#Senegal Military

[postcard-from-the-past]

Military revue in Dakar, Senegal

French vintage postcard

[historicminiaturesnorthernva]

Tirailleurs Sénégalais and some French infantry of the Great War.

[lightdancer1]

The war in Senegal has lasted even longer than the Congo Wars:

The Senegal War of 1982-present relies on a particular juxtaposition that makes its endemic length all but inevitable. Specifically the junction of both local separatism and the kind of Islamist insurgency that can never really be destroyed because the most nihilistic elements of the Islamic religion fasten to it like a vampire to a victim's neck and want a quick ticket to paradise that beats hollow actually living like a decent Muslim like most of the normal people of the Islamic world.

[reasonsforhope]

Note: I super don't like the framing of this headline. "Here's why it matters" idk it's almost like there's an entire country's worth of people who get to keep their democracy! Clearly! But there are few good articles on this in English, so we're going with this one anyway.

--

2024 is the biggest global election year in history and the future of democracy is on every ballot. But amid an international backsliding in democratic norms, including in countries with a longer history of democracy like India, Senegal’s election last week was a major win for democracy. It’s also an indication that a new political class is coming of age in Africa, exemplified by Senegal’s new 44-year-old president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

The West African nation managed to pull off a free and fair election on March 24 despite significant obstacles, including efforts by former President Macky Sall to delay the elections and imprison or disqualify opposition candidates. Add those challenges to the fact that many neighboring countries in West Africa — most prominently Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but other nations across the region too — have been repeatedly undermined by military coups since 2020.

Sall had been in power since 2012, serving two terms. He declined to seek a third term following years of speculation that he would do so despite a constitutional two-term limit. But he attempted to extend his term, announcing in February that elections (originally to be held that month) would be pushed off until the end of the year in defiance of the electoral schedule.

Sall’s allies in the National Assembly approved the measure, but only after security forces removed opposition politicians, who vociferously protested the delay. Senegalese society came out in droves to protest Sall’s attempted self-coup, and the Constitutional Council ruled in late February that Sall’s attempt to stay in power could not stand.

That itself was a win for democracy. Still, opposition candidates, including Faye, though legally able to run, remained imprisoned until just days before the election — while others were barred from running at all. The future of Senegal’s democracy seemed uncertain at best.

Cut to Tuesday [April 2, 2024], when Sall stepped down and handed power to Faye, a former tax examiner who won on a campaign of combating corruption, as well as greater sovereignty and economic opportunity for the Senegalese. And it was young voters who carried Faye to victory...

“This election showed the resilience of the democracy in Senegal that resisted the shock of an unexpected postponement,” Adele Ravidà, Senegal country director at the lnternational Foundation for Electoral Systems, told Vox via email. “... after a couple of years of unprecedented episodes of violence [the Senegalese people] turned the page smoothly, allowing a peaceful transfer of power.”

And though Faye’s aims won’t be easy to achieve, his win can tell us not only about how Senegal managed to establish its young democracy, but also about the positive trend of democratic entrenchment and international cooperation in African nations, and the power of young Africans...

Senegal and Democracy in Africa

Since it gained independence from France in 1960, Senegal has never had a coup — military or civilian. Increasingly strong and competitive democracy has been the norm for Senegal, and the country’s civil society went out in great force over the past three years of Sall’s term to enforce those norms.

“I think that it is really the victory of the democratic institutions — the government, but also civil society organization,” Sany said. “They were mobilized, from the unions, teacher unions, workers, NGOs. The civil society in Senegal is one of the most experienced, well-organized democratic institutions on the continent.” Senegalese civil society also pushed back against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to cling to power back in 2012, and the Senegalese people voted him out...

Faye will still have his work cut out for him accomplishing the goals he campaigned on, including economic prosperity, transparency, food security, increased sovereignty, and the strengthening of democratic institutions. This will be important, especially for Senegal’s young people, who are at the forefront of another major trend.

Young Africans will play an increasingly key role in the coming decades, both on the continent and on the global stage; Africa’s youth population (people aged 15 to 24) will make up approximately 35 percent of the world’s youth population by 2050, and Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion during that time. In Senegal, people aged 10 to 24 make up 32 percent of the population, according to the UN.

“These young people have connected to the rest of the world,” Sany said. “They see what’s happening. They are interested. They are smart. They are more educated.” And they have high expectations not only for their economic future but also for their civil rights and autonomy.

The reality of government is always different from the promise of campaigning, but Faye’s election is part of a promising trend of democratic entrenchment in Africa, exemplified by successful transitions of power in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over the past year. To be sure, those elections were not without challenges, but on the whole, they provide an important counterweight to democratic backsliding.

Senegalese people, especially the younger generation, have high expectations for what democracy can and should deliver for them. It’s up to Faye and his government to follow."

-via Vox, April 4, 2024

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against AFRICA

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people.

In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control.

In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced.

In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.

In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.

[fatehbaz]

Thinking about the Holocaust in Africa.

Here, European notions of anti-Blackness and antisemitism became intertwined.

There was a fusion between the dispossession and racism of European imperialism and colonization projects of the late nineteenth century, and the prison regimes imposed by European fascism in the early twentieth century.

Scholars Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum have recently written much about the importance of recognizing the trauma of labor and internment camps in North Africa during the second world war.

And I want to express my gratitude for their work. I want to share some of what they’ve written in a couple of recent articles.

In their words: “Nazism in Europe was underlaid by an intricate matrix of racist, eugenicist and nationalist ideas. But the war – and the Holocaust – appears even more complex if historians take into account the racist and violent color wheel that spun in North Africa.” [1]

France's prison camps in North Africa were filled with Algerians, local Jews, deported European Jews, Eastern European refugees, domestic political dissidents from France, people fleeing fascist Spain, Moroccan residents, Senegalese subjects of French rule, other West Africans displaced by French occupation, and more.

The anti-Blackness and antisemitism that had fueled Europe's colonial expansion was finding new expression in fascist Europe.

---

Seems France is a central antagonist in the story of evolving approaches to empire, racism, and resource extraction.

After their 1940 alliance with the Nazis, the Vichy French government maintained technical control of French colonies across Africa. Beginning in 1940, the French government “alone built nearly 70 such camps in the Sahara.” [1] This was in addition to another six labor camps which the French government built in West Africa (in Senegal, Guinea, and Mali).

---

By the beginning of the twentieth century, French-influenced or -controlled territory in North Africa was home to around 500,000 Jews, many of whom had been living in the region for centuries or millennia, speaking many languages, “reflecting their many different cultures and ethnicities: Arabic, French, Tamazight – a Berber language – and Haketia, a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco.” [1] The Vichy French government officially stripped North African Jews of formal citizenship and seized their assets.

Then, deporting residents of Europe and political dissidents in “early 1941, the Vichy authorities transferred hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, including women and children, to the Saharan labor camps.” [2] Under French rule “in Algeria [...], it was estimated that 2,000-3,000 Jews were interned in camps [...] resulting in a total prisoner population of 15,000-20,000.” [2]  France pursued an “unrealized dream of the nineteenth century” [2]: the completion of the Mediterranean-Niger railroad line in the Sahara, a transportation route across the vast desert to connect the prosperous West African port of Dakar with the Mediterranean coast of Algeria.

Meanwhile the “Vichy regime [...] continued racist policies begun by France’s Third Republic, which pushed young Black men from the empire into forced military service,” including forced recruitment from “Senegal, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and Mauritania; [...] Benin, Gambia and Burkina Faso; and Muslim men from Morocco and Algeria. In these ways, the French carried on a wartime campaign of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, pairing these forms of racialized hatred from the colonial era with antisemitism. Antisemitism had deep roots in French and colonial history, but it found new force in the era of fascism.” [1]

---

In late 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, the SS “imprisoned some 5,000 Jewish men in roughly 40 forced labor and detention camps on the front lines and in cities like Tunis.” [2] The fascist Italian government had been experimenting with racist and anti-Black policy in their colonization of East Africa; these policies were expanded in Libya. Here, “Mussolini ordered the Jews of Cyrenaica moved” as “most of the 2,600 Jews deported [...] were sent to the camp of Giado” while “other Libyan Jews were deported to the camps of Buqbuq and Sidi Azaz.” [2]

---

Stein and Boum describe the diversity of prisoner experience: “In these camps, [...] the complex racist logic of Nazism and fascism took vivid form. Muslims arrested for anti-colonial activities were pressed into back-breaking labor” and “broke bread with other forced workers” including ‘Ukrainians, Americans, Germans, Russian Jews and others [...] arrested, deported and imprisoned by the Vichy regime after fleeing Franco’s Spain. There were political enemies of the Vichy and Nazi regime too, including socialists, communists, union members [...] overseen by [...] forcibly recruited [...] Moroccan and Black Senegalese men, who were often little more than prisoners themselves.” [1]

As Stein and Boum describe it: “Vichy North Africa became a unique site [...] where colonialism and fascism co-existed and overlapped.” [2]

They write: “Together, we have spent a decade gathering the voices of the diverse peoples who endured World War II in North Africa, across lines of race, class, language and region. Their letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry and oral histories are both defiant and broken. They express both faith and despair. All in all, they understood themselves to be trapped in a monstrous machine of fascism, occupation, violence and racism.” [1]

---

[1]: Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “80 years ago, Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia - but North Africans’ experiences of World War II often go unheard.” The Conversation. 15 November 2022.

[2]: Sarah Arbevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa.” Holocaust Encyclopedia online. Last edited 13 May 2019.

[reddest-flower]

The Soviet intervention in Hungary and the Khrushchev revelations produced in Europe a process that led – gradually – to the Eurocommunism of the Communist Party of Spain’s leader Santiago Carrillo, who said, in 1976, ‘once Moscow was our Rome, but no more. Now we acknowledge no guiding centre, no international discipline’. This was a communism that no longer believed in revolution but was quite satisfied with an evolutionary dynamic. The European parties, correct in their desire for the right to develop their own strategies and tactics, nonetheless, threw themselves onto a self-destructive path. Few remained standing after the USSR collapsed in 1991. They campaigned for polycentrism but, in the end, achieved only a return to social democracy.

Amongst the Third World communist parties, a different orientation became clear after 1956. While the Western European parties seemed eager to denigrate the USSR and its contributions, the parties in the Third World acknowledged the importance of the USSR but sought some distance from its political orientation. During their visits to Moscow in the 1960s, champions of ‘African socialism’ such as Modibo Keïta of Mali and Mamadou Dia of Senegal announced the necessity of non-alignment and the importance of nationally developed processes of socialist construction. Marshal Lin Biao spoke of the need for a ‘creative application’ of Marxism in the Chinese context. The young leader of the Indonesian Communist Party – Dipa Nusantara Aidit – moved his party towards a firm grounding in both Marxism-Leninism and the peculiarities of Indonesian history. [...]

In the Third World, where Communism was a dynamic movement, it was not treated as a religion that was incapable of error. ‘Socialism is young’, Che Guevara wrote in 1965, ‘and has its mistakes.’ Socialism required ceaseless criticism in order to strengthen it. Such an attitude was missing in Cold War Europe and North America [...] After 1956, Communism was penalized by the Cold Warriors for the Soviet intervention in Hungary. This played some role in the Third World, but it was not decisive. In India, in 1957 the Communists won an election in Kerala to become the ruling party in that state. In 1959, the Cuban revolution overthrew a dictatorship and adopted Marxism-Leninism as its general theory. In Vietnam, from 1954, the Communists took charge of the north of the country and valiantly fought to liberate the rest of their country. These were communist victories despite the intervention in Hungary.

[...]

Much the same history propelled the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) forward from 1951, when it had merely 5,000 members, to 1964, when it had two million party members and an additional fifteen million members in its mass organizations (half of them in the Indonesian Peasants’ Front). The party had deep roots in the heavily populated sections of east and central Java but had – in the decade after 1951 – begun to make gains in the outer islands, such as Sumatra. A viciously anti-communist military was unable to stop the growth of the party. The new leadership from the 1953 Party Central Committee meeting were all in their thirties, with the new Secretary General – Aidit – merely thirty-one years old. These communists were committed to mass struggles and to mass campaigns, to building up the party base in rural Indonesia. The Indonesian Peasants’ Front and the Plantation Workers’ Union – both PKI mass organizations – fought against forced labour (romusha) and encouraged land seizures (aksi sepihak). These campaigns became more and more radical. In February 1965, the Plantation Workers’ Union occupied land held by the US Rubber Company in North Sumatra. US Rubber and Goodyear Tires saw this as a direct threat to their interests in Indonesia. Such audacity would not be tolerated. Three multinational oil companies (Caltex, Stanvac and Shell) watched this with alarm. US diplomat George Ball wrote to US National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that in ‘the long run’ events in Indonesia such as these land seizures ‘may be more important than South Vietnam’. Ball would know. He oversaw the 1963 coup in South Vietnam against the US ally Ngô Đình Diệm. The West felt it could not stand by as the PKI got more aggressive.

By 1965, the PKI had three million party members – adding a million members in the year. It had emerged as a serious political force in Indonesia, despite the anti-communist military’s attempts to squelch its growth. Membership in its mass organizations went up to 18 million. A strange incident – the killing of three generals in Jakarta – set off a massive campaign, helped along by the CIA and Australian intelligence, to excise the communists from Indonesia. Mass murder was the order of the day. The worst killings were in East Java and in Bali. Colonel Sarwo Edhie’s forces, for instance, trained militia squads to kill communists. ‘We gave them two or three days’ training,’ Sarwo Edhie told journalist John Hughes, ‘then sent them out to kill the communists.’ In East Java, one eyewitness recounted, the prisoners were forced to dig a grave, then ‘one by one, they were beaten with bamboo clubs, their throats slit, and they were pushed into the mass grave’. By the end of the massacre, a million Indonesian men and women of the left were sent to these graves. Many millions more were isolated, without work and friends. Aidit was arrested by Colonel Yasir Hadibroto, brought to Boyolali (in Central Java) and executed. He was 42.

There was no way for the world communist movement to protect their Indonesian comrades. The USSR’s reaction was tepid. The Chinese called it a ‘heinous and diabolical’ crime. But neither the USSR nor China could do anything. The United Nations stayed silent. The PKI had decided to take a path that was without the guns. Its cadre could not defend themselves. They were not able to fight the military and the anti-communist gangs. It was a bloodbath.

[...]

There was little mention in Havana of the Soviet Union. It had slowed down its support for national liberation movements, eager for detente and conciliation with the West by the mid-1960s. In 1963, Aidit had chastised the Soviets, saying, ‘Socialist states are not genuine if they fail to really give assistance to the national liberation struggle’. The reason why parties such as the PKI held fast to ‘Stalin’ was not because they defended the purges or collectivization in the USSR. It was because ‘Stalin’ in the debate around militancy had come to stand in for revolutionary idealism and for the anti-fascist struggle. Aidit had agreed that the Soviets could have any interpretation of Stalin in terms of domestic policy (‘criticize him, remove his remains from the mausoleum, rename Stalingrad’), but other Communist Parties had the right to assess his role on the international level. He was a ‘lighthouse’, Aidit said in 1961, whose work was ‘still useful to Eastern countries’. This was a statement against the conciliation towards imperialism of the Khrushchev era. It was a position shared across many of the Communist Parties of the Third World.

Many Communist parties, frustrated with the pace of change and with the brutality of the attacks on them, would take to the gun in this period – from Peru to the Philippines. The massacre in Indonesia hung heavily on the world communist movement. But this move to the gun had its limitations, for many of these parties would mistake the tactics of armed revolution for a strategy of violence. The violence worked most effectively the other way. The communists were massacred in Indonesia – as we have seen – and they were butchered in Iraq and Sudan, in Central Asia and South America. The image of communists being thrown from helicopters off the coast of Chile is far less known than any cliché about the USSR.

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019

[youarebeingshaggedbyarareparrot]

Worse things happen at sea: Art in the Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony

So everyone has been sounding off about the Paris' Olympic Opening Ceremony. Mainly about the supposed 'insult to Christians everywhere' with the recreation of Di Vinci's 'The Last Supper'.

(I'd like to go on the record that 1. you pose any group of folk in a line facing the viewer with a barrier at hip height and it's gonna look a little 'The Last Supper'-y, 2. clearly the hand wringers had forgotten that the artist was Di Vinci. The man would be pointing and laughing at them and be living it up on that bridge between Nicky Doll and DJ Butch, and 3. Da Vinci painted enough portraits of Bacchus, he would have known what's up.)

Anyway, a lot of art was incorporated and celebrated but there's one piece that did featured that had me performing a mental emergency stop and NO ONE ELSE is talking about it so I need to know I wasn't the only one to spot this.

So, opening ceremony, we're following our mysterious torch bearer as they race through the the Louvre to the strains of 'Danse macabre', (French composer Camille Saint-Saëns). The eyes of the paintings occupants follow their progress until we see frames with empty back drops, the paintings' subjects having come alive to watch the festivities from the windows. But the last empty frame... my people...

Our mystery guide stands in front of this for nearly 3 seconds, at the 1hr 42min 11sec mark in the BBC coverage. Now, I can't make out the plaque at the bottom of the frame, but I am prepared to place good money that this is Théodore Géricault's 'Le Radeau de la Méduse', or 'The Raft of the Medusa'.

Completed in 1819, this piece is considered the best work of its' French artist and an icon of the French Romanticism movement. It's chuffing huge, over 16ft by 23ft, and it is stunning.

It also depicts one of the worst events in French maritime history.

In June of 1816, the French frigate The Medusa left France for Senegal on the west coast of Africa. At her helm was a captain who had not sailed in 20 odd years and got the post through connections and political clout. And he fucked it up royally. The Medusa drifted 100 miles off course and ran aground off Mauritania. After 3 days of failing to shift the boat, the 400 or so people aboard has choices to make. They were 30 miles from land and there were 6 boats, room for 250 people. Some stayed aboard the stranded vessel but at least 146 men and one woman boarded a jerry-rigged raft. The plan was for it to be towed by some of the boats, but after only a few miles it was turned loose.

For 13 days, exposure, mutiny, disease, dehydration and starvation ravaged the survivors, whittling nearly 150 down to 15. It was in my fact checking for this that I learnt the lovely little term ‘a custom of the sea’. In layman’s terms, cannibalising your crew mates to survive. They were spotted by chance, no search effort had been made by the French. A further 5 died in the days following rescue. British naval officers helped the survivors to return to France because aid from the French government didn’t appear and the captain, who had made it to land fine, was more interested in recovering the gold on board the Medusa. He was court marshalled and should have been executed, but in the end served 3 years in prison. He was the inciting incident for a law to passed that ensured that promotions in the French military would thereafter be based on merit.

Now all this came hurtling into my head because I remember reading a book called 'Severed' by Frances Larson, all about the cultural and historical fascination with decapitation. There's a section in the chapter of severed heads in art about how Géricault went hard on the research for this painting; visited morgues and hospitals, brought home specimens to watch decay rate, y'know, stuff that absolutely wouldn't blow your safety deposit. But yeah, I'm there with dawning horror and ice in my blood as we look at a very French painting, of a French maritime tragedy, brought about by the hubris and arrogance and incompetence of the higher ups who had no right being there, where comrades and crew turn on each other in a horrific fight for survival, with the spooky dancing bones classical piece playing in the background...

And not 20 seconds later we are rejoining the action of the flotilla on the Seine, 'Fraternité' writ large over the boat with Cyprus, Columbia and Comoros waving excitedly and soggily at us.

Thomas Jolly, opening ceremony artistic director, I need to buy you a drink and we need to chat. I need to study you. I have been turning this over in my brain for a week, what are you trying to say?! Was I the only one to hear it?!

[zvaigzdelasas]

Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants Nigeria to increase LNG supplies to Germany and is demanding that Nigerian refugees be accepted back swiftly. Scholz, who held talks on Sunday and Monday in Nigeria's capital Abuja and subsequently in its commercial capital Lagos, is thus continuing his efforts to increase LNG imports from African countries to replace Russian gas [...] The German government had repeatedly urged African countries to abandon fossil fuel extraction. While increasing deportation of Nigerians, Berlin – according to Scholz – is trying to lure more “talents” from the country to work for German companies –a contribution to the brain drain depriving developing countries of urgently needed and expensively trained skilled labor. In Nigeria, Scholz also held talks on the developments in Niger. Last summer, with Nigeria's help, the EU sought to overthrow the military government in Niger that previously had ousted a pro-Western president and is seeking to lead the country to genuine independence from the former colonial powers.

This is Chancellor Olaf Scholz's third trip to Africa and his second to West Africa. In May 2022, Scholz had traveled to Senegal and then on to Niger; where he visited the German troops deployed in that country, before going on to meet with pro-Western President Mohamed Bazoum. Bazoum has since been overthrown by putschists, who can rely on a widespread popular rejection of French dominance in West Africa.[1] This rejection is also growing in Senegal.[2] The two countries Scholz is visiting this time – Nigeria and Ghana – are, like Senegal and Niger, members of the West African regional organization ECOWAS, but they are not former French colonies. Their foreign relations are therefore less affected by the current anti-colonial wave in West Africa’s Francophonie. Moreover, both countries have been Germany’s long-standing cooperation partners of, albeit at a relatively modest level[...]

With his visit in Nigeria on Sunday and Monday, Scholz was seeking to expand bilateral economic relations with a focus on energy resources. German oil imports from Nigeria currently account for around half of the total trade volume. Now the German government also wants to import gas from the country – just as it did from Senegal, where Chancellor Scholz had also negotiated gas supplies in May 2022.[3] This had already raised some eyebrows at the time. Berlin had long been prominent in making the demand that the African continent should abandon its use of fossil fuels. However, subsequent to its decision to halt Russian oil and gas imports, it began to promote tapping new deposits in Africa, for example in Senegal, and is now seeking supplies from the new sources. [...] In 2021, with 14 percent of the EU’s imports, Nigeria was the EU's fourth largest supplier after the USA, Qatar and Russia, with most of it sold to Spain and Portugal.[4] Just before his trip, Scholz had already stated in an interview with the Nigerian newspaper Punch [linked here] that German corporations were also interested in LNG supplies from Nigeria.[5]

To accelerate the repatriation of Nigerians from Germany was Scholz’s second important objective on his visit to Nigeria. Nigerians are rarely granted asylum in Germany. Between January and September of this year, of the 1,850 persons who applied for asylum in Germany only 118 have been granted a reliable right to remain.[6] However, it is currently not easy for Berlin to deport Nigerians, whose bid for asylum has been rejected. The Nigerian authorities only allow those into the country, who have valid original documents. Substitute papers, provided by German authorities to those Nigerians, who have lost their passports, are not recognized in Abuja. That has resulted in around 14,000 Nigerians living in Germany, who, in principle are obliged to leave the country. This year only 262 have actually been deported. Scholz was insisting that Abuja make their repatriation easier. Only “talents from Nigeria,” needed in the labor market, should be allowed to come, says the chancellor.[7] This is Berlin’s admission to lure well, and expensively-trained personnel – the so-called brain drain that inflicts serious damage to developing countries and is regularly criticized by experts.

Scholz used his stay in Nigeria to also discuss the situation in Nigeria’s northern neighbor, Niger. Following the putsch in that country, Nigeria had been one of those countries, that had been particularly advocating for a military intervention in Niger, to restore the overthrown President Bazoum to power. For that purpose, several of the ECOWAS countries, besides Nigeria, for example both Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire wanted to provide the necessary troops. In addition, there was also the prospect of French military assistance. (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[8]) Ultimately the plan was abandoned – also due to the strong resistance from Northern Nigeria, which would have borne the brunt of the extensive damage in the case of a war with the neighboring country. Meanwhile, French troops have begun their withdrawal from Niger. Backing down from the threat of an intervention, supported by Paris and the EU, has cost ECOWAS credibility and weakened its position in West Africa, where it was already widely considered a French and Western lackey. In Abuja, Scholz met with ECOWAS Commission President, Omar Touray, exchanged views on the situation in Niger and praised ECOWAS – in a very odd choice of words – as “a powerful and functioning [!] organization.”[9]

Berlin’s attempt to expand cooperation with Nigeria under President Bola Tinubu is not free of risks. Tinubu came to power in late May – following a quite contested election, winning with around 37 percent of the votes, ahead of two strong opponents (Atiku Abubakar with 29 percent, and Peter Obi, 25 percent). Both opponents alleged the presidential election had been marred by irregularities and challenged the results, but lost their bid a few days ago before the country’s highest court.[10] However, Tinabu is still far from out of the woods. From the beginning of his administration, he imposed stringent austerity measures, such as halting the subventions on gasoline, meaning that many ordinary car owners no longer could afford to drive their cars, and with daily living costs skyrocketing. Whereas Tinubu is praised for his cuts in the West, Germany included – the government owned Germany Trade and Invest (gtai) foreign business agency speaks of “important reforms,”[11] – inside that country, there is great resentment. The number of Nigerians, forced to live on less than US $1/day, could grow from a current 83 million to 120 million and in the worst-case, to as many as 140 to 150 million in a population of 220 million, according to experts.[12] There are already warnings of possible unrest. The supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Obi, who feels cheated out of the victory, are are primarily young, rebellious Nigerians.

31 Oct 23

[darkmaga-retard]

MOSCOW, August 7. /TASS/. Russia doesn't want the world to forget that Kiev is supporting terrorism in Mali, so it will continue to shine a light on this in the international arena, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"On August 4, the transitional government of Mali published an official statement about the ‘immediate’ severing of diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Precipitating this move were statements from Ukrainian officials (the spokesman for the Ukrainian military intelligence, Andrey Yusov, and Ambassador to Senegal Yury Pivovarov) about Kiev aiding terrorist forces that carried out an attack on a convoy of Malian servicemen in northern Mali in late July," the diplomat pointed out. "We will continue to direct the world community’s attention, including at multilateral platforms, to Kiev's barbaric behavior," she underscored.

Zakharova emphasized that the terrorist nature of the Kiev regime is becoming more and more apparent to the whole world. "Having failed to defeat Russia on the battlefield, the criminal regime of Vladimir Zelensky decided to open a 'second front' in Africa. He and his accomplices are pampering terrorist groups in Moscow-friendly states of the continent," she stressed.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Infantry military camp by Dakar, Senegal

French vintage postcard

[sissa-arrows]

Let’s talk about an other crime France committed.

In 1944 a group of Senegalese Tirailleurs (despite their names they were West Africans in general) is made prisoner by the Nazis. They eventually get liberated and France put them all in a military camp in Thiaroye in Senegal while wanting for them to be sent back to their respective countries. France has already been liberated so they started the whitewashing process of their troops by sending the Black and Brown soldiers back to Africa to replace them with white soldiers for the victory celebrations.

The men in Thiaroye refuse to leave the camp until they have been paid because previously France didn’t respect its promises so this time they want their money before leaving. France refuses. On November 28 a group of black soldiers decide to just sit there and refuse to move from the camp until they get paid. The military send the colonel Dagnan in the following days. The man still refuses to pay them and is unable to answer to their concerns regarding never getting paid if they do accept to leave. Dagnan leave and he decides that the solution is to “show strength”. On December 1st 1944 Dagnan send soldiers and cops. The black soldiers are awaken by the cops soldiers and the tank they got with them…. they are completely unarmed. No weapon. No violence on their part. They get slaughtered by the French. The lowest estimation says 50 men were killed.

Dagnan then makes a report in which he lies and accuses the Black soldiers of mutiny, trying to held him hostage and threatening his life. The 30 Black soldiers who survived are therefore arrested and condemned to up to 10 years in military jail and lose all rights to the money France owes them. The widows and children of the ones who were killed are not entitled to any compensation not even the money France owed to these men.

In 1947 the French president pardon them but he refuses to admit it’s because Dagnan lied so while they do get out of jail they are still not entitled to any money because of Dagnan’s lie.

To these days the official version in France is Dagnan’s version that the Black soldiers were violent and that they started shooting first that’s why they were killed. So while they didn’t deserve to be killed the wrongs are shared… to these days people think this massacre is up to debate.

[flipshitz]

Refuting common blood libel about Jews and israel:

gen·o·cide

noun

the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

"a campaign of genocide"

From 1990 to 2022 the population of Palestine increased from 1.98 million to 5.04 million people. This is a growth of 155.0 percent in 32 years. The highest increase in Palestine was recorded in 1991 with 4.58 percent.

Israel is estimated to possess somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads (one can be used to wipe out all Palestinians if wanted but Israel will not)

What percent of Gaza's population has been killed?

1%

7, 2023. With 23,357 killed in Israel's military operation in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, the Gaza Strip population has now lost 1% of its 2.3 million residents. (There is no reason to believe these numbers are true as hamas is a terrorist organization with no intention of reporting accurate numbers therefore we can estimate less.)

Jews originally trace their ancestry to a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes known as the Israelites that inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods. Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah.

With this we know that Jews come from Judea and Arabs come from Arabia.

49 Muslim countries 2 billion Muslims

To 15 million Jews in their one Jewish state the size of New Jersey. 100 to 1 odds.

Zion: the hill in Jerusalem where king David built his kingdom -David (flourished c. 1000 bce) was the second ruler of the united kingdom of ancient Israel and Judah

Israel predates Islam by 1500 years.

ZionISM: the believe that Jews have the right to self determination in their homeland.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (189?-1974) was the Mufti (chief Muslim Islamic legal religious authority) of Jerusalem under the political authority of the British Mandate in Palestine from 1921 to 1937. His primary political causes were: -exiling and further blocking from Jews in diaspora from immigration.

-Organizing pogroms against Jews

-meeting with Hitler

-launching a war that would they would again lose & effectively displace thousands of Palestinians back into their neighboring Arab countries where they came from and blaming it all on the Jews.

After three defensive wars in 1949, 1956, and 1967, Israel had expanded its territory, leading to heightened tensions with the Arab states. On October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the Jewish holy day of atonement.

After these victories and acquiring of more land, the Israelis chose to give back their ancestral soil as a land for peace deal which the Palestinians would violate year after year by electing genocidal governments that seek to finish hitlers bidding.

To date; The bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinians contain no prohibition against the building or expansion of settlements.

Despite contrary allegations repeated ad nauseam.

2001 Israelis uprooted its citizens who had settled in Gaza already in order to make way for the Arabs to settle in an effort for peace but almost immediately they elect Hamas which is a proxy of Iran much like Hezbollah who’s only political agenda is to kill all Jews.

Oct 7th is a direct result of what happens when you invite terrorists to your front door.

For more copy and paste link:

SATURDAY-OCTOBER-SEVEN.COM

For the “UN” excuse;

Islamic Countries in the UN (46): Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Morocco, Iraq, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Syria, Kazakhstan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Tunisia, Guinea, Azerbaijan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Libya, Jordan, UAE, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Lebanon, Kuwait, Albania, Mauritania, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Gambia, Comoros, Djibouti, Maldives, Brunei, Lebanon. All of which are under the influence of IRAN which guess what? Owns Hezbollah and Hamas as its proxies. All of these nations have genocided or exiled all of its Jews. It’s no wonder they all take a majority vote over israel while simultaneously burying their crimes against humanity - but no mention of that from the peanut gallery on ur end right? Doesn’t fit your shill narrative. And to make matters worse; Iran's appointment to chair UN yes that’s right IRAN was appointed as chair for human rights - which drew rightful criticism at least thank god. Oh and 450 terror operatives in Gaza, mostly Hamas members, are also employed by UNRWA

Attacks on Israel: (still on going)

Shlomo Zalman Zoref 1851

Battle of Tel Hai 1920

Jaffa riots 1921

Meora’ot Tarpat 1929

Hebron Massacre 1929

The great revolt 1936-1939

*in the years 1937-1939 was funded by nazi germany*

War of independence 1948

Scorpions pass massacre 1954

Palestinian fedayeen

Jerusalem bombings 1969

Lord Airport massacre 1972

Munich massacre 1972

Yom Kippur Surprise attack 1973

Ma’alot Massacre 1974

Coastal road massacre 1978

Lanarca yacht killings 1985

1st intifada 1987-1993

Tel Aviv Jerusalem bus 405 attack 1989

Night of the pitchforks 1992

Western wall tunnel riots 1996

2nd intifada 2000-2008

Dolphinarium Discoteque massacre 2001

Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing 2001

Haifa bus bombing (16 suicide bombs) 2001

Passover massacre 2002

Yeshiva beit Yisrael bombing 2002

Cafe moment moment bombing 2002

Matza restaurant suicide bombing 2002

Yagur junction bombing 2002

Rishon lezion bombing 2002

Meggido junction bus bombing 2002

Patt junction bus bombing 2002

Karkur junction bombing 2002

Kiryat Menachem bus bombing 2002

Tel Aviv central bus station massacre 2003

Beersheba bus bombing 2004

2nd rosh ha’ir Restaraunt bombing 2006

Kedumim bombing 2006

Eilat bombing 2007

Jerusalem bus stop bombing 20011

Itamar massacre 2011

Tel Aviv truck attack 2011

Shaar ha negev school bus attack 2011

Tel Aviv bus bombing 2012

Gush Etzion kidnapping and murder 2014

Jerusalem synagogue attack 2014

Stabbing intifada 2015-2016

Tel Aviv shooting 2016

Temple Mount shooting 2017

Ariel stabbing 2018

Samaria combined attack 2019

Wave of terror 2022

Jerusalem bombings 2022

Bizengoff shooting 2023

Ramot junction attack 2023

October 7th massacre 2023

[mistressemmedi]

https://www.tumblr.com/mistressemmedi/740063884004802560/anyways-the-funny-thing-about-the-dakar-is-that?source=share

Can you explain the full story, please?

Absolutely but we need to start from the beginning. Back in the 70s this French madlad, Thierry Sabine, got lost in the Sahara while competing in another rally raid. He made it back to civilization and thought to himself "This was a great experience, we should make it a regular thing! Rally raids in the desert!" so, in 1977, Thierry organized a large scale rally that would cross the whole Sahara - starting point would be Paris and the end would be the capital of Senegal, Dakar.

I guess Thierry was not the only madlad around because 180+ other drivers/riders etc decided to join in on the fun. Popularity rose the following few years thanks to big name entries such as Jacky Ickx. The rally was very much an adventure: you got a general map indicating stops you should make on your way to Senegal and... That was kind of it. No teams, no real backup. People showed up in modified everyday cars, someone even raced in a modified Rolls Royce lmao

So by 1982. the rally was kinda known but it wasn't the scale it was today. Enter our main character: Mark Thatcher, absolute weapon of a man (honestly, look him up... Man does not sound like he's the sharpest tool in the shed lmao) and unfortunate son of one Margaret Thatcher (prime minister of England at the time). He decides to enter the rally with his lil Peugeot 504 with no real prior experience besides racing Le Mans twice (which... uh, very different from a rally in the desert). So he starts off with his co-driver and mechanic in tow and gets lost in the desert. It happens, right? People usually turn up after a day or so. Well, after 3 days he's officially declared missing and mommy dearest is informed. Obviously the son of the Prime Minister being lost somewhere in the Sahara is quite a big deal, so the news was all over that, and Old Maggie decided to flex some of that British muscle - a rescue is launched, involving three separate countries who sent out military aircrafts to search for this moron in the desert, as well as Algeria dispatching its soldiers to find the guy.

After a few days, Mark is found about only 50 kms away from the main route of the race 💀 which caused quite a bit of embarrassment on an international scale to his mom.

Anyways, bad publicity is still publicity after all, and by the year after there were 450+ entries to the rally which included big name manufacturers such as Porsche etc. and it evolved in the crazy 2 week rally that we know today!

Bonus - Quotes from Mark Thatcher about the whole ordeal:

Before competing he said:

"I've now raced in Le Mans and other things – this rally is no problem."

In 2004, Thatcher wrote about his experience:

"I did absolutely no preparation. Nothing."

"We must have hit something. ... We stopped. The others stopped too, took a note of where we were and went on. But the silly bastards – instead of telling everyone we were 25 miles east when they finished the section, they told them we were 25 miles west."

"So The Boss (the prime minister) does entirely the right thing, picks up the phone to the ambassador in Algiers and says, "Can you find out what is going on?" The ambassador then rings the prefect of the region who says there are four people missing and that I am one of them."