Commentary: Al-Qaida in Africa By Arnaud de Borchgrave UPI Editor at Large Published 3/12/2004 4:29 PM View printer-friendly version
WASHINGTON, March 12 (UPI) -- There are now 40,000 U.N. blue-helmeted peacekeepers in six sub-Saharan African countries. Most of them are "volunteered" by other African countries. The best troops are from South Asian countries -- Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Soon Sudan, emerging from the nightmare of a 30-year civil war, will need 8,000 to 10,000 more. But before the first peacekeepers could get there, a new insurgency erupted in the west -- the Chad-based Darfar rebellion.
Khartoum hit back ruthlessly with scorched-earth tactics and ethnic cleansing. About 100,000 refugees made it across the border into Chad. Another 600,000 were without shelter and the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders said they were now faced with "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world." No TV footage, no story.
The only sub-Saharan country with a professional army up to Western standards is South Africa, which keeps 75,000 under arms. Forty percent of the force is HIV positive. And only 3,000 men are deployable for peacekeeping duties. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 130 million, maintains a 17,000-strong air force, but only one troop transport can fly.
West Africa is a graveyard of failed nation-states. Government writs seldom extend much beyond capital-city shantytowns. In the countryside, bush and savanna, radicalized Islamist clerics and Christian missionaries battle it out in a war of words for desperate African souls.
The Christian missions offer rudimentary medical services, T-shirts and occasional staples. The Muslim clerics get stipends from the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi clergy and train youngsters to become "jihadis," meaning "holy warriors." Hunger stalks most west and equatorial African states. And the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. James Jones is alarmed. He is responsible for 93 countries, including all of Africa, except the Horn -- Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti. And in a recent trip in SACEUR's G-5, from Algeria to South Africa, Jones -- who speaks flawless, unaccented French -- saw first-hand the emerging failed and failing states that contain huge ungoverned areas that now serve as breeding grounds or sanctuary for terrorists.
The 27 "least developed countries" are all African, says the United Nations Development Program. Half of the 25 "worst countries in the world" are West African. The average Sierra Leonean doesn't live beyond 39. Nigeria, supposedly comparatively well off, pumping 2.1 million barrels of oil per day, is now on the verge of becoming a failed state. It is breaking apart along ethnic and religious fault lines. The Muslim north is terra incognita for federal authorities.
Rwandan and Ugandan forces have reinfiltrated the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC, formerly Zaire, is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. Some 11,000 ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping troops are lost in the vastness of Africa's answer to "Darkness at Noon" that is costing the world body $90,000 per blue helmet per year. It is the United Nations' most expensive operation.
DRC is only a country on a map. Nineteenth-century tribalism has displaced the Western notion of a nation state. Gone are a modern highway system, a network of airports with daily air service between major cities, guest houses in national parks, plantations, water and sewage treatment plants -- in short, all the components of the former Belgian colony's infrastructure.
There are 11,000 U.N. troops in Sierra Leone, 15,000 in Liberia, 6,200 in the Ivory Coast, all stovepipe operations with separate commands for each of these mini-states, and 4,200 in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The nations that contribute troops to the United Nations for blue-helmet assignments are now tapped out. So are contributions to peacekeeping from dues-paying U.N. member nations. U.N. stabilization has become unsustainable. No sooner are these troops withdrawn from the civil war they went in to stop than the fighting starts again.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and (former French) Guinea are states in name only. Two generations of young Africans in these countries, from the ages of 10 to their early 20s, have known no other life than shooting and being shot at.
Flat-earth Muslim clerics are quick to exploit opportunities by inculcating their jihadi creed. Northern Nigeria, where the Sharia law of Islam has been imposed in large swaths of the province, armed Islamist thugs descend on a village with the marabou, a sort of religious enforcer and his noisy tintinnabula. Some of the larger towns have been occupied by jihadi militants who demand more volunteers -- and government authorities kindly oblige by staying out of their way.
There has been sufficient al-Qaida input in the thousands of square miles of unpoliced territory in both West and Equatorial Africa for French and U.S. intelligence to draw the conclusion terrorist networks are alive throughout the region. But there is also ample evidence that little of this is controlled by al-Qaida Central.
Osama Bin Laden and his associates haven't been using satellite and cell phones for the past two years. They know the National Security Agency can intercept mobile phone signals in a nano-second and flash global positioning system information back to Special Forces looking for them in the mountain ranges that straddle Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Al-Qaida cells operate autonomously with sleeper agents among Muslim communities in most western, eastern and African countries. Bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive -- won't change the correlation of forces between terrorists and counter-terrorists. The growing wretchedness of West Africa's populations -- over a million a year die of malaria in Nigeria alone -- greatly facilitates the marabou's mission of recruiting Islamist desperadoes.
The toughest among them survive the desert trek to Morocco and Algeria and from there take small craft to Spain. Their bodies wash up on Spanish beaches every day. Those who make it alive into Spain have also made it into the European Union.
Morocco has had several attacks against Western institutions with Spanish associations recently, including the bombing of a Spanish restaurant, a five-star hotel and a Jewish community center in Casablanca killing 45 people, including 12 suicide bombers last May.
An Algerian jihad group is reportedly getting closer to Al-Qaeda. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
March 10, 2004
An extremist group known for deadly bombings and a brutal campaign to create an Islamic state in Algeria is moving to establish stronger ties to al-Qaida, raising fears the militants may launch terrorist attacks beyond their North African territory. The new leader of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, an armed organization whose decade-long aim has been to overthrow the Algerian government, declared allegiance to Osama bin Laden's network in the fall.
At the time, it received little attention, but now authorities worry the Salafists could become a dangerous affiliate of al-Qaida, which has shown an ability to work through local groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, U.S. officials in Washington told The Associated Press.
Previously, the Salafists maintained only low-level contacts with al-Qaida and the group wasn't thought capable of projecting power far beyond Algeria's border.
Authorities also worry that Algeria _ with vast stretches of Sahara desert in the remote south and long borders that are hard to monitor _ could become a haven for al-Qaida members, U.S. officials told AP.
Signs of the Salafists' expansionist designs have emerged in the past year with dozens of alleged operatives arrested in Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and France _ where the group is considered the top terrorist threat, French intelligence officials told AP.
The Algerian government blames the group for the kidnappings of 32 European tourists in 2003. The Algeria military said last month that it had killed several Salafists trying to sneak arms into the country with ransom money received in exchange for the freedom of 17 of the hostages.
Nabil Sahraoui, after becoming the Salafist leader last year, declared the group's allegiance with al-Qaida in September. Sahraoui ousted longtime leader Hassan Hattab, who reportedly was viewed within Salafist ranks as too moderate. Under Hattab, the Salafists distrusted outsiders and kept al-Qaida at arms length, focusing instead on a domestic agenda.
Sahraoui's declaration confirms authorities' thinking that some regional terrorist groups are going international, joining the broader conflict of Islam versus the West, a French intelligence official told AP. Another analyst with high-level contacts in French intelligence, also speaking on condition of anonymity, sees the declaration as mostly posturing _ a way to raise the Salafists' profile and stir fear.
Despite Sahraoui's ambitions, it remains unclear whether the limited resources of the Salafist group would be at al-Qaida's disposal, said Richard Evans, editor at Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.
The group _ known by its French acronym GSPC _ is fragmented with autonomous brigades in Algeria. Still, there's reason for concern.
"There was no indication until now that this group was pursuing a wider jihadi agenda," said Evans, an expert on the Salafist group.
The Salafists' actual strength is unknown, although experts believe the group is small, with several hundred fighters. The State Department added the GSPC to its list of foreign terrorist groups in 2002.
Only a couple dozen hard-core GSCP operatives are in France, where some 800,000 Algerians live among 5 million Muslims _ only a small minority of them with extremist views, authorities told AP.
Evans said al-Qaida could call on the wider Algerian diaspora in Europe or militants with Salafist links "who might be prepared to attack Western targets."
Al-Qaida is known to have made inroads into Algeria. Interpol chief Ronald Nobel, who has noted the Salafist-al-Qaida ties, visited Algeria a year ago to announce the international police agency would give Algeria a global communications system to track terrorists.
As evidence of al-Qaida's presence in Algeria, authorities point to the killing of Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, a Yemeni al-Qaida lieutenant, on Sept. 12, 2002, in a gunbattle about 270 miles east of the capital, Algiers. Authorities said he had been meeting with the Salafists in Algeria and was managing operations for al-Qaida in North Africa.
Sahraoui, in his mid-to-late 30s, has a reputation for ruthlessness, stemming partly from a murder campaign he ran against a now-defunct insurgent group, the Islamic Salvation Army, after it called a cease-fire with the Algerian government in 1997.
The Salafist group is one of two movements fighting to install an Islamic state in Algeria. It was created in a 1998 split with the radical Armed Islamic Group.
Together, the two groups are blamed in the deaths of more than 120,000 Algerians since 1992. That year, the military government canceled legislative elections to keep an Islamic party from coming to power, sparking the insurgency.
Both groups have conducted bombings, rapes and massacres, but the GSPC has gained some public forgiveness by renouncing violence against civilians and limiting its attacks to soldiers.
Two exit polls gave Spain's opposition Socialists the most votes in Sunday's general election, while another put the ruling Popular Party (PP) ahead.
Traumatised Spain votes Sun 14 March, 2004 19:12
Adrian Croft
MADRID (Reuters) - Traumatised Spaniards have voted in droves in a general election thrown wide open by a purported al Qaeda video tape stepping up claims the group was behind the Madrid bombings that killed 200 people.
Voters, many wearing the black ribbon symbol of national grief since Thursday's attack, turned out in numbers well above the last election in 2000 as angry debate on who was responsible -- al Qaeda or Basque separatists -- put the result in question.
If voters believed al Qaeda had mounted its first attack in Europe and in reprisal for Spain's support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, it could rock the ruling conservatives in a poll they were widely expected to win up to a week ago, analysts said.
Two exit polls gave Spain's opposition Socialists the most votes in Sunday's general election, while another put the ruling Popular Party (PP) ahead.
Party political rancour rose in Spain over the bombings on four packed commuter trains, and Germany called for an urgent meeting of European Union security chiefs as possible al Qaeda involvement triggered alarm bells across the world.
Some Spaniards were vitriolic in accusing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of "manipulating" public opinion by spending three days blaming the bombings on the Basque separatist group ETA, despite denials from the guerrillas.
"Liar" and "Get our troops out of Iraq" protesters shouted at Mariano Rajoy, the man who will take over from Aznar if their Popular Party (PP) does succeed in winning a third term.
The opposition Socialists opposed the war and opinion polls showed most Spaniards were against it.
WASTE BIN FIND
Just hours before polling began, officials said the video tape had been found in a waste bin on the outskirts of Madrid and that three Moroccans and two Indians had been arrested.
Surveys had forecast a PP victory as Aznar retires as prime minister hailing a solid economy and greater clout for a country restored to the international mainstream three decades after Franco's dictatorship ended.
Any ETA responsibility for the attack was widely seen as helping the PP due to its tough line against the group.
"Now it's anyone's guess," political analyst Juan Diez said.
Overnight, thousands swarmed round PP headquarters across Spain to denounce government "misinformation". Banging pots and pans, they chanted: "Before we vote, we want the truth."
At 6:15 p.m. turnout in the election reached 62.9 percent compared to 55.5 percent at the same stage in the last election in 2000, officials said.
Voters said they were turning out to display unity for democracy after the worst guerrilla attack in Europe since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a U.S. airliner killed 270 people.
"We are not going to allow the terrorists and fanatics...to divide and damage our freedom," Aznar said as he cast his vote.
Interior Minister Angel Acebes told a news conference in the early hours a purported spokesman for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the bombings on the video.
Morocco identified its three detained citizens as Jamal Zougam, 30, an office worker, mechanic Mohamed Bekkali, 31, and Mohamed Chaoui, 34, a factory worker.
"MORE BLOOD WILL FLOW"
On the tape, a man speaking in Moroccan-accented Arabic said al Qaeda had retaliated for Spain's support for Washington.
"If you don't stop your injustices, more blood will flow and these attacks are very little compared with what may happen with what you call terrorism," he said, according to a transcript in Spanish from the Interior Ministry. The tape was not released.
The man, who said he was speaking for Abu Dujan al Afgani whom he described as military spokesman of al Qaeda in Europe, referred to Iraq and Afghanistan where Spain has troops.
The caller noted the March 11 blasts occurred exactly two and a half years after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
A purported al Qaeda letter on Thursday also claimed the group was responsible for the 10 simultaneous bombings on the crowded trains.
In Washington, a senior official in U.S. President George W. Bush's administration said: "We've been in contact with the Spanish authorities and offered assistance."
ETA issued a second statement, made public on Sunday, denying any role. The size of the attack would be unprecedented in the group's three-decade armed campaign for independence.
Rajoy's main challenger for the prime minister's job is Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who opposed Aznar over the Iraq war but has backed him in the fight against ETA.
To win an absolute majority in the lower house of parliament, a party needs to win 176 seats. In 2000, the PP won 183 and the Socialists 125.
If the PP wins most seats but falls just short of an absolute majority, it may be forced to seek alliances with regional parties to govern.
Zapatero has said he will only seek to form a government if the Socialists get the most votes.
From Paris to Warsaw, governments across Europe tightened security at borders, railways and airports.
A murderous dictator, his rapper son and a $700m-a-year oil boom
However yesterday Equatorial Guinea threatened to recall its ambassador to Spain over allegations the Spanish government was behind the coup plot.
The grounding of a mystery plane, allegedly carrying mercenaries, has focused attention on the West African state of Equatorial Guinea and its despotic leader. Declan Walsh reports on a would-be coup that sounds like a plot from 'Dallas' 16 March 2004
On the steamy shores of West Africa, oil seldom brings good tidings. Equatorial Guinea, the nugget-sized nation at the heart of last week's bungled apparent coup attempt, is no exception. A despotic leader, his playboy-rapper son, scheming relatives and thousands of American oil men are the characters of a twisted plot that reads like Dallas set in equatorial Africa. And although attention has focused on 67 alleged mercenaries arrested in Zimbabwe, a far greater intrigue swirls around the dictatorial regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Mr Obiang, who came to power by overthrowing his uncle and shooting him, has survived 25 years in power by stuffing the government with relatives, torturing opponents and rigging elections. His would be a perfect banana republic, if it had bananas. Instead it has oil - lots of it.
Mr Obiang's iron fist turned to gold in the mid 1990s when US oil firms made massive offshore discoveries. Overnight, the former Spanish colony shot from poverty-stricken obscurity to fabulous wealth, becoming known as the "Kuwait of Africa". Large oil companies, led by ExxonMobil, invested $6bn (£3.3bn) in operations that now pump 350,000 barrels of oil a day.
More than 3,000 US oil workers are manning the pumps, and business is so brisk there are direct flights from Houston to the island's capital, Malabo.
Equatorial Guinea has become Africa's third-largest oil producer, after Nigeria and Angola, and its fastest growing economy.
"The oil has been for us like the manna that the Jews ate in the desert," Mr Obiang told CBS last year.
The vast majority of Guineans, however, have yet to taste that sweet bread.
The majority of the vast state oil revenues - up to $700m this year - has been salted into foreign bank accounts. Many are controlled by Mr Obiang. Most of the country's 500,000 people scrape by on $2 a day, and human development indicators have barely budged since oil was struck. "There is no evidence that any of the oil wealth has gone to the people," said Sarah Wykes of the lobby group Global Witness, which later this month will release a report linking the Obiang regime to large-scale corruption and drug trafficking.
The US oil companies appear unconcerned by the allegations. Last year ExxonMobil threw a party in Washington in Mr Obiang's honour - one year after he held presidential elections that gave him 97 per cent of the vote. The result suggested a slight fall in popularity over the previous poll, in which he won 99.2 per cent.
Western business has followed on the heels of the Texan oil men with gusto.
Only 15 years ago Malabo had just one hotel with no electricity, food or running water. Two cars in the street was a traffic jam, and the phone directory had just two pages, listing subscribers by their first name.
The airport terminal was a tin-roofed shack that received just one international flight.
Today, however, the French have built a mobile phone network, sports utility vehicles whizz through the streets, and several international carriers service the smart new airport terminal. Prostitutes clamour around the gates of several new hotels. The US re-opened its embassy in October last year, following an eight-year closure in protest at torture and other human rights abuses.
At around the same time the Dutch carrier KLM renamed one of its planes after Mr Obiang, to mark the opening of the new airport terminal. "It was like calling a plane Pol Pot," said one analyst.
A campaign against US involvement in Equatorial Guinea is building. The influential US news programme 60 Minutes criticised the pact between Mr Obiang and the oil companies last autumn. The latest State Department human rights report, released last month, cataolgued an array of police torture, arbitrary arrest and detention and the failure of the courts to administer justice.
In Washington, the FBI has started investigating a $700m bank account at the Riggs Bank, of which Mr Obiang is apparently the main signatory. One bank employee has already lost his job over the scandal.
But the greatest threat to Mr Obiang's dictatorial dominance comes from his own family. The president has been sick, reportedly from prostate cancer, and tensions have arisen among the ruling clan over his succession plans. Some are worried over apparent plans to hand power to his son Teodorin - a government minister, rap music entrepreneur and international playboy.
The 30-something Teodorin parties in Rio de Janeiro, does business in Hollywood and lives at five-star hotels in Paris, where he drives in Bentley and Lamborghini cars. Some years ago he invested several hundred thousand dollars to start his own rap label, TNO Entertainment, standing for Teodorin Nguema Obiang. It apparently failed to release any records, but according to Hollywood gossip he has had a relationship with the American rap star Eve.
Teodorin is also fond of female company from other countries - according to one associate, he once turned up for a meeting in Paris accompanied by several Russian women. He is a keen property investor, owning a $6m mansion in Bel Air.
But when he tried to buy a multi-million dollar apartment in New York - in a building where the arms superdealer Adnan Khashoggi once lived - the board of management rejected his application.
His frequent absences have called into question his ability to run the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Works, although he did head up his father's extraordinarily successful 2002 election campaign.
The president is reportedly worried about his son's partying and has appealed to confidantes to help temper his wilder excesses - presumably to help pave the way for a leadership succession. This worries Mr Obiang's relatives, who hold the top positions in the government and military. In particular it has bothered the president's brother, Armengol Ondo Nguema, the national security chief.
According to documents obtained by The Independent, Armengol has close links with Nick du Toit - the 48-year-old South African mercenary who last week admitted to helping plan the putative coup.
Both men are shareholders in Triple Options, a joint venture company established last October to provide "security services" to Mr Obiang, but which the government now says is implicated in the plot to topple him.
Africa sleuths remain mystified about who is behind the coup plot - if there ever was one at all. Suspicions have been raised by Mr du Toit's appearance on national television to admit his complicity in the apparent coup, only hours after the plane of 70 mercenaries was arrested in Harare.
Appearing relaxed and composed, he enjoyed a more peaceful fate than most failed putchists in Equatorial Guinea, who might expect to have their toenails removed over several days before being allowed to speak in public.
Mr du Toit said he planned to force Mr Obiang into exile, allowing the opposition leader Severo Moto Nsa to seize power. Mr Moto, who lives in exile in Spain, has denied any involvement in the plot.
The task of finding the culprit is complicated by the almost universal unpopularity of the Obiang regime. It is involved in high-profile border disputes with neighbouring Gabon and Cameroon over remote and possibly oil-rich areas; and most of the opposition is jailed or in exile.
Last month an American human rights lobby group put Mr Obiang at sixth place in its gallery of the world's 10 worst dictators. In 2002, for instance, he had more than 70 political opponents jailed. Some were hung in positions designed to break their bones, and at least two died. Those who have not fled into exile in Spain have been detained at the notorious Black Beach prison, where opponents say they have been tortured by Obiang family members. "If you've ever seen a person limp on both legs, you know you're in Equatorial Guinea," said the former US ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, John Bennett.
The government is also tainted by allegations of drug trafficking. In 1997 a former Information Minister, Santos Pasqual Bikomo, was arrested in Madrid with 14 kilos of heroin, allegedly from Pakistan. Currently serving a nine-year sentence, he alleges that other government figures were involved in the drugs trade.
According to research by Global Witness, which specialises in investigating oil corruption, at least 10 Equatorial Guineans travelling on diplomatic passports have been arrested on drugs trafficking charges since the late 1980s.
The independent press has been beaten into silence and even the foreign press is not safe. A local correspondent for the French news service AFP was jailed for eight days in November last year after writing "scurrilous" stories.
Instead, the state media bring greasy sycophancy to new depths. Mr Obiang has "all power over men and things", state radio said last year, adding: "He can decide to kill ... because it is God himself, with whom he is in permanent contact, who gives him this strength."
US interest in censoring Mr Obiang's abuses has waned in tandem with the flood of investment. For example, after the sham 2002 elections the European Union issued a stern condemnation. In contrast the US State Department reaction was notably muted.
The US increasingly sees West Africa as a "safe" source of oil, far from the Muslim world and OPEC price controlling countries. Sub-Saharan African already supplies 15 per cent of US imports, which the Bush administration hopes will rise to 25 per cent in the coming decade.
Other countries have more mixed relations. The South African president Thabo Mbeki recently strengthened relations, and the Spanish foreign minister Ana Palacio visited in November last year.
However yesterday Equatorial Guinea threatened to recall its ambassador to Spain over allegations the Spanish government was behind the coup plot.
The 67 alleged mercenaries detained in Zimbabwe are due to make their first court appearance today. Led by the former SAS commando and Old Etonian, Simon Mann, they are accused of acting like characters from the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Dogs of War - a thriller about a mining executive who hires a group of mercenaries to overthrow an African government and install a puppet dictator so he can mine platinum. But the alleged mercenaries give a different explanation - that they en route to Eastern Congo to protect an unnamed mine as part of a legitimate contract. "It is all a dreadful misunderstanding," said Charles Burrow, an executive with the Channel Islands-registered company that owns their impounded Boeing 727 plane.
However Africa Confidential, a respected newsletter, says that they had in fact stopped to pick up weapons for a planned coup. According to a quoted contract, the team had already paid $180,000 to Zimbabwean army officers for a consignment of AK-47 guns, mortars and 30,000 rounds of ammunition.
Whatever the truth, when their plane landed in Harare their plans went disastrously wrong. The coming trial may shed further light on their bizarre adventure and -- just perhaps -- on the intrigues of a tiny oil-rich yet fragile nation 2,000 miles away. 16 March 2004 13:10
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