy power in the region, Algeria, in the name of the ubiquitous GWOT or, as President Obama now prefers to call it, the ‘Long War’. This volume raises serious questions about the extent to which government counterterrorism policies are invariably nothing more than a cover for state terrorism, while al-Qaeda is revealed as something very different from what is portrayed to the public by Western governments and their intelligence services.
On 10 July 2012, too late for inclusion in this book, The National Interest published an article by John R. Schindler entitled ‘The Ugly Truth about Algeria’, which blew the whistle on Algeria’s creation of terrorists and their use in ‘state terrorism’. 1 Schindler is a former high-ranking US intelligence officer and member of the National Security Council (NSC). He is currently Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. His exposé of Algeria’s secret intelligence service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), and his expressed concerns over the relationship between Washington and Algeria’s DRS lend much weight to the fundamental thesis of this book, namely that most of the terrorism, both real a