The Dying Sahara: US Imperialism and Terror in Africa

The Dying Sahara

First published 2013 by Pluto Press

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Copyright © Jeremy Keenan 2013

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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 and imagined, in North Africa, the Sahara and Sahel has been fabricated by Algeria’s DRS in collusion with US and other Western military intelligence agencies.

While that is shocking, perhaps even more disturbing is the evidence now emerging that the US Department of Defense and US AFRICOM (Africa Command) have together been acquiring even greater funding for the implementation of their counter-terrorism policies in North Africa and across the Sahara-Sahel on the basis of extensive help from Algeria’s DRS in the form of intelligence which they have known to be false. The word that comes to mind is ‘fraud’. Indeed, as this book reveals, AFRICOM was created in a web of duplicity. Chapters 2 and 5 reveal how its first commander, General William ‘Kip’ Ward, was economical with the truth. In September 2012, a 99-page report, based on a 17-month investigation by the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector-General, revealed that he had taken AFRICOM’s ethos of disingenuousness a step further by his involvement in extensive embezzlement. There are political forces in Washington who have been critical of AFRICOM since its inception. This volume will give them further reason to reflect on whether it really serves the US’s best interests.

Since I began exposing the operations of Algeria’s DRS and its collusion with the US and other Western powers in the GWOT, I have, not surprisingly, received considerable ‘hate mail’ and personal abuse from a number of self-appointed ‘security experts’ and ‘right-wing’ bloggers. I would now merely refer them, along with those others who have dismissed my work on the GWOT in the Sahara, notably Daniel Volman, whose review of The Dark Sahara was so appreciated in Washington, and Le Monde Diplomatique’s editor who refused to publish my commissioned article on ‘What is Happening in the Sahel’ because of concern for Algeria’s DRS, to John Schindler’s publication(s).

Much of the information in this book could not have been collected and verified without extensive help from a host of people in the media, intelligence and security services, other government agencies and, above all, ‘on the ground’ in Algeria, the Sahara and Sahel. Many of these people are Tuareg and Algerians whom I regard as friends. It is the nature of the world in which they live that for their own safety, their identities cannot be revealed. I thank them all. Without their invaluable and often courageous help, I could not have compiled or verified much that is documented in this book.

Postscript: January 2013

Now, media commentators are talking about developments in Mali as a new phase in the GWOT. However, what they are addressing is the outcome of the US’s launch of the GWOT in the Sahara-Sahel in 2003. What we are now seeing, precisely ten years later, is the ‘blow-back’, the region-wide conflagration that I have long predicted.

After ponderous deliberations, on 20 December the UNSC finally authorised the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA) to oust the Islamists. But, with experts claiming that it would take months to train ECOWAS forces, an intervention was not foreseen before September 2013.

The unanimity of the UNSC resolution masked major disagreements between France and the US. While France had long been pushing for military intervention, the US, mindful of its alliance with Algeria, harboured major reservations. On 18 December, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice had called the military intervention plan ‘crap’.

Three weeks later, on 10 January, the Islamists broke out suddenly from their de facto border with southern Mali and occupied the town of Konna on the main road to Bamako. With Mopti and the strategic Sévaré military air base within the Islamists’ sights, only 50 kilometres away, the Malian government turned desperately to France for help.

Why the Islamists made their sudden advance is not yet clear. Although they claimed it was to provoke Mali and the West and to draw France into a trap, my own view is that Iyad ag Ghaly saw it as a means of preventing the further fragmentation of the three main Islamist groupings into a number of smaller, more ethnically and locally based groups. Mokhtar ben Mokhtar (MBM) had already broken away from AQIM on 3 December, while Iyad’s own Ansar al-Din was to fracture decisively within two weeks. Whatever the Islamists’ thinking, it appears to have been a grave miscalculation. France immediately launched heavy air strikes on Konna and Islamist bases across northern Mali: at Gao, Ansongo, Timbuktu, Kidal and elsewhere.

Although the Islamists counterattacked and temporarily occupied the town of Diabali, the advance of French ground troops, supported by the accelerated deployment of ECOWAS and Chadian forces and continuous French air strikes, led to the Islamists being driven out of their front-line positions and also out of both Gao and Timbuktu.

By 27 January, observers were describing their flight as a stampede. In Gao, residents danced in the streets as thousands cheered the liberating troops with shouts of ‘Mali, Mali, France, France’. At Kidal, French bombs reportedly reduced Iyad’s house to rubble. Back in Washington, General Carter Ham was busy apologising for the inept failure of the AFRICOM mission.

On 16 January, ‘terrorists’ attacked the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria. At least 49 foreign nationals and 31 terrorists died. Reportedly undertaken by MBM as revenge for Algeria granting France overfly rights to attack the Islamists in Mali, many experts believe that the attack may have been a DRS false-flag operation that went wrong.

This is not the end of the story. The Islamists have been neither totally eliminated nor yet driven entirely out of northern Mali. The possibility of ‘spillover’ into neighbouring states and human catastrophe is still high. So too is the likelihood of the perpetration of revenge atrocities by Mali’s humiliated army and others. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has confirmed that it will investigate the atrocities committed in northern Mali. In so doing, it will also examine the role of Algeria’s DRS.

ABBREVIATIONS

TIMELINE

Map 1 Northern Africa (Catherine Lawrence)

Map 2 Sahara (west-central) and Sahel (Catherine Lawrence)

1

P2OG: A LONG HISTORY OF FALSE-FLAG TERRORISM

El Para’s Kidnapping of 32 European Tourists

At 5.34 a.m. Baghdad time on 20 March 2003, the US commenced its military invasion of Iraq. In the preceding few weeks, 32 European tourists, in seven separate parties, had disappeared in one of the most remote corners of Algeria’s Saharan desert. The two events were not entirely unrelated.

The region where the tourists disappeared, known as the Piste des Tombeaux (Graveyard Piste) because of the numerous prehistoric tombs scattered along its way, became the Sahara’s Bermuda Triangle: the tourists had disappeared into thin air. For weeks, there were no clear leads on what had happened to them. Rumours and theories abounded. Gradually, however, the evidence, such as it was, pointed towards their having been taken hostage by Islamic extremists belonging to Algeria’s Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), renamed al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007. The leader of the kidnappers was Abderrazak Lamari. Sometimes known as Amari Saifi, or a dozen other aliases, he was usually referred to by his nom de guerre, El Para, a name derived from his time as a parachutist in the Algerian army.

The hostages were held in two groups. One group of 17 was released on 13 May after an Algerian army assault on the kidnappers’ hideout in Gharis, an isolated range in southern Algeria’s mountainous region of Ahaggar. The 15 members of the other group had been held captive in Tamelrik, part of another range on the northern edge of Ahaggar some 300 kilometres to the east of Gharis. After the release of the first group, those who had been held in Tamelrik were taken on a tortuous, weaving journey by their captors, estimated at some 3,000 kilometres, to the remote desert regions of northern Mali where they were finally released on 18 August after the alleged payment of a €5 million ransom.

Even before this second group of hostages had been released, the Bush administration had branded El Para as Osama bin Laden’s ‘man in the Sahara’ and identified the Sahara as a new front in its ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT). After four months in Mali, El Para and his 60 or so terrorists, who had recruited about 15 helpers while in Mali, were driven out of their desert retreats somewhere in the region to the north of Timbuktu and around the Adrar-n-Iforas mountains of north-eastern Mali and reportedly chased by a combination of Malian, Nigerien and Algerian forces, assisted by US Special Forces and aerial reconnaissance, across the desert tracts of north-eastern Mali, the Aïr mountains and Ténéré desert of northern Niger and on into the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad. There, in the first week of March 2004, forces of the Chadian regular army, supported by US aerial reconnaissance, were said to have surrounded them. Forty-three of El Para’s men were reportedly killed in the ensuing battle, with El Para and a handful of followers escaping the carnage, only to fall into the hands of Chadian rebels.

With El Para holed up in Chad, Washington was not short of hyperbole, imagination or downright lies in portraying this new terrorist threat as having spread right across the wastelands of the Sahel, as the southern ‘shore’ of the Sahara is known in Arabic, from Mauritania in the west, through the little known desert lands of Mali, Niger and southern Algeria, to the Tibesti mountains of Chad, with, beyond them, the Sudan, Somalia and, across the waters, the ‘Talibanised’ lands of Afghanistan and the debacle that was Iraq.

Whether the ‘El Para story’ was real or fabricated, the Generals of the US’s European Command (EUCOM), based in Stuttgart but charged with responsibility for most of Africa, were quick to seize the opportunities presented by this new threat. Marine Corps General James (Jim) Jones, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), the Commander of EUCOM and from January 2009 until November 2010 President Obama’s National Security Advisor (NSA), talked enthusiastically about constructing a ‘family of bases’ across Africa. His Deputy Commander, with responsibility for Africa, the gung-ho Air Force General Charles Wald, described the Sahara as a ‘swamp of terror’, a ‘terrorist infestation’ which ‘we need to drain’.¹ Back at the White House, press officers described the Sahara as ‘a magnet for terrorists’. Within proverbial minutes of El Para’s flight across the Sahel becoming public knowledge, Western intelligence and diplomatic sources were claiming to be finding the fingerprints of this new terrorist threat everywhere. For instance, it took only a few days after the Madrid train bombings for that atrocity to be linked to al-Qaeda groups lurking deep in the Sahara.² Western intelligence-security services warned that al-Qaeda bases hidden deep in the world’s largest desert could launch terrorist attacks on Europe.

The US’s military commanders went out of their way to alert Europe to the threat of terrorist activity from North Africa. They pointed explicitly to the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in 2002, suicide bombings in Casablanca that had killed 33 innocent civilians and wounded more than 100 in May 2003, the arrest of al-Qaeda suspects in Morocco and the abduction of the 32 tourists in Algeria. They warned of terrorists from Afghanistan and Pakistan swarming across the vast ungoverned and desolate regions of the Sahara desert, as they described them, and turning the region, Europe’s back door, into another Afghanistan. The GSPC, so the US warned, had already emerged in Europe as an al-Qaeda recruiting organisation and in North Africa it sought nothing less than the overthrow of the Algerian and Mauritanian governments.

* * *

The Dark Sahara

I was in the Ahaggar region of the Algerian Sahara when the 32 tourists were abducted, as well as for much of the time that they were held in captivity. I was also in the region when El Para and his men were reportedly being chased across the Sahel. Neither I nor many of the local Tuareg peoples, with whom I was living at the time, recognised the literally terrifying image of the Sahara that the Bush administration and its military commanders were portraying to the world.

I was able to record and document almost all that happened in these regions of the Sahara and Sahel at that time. The Dark Sahara,³ the prequel to this volume, recounts in detail what happened to the 32 hostages and how both I and my Tuareg companions became increasingly suspicious and aware of the role played in the kidnapping by Algeria’s mukhabarat (police state), especially the ‘dirty tricks’ department of its intelligence and security service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS). As the evidence documented in The Dark Sahara makes abundantly clear, the operation simply could not have been undertaken without the facilitation of the DRS.

Indeed, as François Gèze and Salima Mellah of Algeria-Watch, Algeria’s respected human rights organisation, concluded:

We have undertaken an in depth enquiry into the affair of the European hostages in the Sahara. A close study of the facts shows that there is no other explanation for this operation than the directing of the hostage-taking by the DRS, the Algerian army’s secret service.⁴

As this volume reveals, with