The American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man serve as a safety net for U.S. Afro-Descendants. Just because the U.S. government is not a party to the American Convention on Human Rights, does not mean we can not get a remedy. The Pendo Center for Human Rights and Self-Determination is working series of cases citing numerous violations based on the United States' ongoing infringements of the right to use and occupy their ancestral land in the United States. Join us today as we discuss the movement in Chicago, Detroit, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma to secure property rights and stop constant infringements on U.S. Afro-descendant's land, and cultural, biological, real property rights.
BBHAGSIA President attends session: Anti-Black racism and police brutality: HRDs’ expectations from the UNHRC
BBHAGSIA President attends session: Anti-Black racism and police brutality: HRDs’ expectations from the UNHRC
On November 18, 20202, BBHAGSIA President Siphiwe Baleka attended the session, Anti-Black racism and police brutality: HRDs’ (Human Rights Defenders') expectations from the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) hosted by the International Service of Human Rights. Mr. Baleka’s cousin, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, WI back in August, 2020. The officers have not been brought to justice.
Panellists:
Salimah Hankins, U.S. Human Rights Network
Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, Fondation Frantz Fanon
Douglas Belchior, Uneafro Brasil and Coalizão Negra por Direitos
Rodje Malcom, Jamaicans for Justice
Esther Mamadou, Implementation Team for the International Decade for People of African Descent Spain
Deji Adeyanju, Concerned Nigerians
Below is the discussion that took place in the session chat:
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:29 AM
We must address that the old colonial “masters” have disproportionate influence in the UN at the expense of people of color globally.
From Yolanda Lewis to Everyone: 09:31 AM
We must also address the international laws against genocides, human trafficking, institutionalized slavery, and substitution of the autochthonous. There is no voice because they keep calling the autochthonous black and say their lives matter when black is a brand used for genocide.
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 09:33 AM
The Lineage Restoration Movement is changing this "autochthonous" issue. 750,000 African Americans have taken the African Ancestry test and identified their maternal or paternal lineage ancestry and are now identifying themselves by their genetic ancestry. The movement is growing. https://www.balanta.org/news/lineage-restoration-movement
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 09:34 AM
From USHRN People of African Descent Working Group; Westside Justice Center, US. Sending condolences and strength to the mothers and families of our stolen ones. African descendent families in the U.S. are experiencing the genocide of racist practices via police brutality, police torture and murders, as these mothers have so eloquently shared. And also, to "death by incarceration". Wrongful incarceration, excessive sentencing, life in the criminal punishment system. We need international support and accountability to expose and eradicate the entire racist US law enforcement system. vcw.ushrn@gmail.com
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:35 AM
4 years later the US has not done anything to address the findings of the 2016 visit to the USA.
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 09:35 AM
My cousin is Jacob Blake. He was shot seven times in the back in Kenosha, WI. The officers have not been brought to justice. https://www.balanta.org/.../statement-on-the-shooting-of...
From Yolanda Lewis to Everyone: 09:37 AM
Belligerent occupation is supposed to be temporary - the current occupation is well beyond temporary and unlawful.
From Beverly John to Everyone: 09:37 AM
…and, of course, we have actually increased violations since 2016.
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:37 AM
The Afro Descendants in the USA are currently a colonized people. we need the 1960 decolonization act to apply to us. We have requested to be added to the decolonization list with no response.
From Yolanda Lewis to Everyone: 09:39 AM
According to the Liber Codes Art. 2.
Martial Law does not cease during the hostile occupation, except by special proclamation, ordered by the commander in chief; or by special mention in the treaty of peace concluding the war, when the occupation of a place or territory continues beyond the conclusion of peace as one of the conditions of the same. So long as we keep the racial brand we are not protected private civilians.
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:41 AM
France is a hypocrite like the USA. look at its treatment of the alleged ex colonies. Its time for truth .
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 09:41 AM
Merci Mireille
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:49 AM
Brazil has a majority black population but look at who is in power? State sponsored terrorism similar to what we are experiencing in the USA.
it’s time for wherever we are we must be self determined. Self determination is our only solution
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 09:49 AM
obrigado
From Beverly John to Everyone: 09:49 AM
Brazil, the USA are using the same playbook…
From Fabiana Leibl to Everyone: 09:52 AM
Are there discussions in your countries on concrete measures for police reform or new models for security policies? Is there any specific ask for the OHCHR (either in this report, or moving forward) in that regard?
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:53 AM
We are prisoners of war. a war against black people launched by the papal bull in the 1400’s
From Me to Everyone: 09:55 AM
How can people who are the descendants of the people who survived the middle passage of the criminal European Trans-Atlantic trafficking and enslavement bring charges and receive remedy for the crime of "ethnocide"? What is the process?
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 09:59 AM
All of our ex colonies accepted a Trojan horse upon independence where we kept all these colonial vestiges and we wonder why we see the same system globally.
From Ann Marie Clark to Everyone: 10:00 AM
Thank you to all of the panelists. I am sorry that I have to sign off early.
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:00 AM
@Rodje - this is the same in the US. The system works exactly as planned, centuries ago.
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:01 AM
Originalism
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:03 AM
Can/will this collective consider broadening our human rights advocacy around "police brutality" to "law enforcement" accountability? It is the entire corrupt and racist system we must interrupt.
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:04 AM
how do we contact Rodje Malcolm?
From Yolanda Lewis to Everyone: 10:04 AM
How can we connect with participants and panelists afterwards? yolewis@digitalmobility.net
From Janvieve Williams Comrie to Everyone: 10:05 AM
Will the recording of this call be shared?
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:05 AM
https://systemicjustice.law.harvard.edu/
From Janvieve Williams Comrie to Everyone: 10:05 AM
How can we get in touch with the panelists?
From CO-HOST: Tess Mcevoy (ISHR) to Everyone: 10:06 AM
The recording of this event will be available on ISHR YouTube @ISHRGlobal after the event
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:07 AM
great
From Colleen Daniels to Everyone: 10:08 AM
We are looking at law enforcement expenditure versus national harm reduction budgets. The war on drugs has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown people, it has entrenched police violence as the norm and trillions of dollars has been wasted. In Thailand, for example, redirecting just 1% of the total drug law enforcement budget for 2019, would equal an estimated USD 17,670,895, an amount that would represent more than a fivefold increase on the 2015 allocation for harm reduction (which was the year when the greatest amount of funding was ever allocated to such efforts in Thailand). Redirecting 10% of Thai drug law enforcement budget for 2019 to support harm reduction would represent USD 176,708,957, an amount that could finance more than 10% of the financial gap for harm reduction across the entire planet for a full year. https://www.hri.global/contents/2051 We can and should call for defunding the police and moving resources to community based responses.
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:09 AM
^^^
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:09 AM
https://en.unesco.org/.../people-african-descent-and...
From Lamar Bailey to Everyone: 10:11 AM
Thank you Esther for this information
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:13 AM
thank you Cecile Johnson cecilejohnsonAihr@protonmail.com
From Mireille Fanon-Mendès France to Everyone: 10:14 AM
sorry I have to leave, thank you for organizing this dialogue, very informative and informative; hoping it will be followed by a second « round »
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:15 AM
merci Esther, good to see y'all
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:16 AM
Many thanks to all the panelists and Salma for organizing. Very informative update. Looking forward to next steps
From Beverly John to Everyone: 10:18 AM
Can we collect the hashtags from all the campaigns so we can share them on our respective websites and social media?
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:19 AM
oshe Deji … tell it like is
From Beverly John to Everyone: 10:21 AM
I like that idea…
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:21 AM
old colonial laws in place globally … systemic legal reform is imperative
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:22 AM
^^^
From Lydia Vicente to Everyone: 10:23 AM
You can also hear the voices and testimonies of victims of police brutality, profiling (Spain) with English subtitles here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7OfbU6_qA
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:23 AM
gracias Lydia
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:26 AM
Here is pre-UPR testimony shared last month by directly impacted USHRN members and civil society allies https://www.aclu.org/.../universal-periodic-review-united...
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:28 AM
merci
From Lamar Bailey to Everyone: 10:32 AM
Rodje!! Thank you for speaking THE TRUTH!
From Salimah Hankins (she/they) to Everyone: 10:32 AM
Rodje, great point!
From Beverly John to Everyone: 10:32 AM
Excellent point!
From Ashley Emuka to Everyone: 10:32 AM
Yes Rodje! U.S. oriented reforms, but a global approach is indeed needed (aemuka@uua.org)
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:32 AM
Tell it like it IS ...
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:34 AM
so true
keeping it real . thank you
And a lot of police trained in the USA is from Israel
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:34 AM
well done Rodje
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:34 AM
TEACH
From Beverly John to Everyone: 10:35 AM
Alright now! That’s real talk!
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:35 AM
finally
From Isabelle Mamadou to Everyone: 10:35 AM
Thank you for this point of view Rodje Malcolm! Very interesting
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:35 AM
Some Police in Jamaica and Nigeria are trained by the UK Forces
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:35 AM
Thank you so much Rodje .
From Floriane Borel to Everyone: 10:35 AM
Really great points Rodje!
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:35 AM
not to mention the military
From Lydia Vicente to Everyone: 10:41 AM
COVID-19, systemic racism and global protests - Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent* https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/45/44
From Beverly John to Everyone: 10:42 AM
Excellent response Esther! Thank you.
From Isabelle Mamadou to Everyone: 10:42 AM
Many thanks Esther Mamadou!!
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:43 AM
Great presentation Esther
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:43 AM
good data as usual Esther, muchas gracias
From Lydia Vicente to Everyone: 10:43 AM
Very well said, Esther. We need to move to "enforcement", application, implementation
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:44 AM
^^^
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:44 AM
oui
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:45 AM
I agree on sanctions but all these countries represented here today need to be sanctioned
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:46 AM
... and others here in Europe ...
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:49 AM
https://breatheact.org/.../The-BREATHE-Act-PDF_FINAL3-1.pdf
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:49 AM
Can all participants be sent a link to the video of this event when it is prepared ?
From Salma El Hosseiny - ISHR to Everyone: 10:50 AM
yes
From Yolanda Lewis to Everyone: 10:50 AM
Free resources and training for equity www.digitalmobility.net
From Anastassiya Miller to Everyone: 10:50 AM
Thanks for sharing this
From DANIELLE SERRES to Everyone: 10:50 AM
Thank you Vicki. Very useful to understand what we are talking about
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 10:50 AM
merci
From Sarah Davila-Ruhaak to Everyone: 10:50 AM
Thank you for sharing that.
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:51 AM
Thank you for your excellent presentations Salimah!
From Salimah Hankins (she/they) to Everyone: 10:53 AM
Thank you Douglas and all of the panelists!
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:53 AM
that’s right black organizations want consultative status
From Anastassiya Miller to Everyone: 10:53 AM
And this is a very important point from speakers about acknowledgment - we have to acknowledge first publicly that this issue exists.
From Esther Mamadou to Everyone: 10:54 AM
Thank you ISHR, the panelist and all of you listening to us.
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:54 AM
and can the compilation of these suggestions be shared also
From JOYCE HOPE SCOTT to Everyone: 10:55 AM
The deafening silence of the AU around the state-sanctioned violence against Black citizens in the USA, Brazil, Spain, Nigeria and other countries is quite telling. Should they not be called to task to advocate for immediate reforms in these countries or make their position known? They have a powerful voice as an all-African organization that has yet to speak out on behalf of their brothers and sisters in these diasporas that are suffering police and other kinds of abuse. What are your thoughts on this?
Prof. Joyce Hope Scott/Boston hope2100@yahoo.com
From Mohammed Haque to Everyone: 10:55 AM
From Peace And Justice Alliance, Canada, Since 2009 we have been calling to UN and Int’l organizations to extend their support to halt extra judicial killing, enforced disappearances, corruption, intimidation, custodial death, illegal imprison in Bangladesh. Bangladesh vulnerable people feeling that their voice has been ignored, how you or your organization could assist to the victim people of Bangladesh for their human rights and social justice? Kindly extend your hand to us, www.peaceandjusticealliance.ca; please contact : peaceandjusticealliance@gmail.com; Thanks
From Anastassiya Miller to Everyone: 10:55 AM
Law reforms are very important but also important that people know their rights and can use law to protect themself, so law should works for all
From Tonya Teichert to Everyone: 10:57 AM
Just a note that the "defund the police" slogan is not widely accepted. The premise of reallocation is, but theslogan is being used to ensure that we won't be able to see the Breathe Act come into play.
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:57 AM
also in the US South, many/most of police are Black/African descendants
From Tonya Teichert to Everyone: 10:58 AM
This was an amazing panel and discussion! I really want to see this conversation continue. Thank you ISHR/UNHRC for doing this.
From Vickie Casanova-Willis to Everyone: 10:58 AM
@Tonya Agreed!
From Jackie Zammuto to Everyone: 10:58 AM
excellent panel, thank you!
From Isabelle Mamadou to Everyone: 10:58 AM
Well said Esther! We need effective actions.
From Tonya Teichert to Everyone: 10:59 AM
We also need to make sure that this conversation and the importance of Black lives are not lost on other people's agenda.
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 10:59 AM
yes the silence of the African Union is deafening
From Tonya Teichert to Everyone: 10:59 AM
What I have seen from this single discussion is that there is no place in the world where it is safe or okay to be Black. We need to keep that message front and center.
From Anastassiya Miller to Everyone: 11:00 AM
And also from my personal experience, it is important to use different approaches to talk about this - art can make things different. Like for instance street arts, documentary etc. Like this recently released movie from NYC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEie9YH0E4c...
From Cecile Johnson to Everyone: 11:00 AM
excellent panel. thank you so much for your words and wisdom
From Hugh Bankole Olaiya to Everyone: 11:00 AM
AU got wars in Africa on their plate presently
Panellists:
Salimah Hankins, U.S. Human Rights Network
Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, Fondation Frantz Fanon
Douglas Belchior, Uneafro Brasil and Coalizão Negra por Direitos
Rodje Malcom, Jamaicans for Justice
Esther Mamadou, Implementation Team for the International Decade for People of African Descent Spain
Deji Adeyanju, Concerned Nigerians
+ Videos by Dayana Blanco Acendra,Founder and Director General of Ilex Acción Jurídica (Colombia), and Mothers against Police Brtuality (USA)
Salimah Hankins, is the Interim Executive Director of the U.S. Human Rights Network. Salimah began her engagement with the Network in 2013 and has served as a human rights consultant advising domestic civil and human rights groups on their advocacy efforts before various United Nations human rights bodies. In 2014, Salimah organised the civil society side of the U.S government review before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to this, Salimah has produced the last six annual human rights reports for the Network which chronicles human rights abuses in the United States through the lens of local grassroots groups and national organisations. Salimah has also served as Director of Human Rights for a Brooklyn-based human rights organization working primarily with Black women survivors of sexual violence. Salimah began her legal career as an associate at the ACLU of Maryland, advocating for the rights of low-income communities of color living in Baltimore’s public housing. Admitted to practice law in Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and California, Salimah most recently served as Senior Staff Attorney for Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, CA. While there, she worked on anti-gentrification and displacement issues and employed a community lawyering approach to legal representation. In this role, Salimah worked with community groups to secure a $20 million settlement from Facebook which created an affordable housing fund worth. $75 million. Salimah was given the Marriage Equality Advocate award from the ACLU of Maryland, served as a human rights fellow at the Urban Justice Center, and was selected for the Whitney M. Young fellowship at Columbia University
Mireille Fanon-Mendès France is the President of Foundation Frantz Fanon, former chair of the Working group on People of African descent, prominent anti-racism human rights defender and scholar on racial justice and decoloniality.
Douglas Belchior, is the founder of Uneafro Brasil, a grassroots organisation focused on educating poor, black youth and mobilizing around political issues in Brazil, and the co-founder of Coalizão Negra por Direitos (Black Coalition for Rights in Brazil), which includes more than 150 organisations across the country.
Rodje Malcolm is the Executive Director of Jamaicans for Justice. Jamaicans for Justice is a non-governmental human rights organisation that provides legal services in response to human rights violations, conducts research and advocacy to advance social justice, and conducts training and education programmes to build a more just society. Rodje leads the organization’s strategic direction and advocacy.
Esther Mamadou is a human rights defender expert in forced migration. Her experiences in the fight against Anti-Black racism from a human rights and gender perspective include working in the UK supporting refugees, in Ecuador supporting Afrocolombian women refugees in the context of the armed conflict and in Spain advising on migration and refugee law since 2004. She is currently the coordinator of the Refugee Programme at Movimiento Por La Paz in Valencia. As part of the implementation team of the International Decade for People of African Descent 2015-2014 in Spain, she is supporting the efforts in fighting anti-Black racism and police violence suffered by people of African descent and Africans in the diaspora in Spain and internationally.
Deji Adeyanju is one of the leading human rights defenders in Nigerian who is dedicated to fighting for justice, preservation of democratic ideals, protection of civic space, rights of vulnerable groups and rule of law. He is a former unionist and prominent activist in Nigeria. He has been arrested and jailed severally by the government for leading protesters and fighting for the rights of persecuted journalists and civil rights campaigners. He is the Convener of Concerned Nigerians Group, a civil rights pressure group in Nigeria. Comrade Deji Adeyanju has led the #EndSARS campaign against police brutality in Nigeria with other activists since 2016 until the advocacy gained global attention. He has also led campaigns calling for electoral reforms, #SayNoToSociaMediaBill which is an advocacy against social media regulation in the country and several other campaigns.
Background information:
In response to global protests denouncing systemic racism and police brutality and to a request from the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and Michael Brown, supported by over 600 NGOs, the African Group convened an urgent debate at the Human Rights Council in June 2020. The African Group had proposed the establishment of an international commission of inquiry on system racism and police brutality in the USA and other parts of the world. However, due to immense diplomatic pressure from the USA and its allies, the Council decided to instead mandate the High Commissioner with preparing a report, due in June 2021, on systemic racism, police violence against Africans and people of African descent, and government responses to anti racism protests and share regular updates on the issue at all Council’s sessions.
BBHAGSIA PRESIDENT ATTENDS SESSION OF THE AFRICAN PEER REVIEW MECHANISM (APRM) OF THE AFRICAN UNION
BBHAGSIA President Siphiwe Baleka was asked to Chair the Panel, “Sixth region – Critical thinking and Action Plan towards re-integration at the African Union” at the 2nd Annual Centre for Global Africa (CGA) – APRM Pan African Development Conference on 12-14 November 2020 hosted by the African Peer Review Mechanism of the African Union and the Centre for Global Africa. While Mr. Baleka did not chair the panel, here is what he asked the panel on behalf of the BBHAGSIA and the Lineage Restoration Movement and all black people in the United States whose ancestors survived the criminal European Trans Atlantic trafficking of people of African ancestry and heritage:
From Siphiwe Blake to All Panelists: 11:33 AM
1. There is a perception, as evidenced, for example, the overwhelming number of this conference panelists’ “accents” and birthplaces, that the AU 6th Region initiative is something for African expatriates and not those of us whose ancestors were taken from Africa against their will. Also, most of the outreach is perceived as only interested in getting money through investment and heritage tourism, which is producing some negative pushback. Besides outreach to the HBCUs, what must the Diaspora Division/CIDO do to rectify this?
2. Why, after 17 years, has the African Union failed to seat any of the 20 representatives from the Diaspora in ECOSOCC? What must the Diaspora Division/CIDO do to rectify this and to ensure that such representatives come from the segment of the diaspora that resulted from the slave trade so that that population is not further marginalized at the AU?
My question was especially intended for Ato Teferi Melese, Director for Diaspora Information & Research/ CIDO which is responsible for diaspora affairs at the African Union.
Unfortunately, Ambassador Dr. Salah Siddig Hammad, Head of Governance at the Department of Political Affairs at the African Union, did not answer the questions directly. Instead, he reiterated that the Diaspora is welcome to participate. However, when Dr. Njeri Mwagiru pushed him further, the Ambassador rejected any responsibility and instead, blamed the Diaspora, saying that the Diaspora "wrongly interpreted the meaning of the 6th Region" and that the question should be asked of the Diaspora itself. This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened since 2003 up to the present. Further, here is excerpts from the discussion that occurred in the panel chat room:
From Ronnette H. to Everyone: 11:39 AM
Wow -His choice of words
From Dr. Akwasi Osei to Me, All Panelists: 11:40 AM
Thanks for your question. It truly is a perception; in all my years as an immigrant, it has been descendants of slaves in Africa who have been my teachers, from Molefi Asante, to Maulana Karenga. And the glue is a belief in the pan African mindset. of slaves in America
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 11:43 AM
My question was posed not in the general context of Pan Africanism, bust specifically in the context of AU 6th Region mobilization. I am afraid I have been totally misunderstood.
It was not meant as a launching pad for a history of Pan African contributions, it was meant as a current critique of the actual events/participation that have been held under quasi-official AU/6th Regions banner. The most important question, the initial participation in ECOSOCC, still has not been addressed.
Unfortunately, the Ambassador only reiterated that there is a "welcome". The practice and implementation in official AU organs, like ECOSOCC, evidences otherwise...
From Dr. Akwasi Osei to Me, All Panelists: 11:43 AM
Ok, Siphiwe Sorry if I misread you. How to make concrete the 6th region has been an ongoing issue. The CGA-APRM collaboration is only a way to make it concrete
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 11:44 AM
No worries. This is what dialogue is for. Understanding.
From Ronnette H. to Everyone: 11:45 AM
"Black people" as mentioned by the professor before may change the way their classify themselves and say the term "African" or "African American" instead of just "American" or "black" when speaking of Africans both on the Motherland and American born "diaspora"
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 11:47 AM
Can you provide the email for Ato Teferi Melese?
FYI- 750,000 "black" people have taken the African Ancestry DNA test and are classifying themselves based on their maternal and paternal ancestry.
From Siphiwe Baleka to All Panelists: 11:52 AM
That work was started by civil society in the Diaspora in 2003. CIDO obstructed it. CIDO never provided clear guidelines and left the responsibility to the Diaspora. We created a procedure and hosted elections but it was rejected by CIDO. After 17 years, it is CIDO's responsibility to say clearly what the process for seating the representatives will be. Remember, this was THEIR initiative and after 17 years, there are zero representatives. Not because of lack of effort on the Diaspora's part.
Please review.
Mr. Baleka’s comments on this post are in no way intended to detract from the great work of the Center for Global Africa or of Professor Ezra Aharone at Delaware State University.
The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is just that - a way for African people to review the activities of the African Union. It must be receptive and responsive to critical analysis and input from all members of the African Union's six regions.
Please read Mr. Baleka’s critique of the AU 6t Region Mobilization effort in the United States:
THE AU 6TH REGION DIASPORA INITIATIVE IS FAILING MEMBERS OF THE DIASPORA WHOSE ANCESTORS WERE ENSLAVED IN THE UNITED STATES
ACTUAL PICTURE OF AU ECOSOCC REPRESENTATION
“In the past three AU Summits in June 2015, January 2016 and July 2016, the AU Executive Council issued decisions for the full representation of Member States at the ECOSOCC.
Based on the ECOSOCC Constitution, 152 representatives are to compose the AU ECOSOCC General Assembly: 2 from each Member State; 10 at regional level; 8 at continental level, 20 from the Diaspora; and 6 appointed by special consideration by the Chairperson of the African Union Commission. South Sudan brings the number to 152 with additional two seats. You can read the Report and find out which States have full, half and no representation.
Currently, AU ECOSOCC operates at less than half its full capacity with resultant imbalance in Member State and gender ( contrast with AU Commissioners) representations; consequent demoralization of the disenfranchised, and predictable loss of opportunities.
23 Member States and Continental African Diaspora that steadily contributes to the Gross National Product of Member States through remittances, Diaspora Sovereign bonds, and hometown investments, have no representation. Five Member States have partial representation. There is no special appointee.
Members of the ECOSOCC are duly elected representatives to serve constituencies - the people - as a core mandate in advancing the voice the civil society in realizing the Vision of the AU.
It is realistic to say ECOSOCC Representatives cannot properly advise African Heads of States, make evidence-based recommendations, and implement AU policies without necessarily being hands-on with the people.
Each Member State of the AU is entitled to 2 Seats at the AU ECOSOCC
ECOWAS: Western Africa: 15 Member States: Entitled Representation 30
Full Representation: Benin; Cote D'Ivoire; Ghana; Nigeria; Togo: 10 Representatives.
Partial Representation: Senegal: 1 Representative out of 2.
Total Representatives for Western Region: 11.
No Representation: Burkina Faso; Cape Verde; Gambia; Guinea; Guinea Bissau; Liberia; Mali; Niger; Sierra Leone.Vacancies: 18
Total Vacancies: 19
*Guinea is considered vacant unless verified after an unfortunate news.
Result: Out of 30 expected representation for ECOWAS' 15 Member States, there are 11 Representatives and 19 vacancies. Representation is 37%. ECOWAS is under-presented by 63%.
Southern Africa: 13 Member States: Entitled Representation: 26
Out of 26 expected representation for the Southern Region, there are 8 Representatives and 18 vacancies. Representation is 31%. The Southern Region is under-presented by 69%.
Note: Countries that are officially in SADC but in another Regional Economic Community such as Tanzania (Eastern) and Congo DRC (Central) are not listed in order to avoid duplication and an over count of Member States of the African Union.
Eastern Africa. 11 Member States: Entitled Representation: 22
Full Representation: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia; Sudan; Uganda: 14 Representatives.
Partial Representation: South Sudan (1); Tanzania (1): 2 Representatives out of 4.
Total Representatives: 16.
No Representation: Rwanda; Burundi: 4 Vacancies.
Total Vacancies: 6
Out of 22 expected representation for Eastern Region, there are 16 Representatives and 6 vacancies. Representation is 73%. The Eastern Region is under-presented by 27%.
Central Africa. 9 Member States. Entitled Representation :18.
Full Representation: Cameroon, Congo DRC. 4 Representatives
No Representation: Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea; Gabon, Sao Tome and Principle: 16 Vacancies.
Out of 18 expected representation for the Central African Region, there are 4 Representatives and 16 vacancies. Representation is 22%. The Central Africa Region is under-presented by 78%.
Note: Burundi is accounted for in the Eastern Region.
Northern Africa. 6 Member States. Entitled Representation: 12
Full Representation: Algeria; Egypt; Mauritania; Tunisia; Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic: 10 Representatives:
No Representation: Libya: 2 Vacancies
Out of 12 expected representation for the Northern African Region, there are 10 Representatives and 2 vacancies. Representation is 83%. Northern Africa is under-presented by 17%.
SUMMARY
Total Member States of the African Union: 54
Western Africa: 15; Southern Africa: 13; Eastern Africa: 11; Central Africa: 9; Northern Africa: 6.
Expected Representation per ECOSOCC Constitution based on 2 Representatives from each Member State: 108
Current Representatives: Western Africa: 11; Southern Africa 8; Eastern Africa: 16; Central Africa: 4; Northern Africa: 10:
Out of 108 expected representation for AU Member States, there are 49 representatives and 59 vacancies. Representation is 45%. Member States' Representation is under-presented by 55%.
23 Member States have no representation at the ECOSOCC and 5 have partial representation.
Entitled Representation Per ECOSOCC Constitution at Regional Level: 10
Western: 2 Representatives. Senegalese Nationals.
Southern: 1 Representative. Zambian National.
Eastern: 1 Representative. Sudanese National.
Central African Region: No Representation.
Northern Africa: 2 Representatives. Libyan and Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Nationals.
Current Representatives: 6
Total Vacancies: 4
Out of 10 expected representation at Regional Level, there are 6 Representatives and 4 vacancies. Representation is 60%. Regional Representation is under-presented by 40%.
Entitled Representation Per ECOSOCC Constitution at Continental Level: 8
2 Sudanese Nationals (2 from Eastern Region).
2 South Africa Nationals, 1 Zambian National (3 from the Southern Region).
1 Ghanaian National, 1 Togolese National; 1 Nigerian National (3 from the Western Region)
Current Representatives: 8
Out of 8 expected representation at Continental Level, there are 8 Representatives. There is no vacancy. Representation at the Continental Level is 100%.
Note: CSOs at Continental Levels must be operating in at least 3 Member States.
Entitled Representation Per ECOSOCC Constitution at Member State; Regional and Continental Levels: 126.
Total Current Representation at the Member State; Regional and Continental Levels: 63.
Total Vacancies: 63.
Out of 126 expected representation at Member State, Regional and Continental Levels, there 63 there Representatives and 63 vacancies. Representation is 50% of expected capacity.
Entitled Representation per ECOSOCC Constitution at Diaspora Level: 20
Representation of Contemporary/Continental African Diaspora: Nationals and Members within the Five Regions in Africa: 0
Notes:
The AU defers determination of Membership in a Member State to its 54 Member States. Currently, Member States' Diaspora and Regional Economic Communities' Diaspora policies and outreach cover only Contemporary/Continental African Diaspora Stakeholders.
By virtue of citizenship in Member States, Continental African Diaspora stakeholders are generally eligible for citizenship entitlements, including National and Regional Passports, and the eventual African Passport by 2018 based on the timeline of Agenda 2063.
An increasing number of AU Member States have Diaspora policies and programs under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some countries have Diaspora Committees at the legislative branch. A best practice at Regional level is ECOWAS and its Diaspora with two Conferences held.
Member States' / Regional engagements of their Diaspora Stakeholders have structural coherence. A growing number are granting Dual Citizenship (latest Zambian Diaspora in January 2016) and Voting Rights (latest Kenyan Diaspora voting in 2017.) It is feasible to understand and base methods of representation on the legal and political context of Continental Africa Diaspora.
The AU Executive Council is yet to determine how non-citizens and how people of African descent living outside Africa and not members of any of the Five Regions of the African Union can be legal representatives of the African Union's organs and vote in the processes. The Constitution has not been amended and ratified to provide clear guidance.
The recent clarification that Haiti is not a Member State of the AU but has an "Observer Status" adds to the uncertainty. ECOSOCC Constitution has provision for "Observer Status." Therefore, the legal and political context for the creation of the Sixth Region for all people of African descent living outside Africa, which will cover Historical Diaspora, needs to be determined by the AU.
Historical Diaspora from Caribbean Nations can elect to participate in the Diaspora policies by their governments. Some of the policies, such as Remittances, Skills Transfer, Investments to build their nations and region, are similar to the AU Diaspora Legacy Programs.
Therefore, informed understanding and targeted policies for the three distinguishable groups of Continental African and Historical Diasporas will enable the African Union to make sound policies in alignment with Member States Diaspora Policies; provisions for Historical Diaspora where legally and structurally feasible, and other diplomatic relations with the Caribbean nations since they also have Diaspora programs that are similar or identical to the African Union outreach but with different targeted results from their stakeholders.
Entitled Representation Per ECOSOCC Constitution at Ex-Officio capacity, nominated by the Commission based on special considerations, in consultation with Member States: 6
Representation: 0
Vacancy: 6
Note: There is no indication of Representation in the current Membership of the ECOSOC Second General Assembly.
Out of 152 required representation at the ECOSOCC General Assembly, there are 63 Representatives and 89 vacancies. Representation is 41%. ECOSOCC Representation is under-presented by 59%.
How AU's lack of Coherence, Targeted Policies and Practical Focus to engage Continental African Diaspora results in missed Annual Billions of Dollars while AU depends on aid.
The African Union Diaspora Legacy Programs' Cash Cow and Cash Inflow. African Institute of Remittances (AIR) and Diaspora Sovereign Bonds.
The AU and organs have spent considerable time and effort, mostly with foreign donors/partners, on the implementation of AIR.
According to the AU, remittances are now a bigger source of Africa's capital inflows compared to Foreign Direct Investment or Overseas Development Assistance. The funds provide safety nets for families and keep poorer nations from collapsing into social and financial abyss. The focus of the article goes beyond the monies to families and friends to the potential revenues from reduced fees of sending the money. The revenues can be used for poverty reduction programs in Africa and other sustainable developments. The benefits, then, of using AIR, managed and owned by Africans, cannot be negated or opposed by non-mischief making and non-conflict of interest Africans.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) estimates that, on a country-by-country average, remittances represent 5 per cent of GDP. If one looks at the percentage of a country's GDP that is generated by Diaspora remittance, the poorest and relatively smaller countries show the highest dependence on foreign transfers, for examples: Eritrea (38%), Cape Verde (34%), Liberia (26%) and Burundi (23%). Somalia receives approximately $1 billion worth of diaspora transfers every year but it is not listed on percentage terms because its GDP is unclear.
Zimbabwean Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, in his 2016 National Budget, projected that Diasporan remittances would contribute about $960 million in the fiscal year, adding that a National Diaspora Policy was in the offing. "Zimbabweans are all over the world and they have been playing a sterling role in ensuring the economy does not collapse through their remittances which are almost $1 billion, which is 25% of the $4 billion 2016 National Budget announced'' Minister Chinamasa said.
Researchers admitted that the record of $62 billion US dollars in 2013 is a conservative estimate and maybe half the amount since not all sources of sending money was factored in.
Adams Bodomo, a Hong-Kong based Ghanaian academic researching remittances, indicated that about 75% of all transfers are informal and, therefore, impossible to track. "If we add all that [informal transfers] in, the diaspora remittances would be bigger by a factor" bringing the actual figure anywhere between $120 billion and 160 billion.
The cost of sending money to Africa range from 5-12%. If a very low estimate of 2% - 3% is used on $100 billion annual remittances, that is 2-3 billion dollars to the AU to financing much needed developments.
However, after more than four years, the curious or lamentable dimensions to AIR are that Contemporary/Continental African Diaspora Stakeholders, on whom the sustainability of AIR depends, remain largely clueless while old and new businesses are engaging Contemporary/Continental African Diaspora to send remittances using their services.
This month, a headline blared, Ghanaian diaspora embrace MTN Mobile Money sending with WorldRemit. World Remit was established in 2010. USAID and Western Union partner on another Diaspora program, posing a conflict with AIR since Western Union competes in maintaining and expanding its market niche and growth with the Continental African Diaspora.
In 2014, at a meeting titled, " African Institute for Remittances (AIR) Project Bank Executed Trust Fund (BETF - TF071207) and based on the Minutes of the 5 th Conference of AU Ministers of Finance (CAMF) 21 st - 28 th March 2012, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the followings items were noted in points 13 and 15.
13: While the top priority should remain the reduction of remittance costs, the following priority areas were also suggested: the impact of remittances on M/S' balance of payments; financial sector development (including the financing of rural development); the establishment of a Continental database; Continental advocacy; Diaspora involvement, intra-Africa vs. outgoing remittances; remittances in-kind; intra-operability; the AIR mandate/legitimacy to work on the remittances (as it is actually individual's money); dual nationality; existing best practices; infrastructure building and involvement of the RECs. Beyond AIR, the aforementioned areas should also be addressed within Africa's development agenda.
15: The international issue of African remittances warrants an exclusive focus by an African-led, African-owned and Africa-based institute with a sole focus on this matter.
At the 24 th Ordinary Session of AU January 2014, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Kenya's offer to host AIR was adopted by the AU. On October 22, 2015, Dr Mustapha S. Kaloko, the AUC Commissioner for Social Affairs AUC, hosted the flag hoisting ceremony to launch the Operationalization of AIR in Nairobi, Kenya. Mr Amadou Cisse is AIR's Interim Executive Director of AIR.
Based on a random survey of 521 stakeholders after the AU ECOSOCC Global Africa Diaspora Stakeholder Convention on Nov. 19-22, only 8% had an idea of the purpose of AIR and 15% were misinformed by generated controversies. The rest of the respondents were clueless.
Will it not make good sense for the AU and AIR officials to start engaging those whose monies will make AIR functional? The ECOSOCC Social and Economic Affairs Cluster have valuable roles to play in the domestic mobilizing of the resources by engaging Continental Africa Diaspora.
Each delay means billions are lost in potential revenues.
Engaging Continental African Diaspora also improves another outlet for cash-strapped Africa to gain access to financing from their Diaspora nationals. The alternative financing has been successfully tried and tested by two countries with industrious diaspora populations, Israel and India. Both nations demonstrated significant success issuing Diaspora bonds and raised $32 billion and $11.3 billion respectively.
Diaspora bonds are a form of government debt that targets members of the national community abroad, tapping into a sovereign capital market beyond international investors, foreign direct investment, or foreign loans. It is an attractive source of financing for long-term projects and alleviation of poverty. The success of banking on the "patriotic" Diaspora, when investors are often not keen to accept returns lower than they might get on the open market and the compromising conditions of foreign loans, is a unique feature of the Diaspora Bond.
However, Member States would be presumptuous and mistaken to expect automatic embrace without meaningful changes in the way they relate to the Continental African Diaspora populations whose members are counted on to buy the bonds.
In recent years, a number of Member States have issued Diaspora Bonds with limited success, most notably Kenya and Ethiopia. Major drawbacks are the lack of awareness and reciprocal relationships. Nigeria just increased the level of the Diaspora Bond.
Another suggestion to increase results and overcome hesitancy to individual government is through Diaspora bonds at the Regional levels with Member States pooling their efforts and launching Diaspora Bonds through an African-led institution.
Invariably, for success to happen and to be sustained, effective working relations with Continental African Diaspora, representation at the AU ECOSOCC, collaboration with the pertinent Clusters and Regional Representatives can be instrumental in improving awareness of the products and reducing barriers to outcomes.
Conversation Reparations With NCOBRA: Reparations thru Lineage Restoration
Listen to Balanta B'urassa History and Genealogy Society in America President Siphiwe Baleka and Sofda Latinya Channer discuss the Lineage Restoration Movement and Reparations with Jumoke Ifetayo SE Region Representative of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparation in America (NCOBRA)
FIHANKRA CONTROVERSY: A CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT REPATRIATION TO AFRICA AND DEVELOPMENT MODELS BASED ON BLACK CAPITALISM
In 1994, I was living in Chicago down the street from the Hebrew Israelite community. I used to frequent their Original Soul Vegetarian Restaurant. As documented in my book, From Yale to Rastafari: Letters to My Mom 1995-1998, I had just left Yale University the previous year and was seeking my African roots. At this time, there was great excitement over the Fihankra movement. News was being spread that Ghana was giving free land to African Americans! The first step in getting this free land was registering with a group called Fihankra. This is how I first got involved with a serious repatriation to Africa effort. And that’s pretty much where my involvement with Fihankra began and ended. Something didn’t seem right. The more information I got, the more skeptical I became. As a young, gifted black man with absolutely no money, I was looking for an opportunity to go to Africa and serve - lend my youthful energy and education to building Africa. I was only 23 years old and I had no money, no business, no real skills. All I had was a desire to ESCAPE America and the Pan African dream to unite with my people to make the African continent a world power. The more I looked into Fihankra, however, the more I realized this was not a movement to take young people and give them opportunities in Africa. This was a plan to find wealthy black people to invest in a a real estate program. That’s not exactly what I thought of when I heard the words, “Right of Return”. Why did I have to PAY to go back to the place where my ancestors were taken from? How were the vast majority of people who wanted to repatriate going to be able to afford this????
Meanwhile, at the same time, I became more and more involved with the Rastafari movement and learned about the Shashemane Land Grant that Emperor Haile Selassie gave to African Americans through the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF). I would eventually become a very active member of the EWF and traveled to Ethiopia in 2003 where I spent a year there, much of it on the Shashemane Land Grant. There I saw firsthand the problems and issues concerning Repatriation while also consulting with the government of Ethiopia and the African Union to resolve various immigration and citizenship issues.
On the other side of the continent, in Ghana, the Fihankra land grant was experiencing similar problems. Below are firsthand accounts of what happens when ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT is placed before the HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. To avoid this, the Lineage Restoration Movement has a development model based on restoring the ancestral bonds of the families that were separated through the criminal European trans Atlantic trafficking and enslavement of people from the African Continent. The Lineage Restoration Model is based on
1) identifying your paternal and maternal lineage
2) building a relationship with the members of your ancestral lineage across the Atlantic in their homeland - re-learning your ancestral language and culture that was taken during slavery and organizing welcome home rituals in those villages.
3) helping the communities to determine their OWN development needs first and assisting in those projects
4) build the village first, then repatriate as family that contributed its share to building the village.
This is the development model that the Balanta B’urassa History and Genealogy Society in America has successfully pursued with both the people and government in Guinea Bissau.
HERE IS WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN THIS MODEL IS NOT USED:
Black Star Lions
“October 24, 2013
THE FIHANKRA CONTROVERSY
Many people have heard about Fihankra over the years and while many have come forward to ‘claim’ their free land, many do not really understand what Fihankra is.
The term Fihankra is a Ghanaian expression which means, “When leaving home no goodbyes were said.” Fihankra, then, refers to all Africans from the Diaspora who are descended from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That comprises some maybe 300 million people. That’s just a guess cause these figures could never be totally accurate.
The skin and stool of Fihankra are physical symbols which were purified to represent the apology given by several Ghanaian elders and the welcoming home of those of us out in the Diaspora. This was done in December 1994. It was considered an historic event and everyone was optimistic about the possibilities of joining the entire African family once again.
The land that many people refer to as Fihankra is really called Yeafa Ogyamu and is only one of many parcels of land that were offered, but few know this fact. The land was a ‘gift’ of the Akwamu people to represent their own personal atonement (for slavery). The land was given for all Fihankra, in other words, all of us descendants of the slave trade. The original people who made up the group given the land promised development of many kinds, including, fire station, police station, health facility, schools and various businesses. One family eventually usurped not only the land, but the stool and skin of Fihankra. They call(ed) themselves the 'royal family'. How this happened is not really clear. Some of the key figures are no longer on this plane and cannot answer that question. The man/chief’s name is down on the indenture as CUSTODIAN for the skin and stool of Fihankra.
What should have been an opportunity for African descendants to resettle became a personal business enterprise for one man. The fee for land started at $3,500 for one plot (100ft x 100ft), at a time when plots were leasing for approximately $200 with a 50 year lease. I never really understood whether a person who chose to have 5 plots would have to pay $17,500 or the same $3,500. With stool land the general procedure for acquiring land is to negotiate with the family chief, agree on a price, have the land surveyed and have the land registered. Then you are expected to pay a ‘land rent’ every year, half of which goes to the district assembly and half goes to the chief. This process ensures that each succeeding chief benefits a bit from the original land deal. For further clarity and information, the land rent today, after years of increases, on 6 plots of land is just under $100. On a new acquisition, the land rent on the same six plots may be only $30 (this is every year until an increase).
Back to Fihankra……. Around 2003 the tactics changed. The usurper decided that it would be better to charge a yearly fee and started with a fee of $100. By 2004 it was $200/year and recently we were told the fee was $800/year. The original usurper died in 2008 and many thought that the politics would change and become more favourable and just. Well, it seems we were completely wrong. Now the 'royal family' has decided that this land is their private property and that any others who try to do anything on the land are trespassers!!!!!!! The 'royal family' claims that one of the original custodian’s sons is the heir and successor and therefore it is his land. The landlord (an Akwamu chief) is not in accord with any of this and is working to remove that 'royal family' from the land.
We live ½ mile down the road from Yeafa Ogyamu so we have seen quite a bit in the almost 12 years we have lived here. Some of the things that we have witnessed include:
People pay their yearly fee to secure their plot. When they arrive to commence building they are told they have to pay infrastructure fees (which we are told are $800 per room) and until that is paid they cannot build.
People are not being showed where their plots are unless they pay the infrastructure fee.
The security guards are not allowing workers on the site, blocking any building from going on.
One sister sent close to $20,000 to have her home built and when she arrived all she found was a load of sand, and didn’t get her money back.
One sister paid for 3 plots for herself and 3 plots for her son (at the time the yearly rate was $200). When her husband went to clear the land some men came at him with rifles and told him he had no business to build there.
One man paid an astronomical amount for an incomplete building and when he wasn’t paying the agreed monthly payments, one of the 'royals' broke in and took all his legal documents.
Despite collecting yearly fees the land rent was left unpaid for several years until one land ‘owner’ paid all and started to keep decent records.
One family has been taken to court for trespassing, even though they are land owners. They wanted to have a small business and it was opposed by ……. Yes, you guessed it, the 'royal family’.
Many people have been turned away from acquiring land based on the fact that the ‘royal family’ feels they don’t have “what it takes” to build. Who are they to judge?
After about 18 years of having the land, the only people who are living at Yeafa Ogyamu other than the ‘royal family’ are two families. Another brother has stayed there for a length of 6 months so is basically living there also. After 18 years I would hope that a lot more families would have taken advantage of this gift from the chiefs. From what we know, we have close to or more than 10,000 people living in Ghana from the Caribbean and the united States. 10,000 people and only 8 people are living at Yeafa Ogyamu.
We have tried to stay out of this issue but it’s difficult to watch such injustice occurring and not react. The question is, what to do and how to 'free' the land so that interested parties can come and develop their homes and/or businesses. We are putting this out so that the truth can be known and the correct people come forward to assist in this freeing. Many blessings.”
TESTIMONY OF KHAMEELAH SHABAZZ
“I became involved with Fihankra in 2006 after attending a lecture at Savior's Day in Chicago. The lecture was conducted by Saladdin Ali and Minister Akbar Muhammad. We were presented information and given a professional video marketing Fihankra by telling us we would receive a free plot of land and all we had to do was compete the paperwork and pay $500. I mailed in the $500 plus my last payment for the tour. We were taken to the land, met the chiefs and even toured several bate houses on the property. Now I realize Fihankra was orchestrated. The day after visiting Fihankra I met a young man and his wife who repatriated to Ghana. Right out of the clear blue he came up to me and asked what was I doing in Ghana. I told him about claiming land in Fihankra. He told me not to get involved with that land because there were toooooo many disputes with the chiefs. I took his advice. In 2012 while in Ghana a Ghanaian told me Mr Akpam had been killed and several years ago two other people were murdered and buried on that land. I made the mistake of buying a dream without requesting the business plan and verifying the validity of the project. I still have my papers to the plot of land.”
See the Fihankra Constitution Below
Chieftaincy minister sued over Akwamufie 'chieftaincy tussle'
October 13, 2014 By Myjoyonline.com|Nathan Gadugah
“The Chieftaincy Minister has defended a decision to arrest some persons claiming to be Chief and Queen mother of an African-American community at Akwamufie in the Eastern Region.
Dr Seidu Danaa said the arrest of the claimants to the Fihankra Stool is to restore lasting peace to the area and to ensure that "the right thing is done."
Goloi Osakwe Akpan and his mother, Majewa Akpan were arrested over the weekend for allegedly creating a near chieftaincy crisis in the area.
A third suspect, said to be the leader of a group of African- Americans who settled in Akwamufie in the Eastern region in 1997 was also arrested but granted bail.
Erna Terefe-Kasa, an aunt to one of the arrested persons has challenged the basis for the arrest of the three.
She told Joy News' Dzifa Bampoh the suspects were arrested for holding themselves out as chiefs, something they never did.
She explained her nephew's father had been enstooled as chief in 1997 but after he died the nephew became the "custodian of the stool and skin."
She said at no point did her nephew call himself chief of the area.
Erna Terefe-Kasa has filed a suit against the Minister of Chieftaincy as well as the Attorney General, seeking justice for what she says is the bad treatment being meted out to her family.
But the Chieftaincy Minister told Joy News the conduct of the suspects is reprehensible and if action is not taken the situation could take a turn to the worse.
Dr Danaa told Joy News nobody can hold himself out as chief "when you are not qualified to do so."
He said "if you acquire land, that is good but acquiring a land does not give you a right to be a chief."
According to him, the names as given by Osakwe Akpan and his mother Majewa Akpan are not recognised in the register of chiefs.
The decision to arrest the three is to bring peace to the area, he insisted.”
UNDERSTANDING THE REPARATIONS AND REPATRIATION CONTEXT IN GHANA
According to Toward Reparations Policy In Ghana A study of the Reparations Movement in Ghana, West Africa:
“On Thursday, August 12, 1999 representatives of African descent from Cote d’Ivoire, Namibia, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Jamaica, Tanzania, Zamibia, USA, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Barbados, Martinique, and Guadaloupe gathered in Accra, Ghana at the W. E.B. DuBois Memorial Center for Pan-African Culture for the International Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission Conference under the leadership of the Afrikan World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission (AWRRTC). As a follow-up to this historic meeting, the delegates crafted a declaration that not only called for the immediate cancellation of international debt owed by Africa and all countries of African slave descendants and $777 trillion principal with interest per annum from the nations of Western Europe, the Americas, and institutions who benefited from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism, but also for the unconditional right of return to Africa for the direct descendants of enslaved Africans. In addition, the declaration noted, “the root causes of Africa’s problems today are the enslavement and colonization of Africa and of African people over a 400 year period-through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the illegal occupation by European nations on Africa’s sovereign soil. As a follow-up to the 1999 conference, AWRRTC organized a second International Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission Conference, held July 28-30 2000 in Accra, Ghana, during which delegates drafted an action plan aimed at bringing the tenants central to the 1999 declaration to fruition. The plan called for African nations and those nations of African descent in the Diaspora to immediately stop debt-servicing payments, and “rightfully use debt servicing capital for domestic development” , it also called for the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to allocate four observer seats to representatives of the African Diaspora of North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean regions. The action plan also supported Ghana’s Immigration Bill #573, which would give descendants of those enslaved the right of abode in Ghana, and encouraged Ghana’s traditional rulers to set aside lands for resettlement and development in agriculture, small scale industry, and education.”
In 2007, Ghana launched The Joseph Project. At the time, New African magazine reported,
“Diasporan Africans who have yearned for years to return to the motherland but have not been able to do so, can now have no more excuses to stay back. An innovative programme launched by the Ghanaian government, called The Joseph Project, is all that they need to return home. . . . The Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations (MOTDR) has drawn an elaborate plan to establish Ghana as the homeland for Africans in the Diaspora via an innovative Joseph Project, which takes inspiration from the story of the Biblical Joseph who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brethren but triumphed over all adversity. . . . . The Joseph Project was initiated by the Ghanaian government through the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations in collaboration with the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO). The project is being jointly funded by the Ghana government, UNWTO and UNESCO. . . . Its benefits are enormous, as it seeks to turn a painful past into a World Heritage Property and a major tourism attraction. Statistics show that colonial castles and forts are one of the most sought after tourism attractions in the world. The Joseph Project is basically Ghana's lead role in re-enacting the sordid chattel slavery and its devastating effects on mankind, especially Africans at home and in the Diaspora. . . . The Joseph Project is, therefore, Ghana's invitation to Diasporan Africans to return to the land of their ancestors.
The project was formally launched on 15 February 2007 during a meeting of African tourism ministers in Accra. It is the lead activity in the Akwaaba, Anyemi programme of the Ghana Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations (MOTDR) aimed at reestablishing the African nation as one for all Africans--whether living at home or in the Diaspora. . . . In 1994, the government of President Jerry Rawlings took these ideas a step further when it launched "Emancipation Day" to be celebrated annually in commemoration of the day when African slaves in the Americas, the Caribbean and elsewhere got their freedom. . . . The Ghana government, therefore, intends to use the 50th anniversary of the country's independence, which coincides with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to celebrate "African excellence. . . .”
I went to Ghana in 2007 as part of the Joseph Project and a journalist covering the African Union Grand Debate on the United States of Africa. I, along with many others, criticized the approach by Ghana and other government to make “heritage tourism” the primary aim of engaging the African Diaspora because essentially, it was only a marketing plan aimed at attracting tourism revenue and business development, and was not primarily concerned with issues of justice, human development, and the needs of the African Diaspora for physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual repair. They were attempting to make money the priority.
It is from these two experiences, in Shasheman, Ethiopia, and with Fihankra in Ghana that the inspiration to develop a new model of development was born, and that model has now crystallized in the Lineage Restoration Movement. I saw firsthand what happens when the African Diaspora attempts to create new “ethnic groups” such as Rastafari and Fihankra, and is seen as foreigners moving into a new territory. As an alternative to that model, the Lineage Restoration Movement aims to re-integrate and assimilate the African Diaspora back into the community from which it ACTUALLY came from and once integrated, the village and the repatriate development becomes one and the same. If you would like to learn more about this approach, go to
LINEAGE RESTORATION MOVEMENT
and sign the petition
A BABY NAMED FIHANKRA
by Curtis Murphy
I have been living in Ghana since 2011 and I will say The Government of Ghana have been fair and given AA’s and all Africans who are antecedents of Africans placed into enslavement, an opportunity to be treated as any other African with the same rights as Ghanain citizens... None of you who have posted in this thread from the very person who made the initial post down to the last person that posted before me understand the Ghana/African culture in regards to ones existence. You don't understand the significance of a Ghana Stool. Without an in depth understanding of a stool you are definitely in the "Obuni/foreigner" state of mind. For the past 23 years Ghana government has given us the opportunity to be full equal citizens thru the traditional system, sense and culture that every other African citizen has, but the actions and routes AA’s have taken is the non African based cultural approach to living and being accepted as a citizen here in Ghana. Let me give you an analogy story, to help you understand. A child name "Fihankra" was born/created 23 years ago from the genes of all Africans taken into slavery in the Diaspora.. The Baby, Fihankra was the inheritor of 32,000 acres of land with the rights of every other citizen of Ghana.. The child, was abandoned on the Ghana streets, by the father and the mother could not be found. Some UN-scrupled people visiting Ghana from American, AA's, recognized the child and the potential profits that could be had from "Baby Fihankra" and so they took/kidnapped, the child off the streets and claimed to be Baby Fihankra, parents. They told lies about them being the birth parents of the child. The lie was told, over and over again, to all the AA's that visited Ghana and so AA's believed the story of the kidnappers and not knowing the truth paid little to no attention to "Baby Fihankra" and didn't know the child, their genetic relative was being mistreated, abused, and exploited. In 2011 some AA's genetic researchers discovered the truth about Baby Fihankra and began to fight for the child's freedom from the Kidnappers. In 2014, The Ghana government through official document recognized what had happened and ordered the child to be reunited with her genetic parents and people. The kidnappers refused and were arrested and the child was took away from them. Now the child Fihankra is 23 years old and wish to unite with her genetic family but her genetic family is ignoring her still. Karma came in and a robber murdered the kidnappers, trying to rob them of the money they had scammed by selling Fihankra’s land. The End of this analogy story. We should not expect to be treated as Africans but not come through the traditional African way, that of the "African Stool "? Ghana government is proud of their culture but seem to not explain it to us, AA’s very well, one has to experience it, it seems. The Ghana Government, the Government that was in existence when our ancestors were taken away, That government is still in existence and offer our way back to Africa under the same conditions in which our ancestors left, with land and rights.. We belonged to the Fihankra "Stool and Skin", our ancestors belonged to a "STOOL OR A SKIN" when they left and we are offered the same method of return based on an African identity through a Traditional Stool or skin, but we have neglected to accept it. Those of you who want to be in the know please google the "Tabom People" in Ghana. They were the Africans that repatriated from Brazil in the early part of the 19th century. They were given full rights of Ghana citizens, which included land and the right to vote, and a seat for representation in the government. We can talk more but I have to leave for now, I can say with certainty that when Bill Clinton was president he made an offer to former Ghana president, Jerry Rwalings that if Ghana would deny AA's citizenship, the USA government would pay for the construction of Ghana infrastructure of highways. Thus, Ghana has the " George Bush" Highway named for George Bush to furnish the funds to finish the deal Clinton had started. End of story!!!! Except The Repatriation Movement is threat to US National Security. America will not know what to do if all the descendants of the people they enslaved was to leave. Make a list of all the jobs White Americans have off of the presence of African/Black people in the US...!!! United State Government is proactive... and they noisey as hell...
BBHAGSIA 1st Annual Meeting
“Let us go on with our work and talk a little to the comrades about some principles of our Party and of our struggle. . . . Let us consider, for example, a football team, which is made up of various individuals, eleven persons. Each person has his specific work to do when the football team is playing. The persons differ from each other: different temperaments; often different education, some cannot read or write, others are doctors or engineers; different religion, one might be Moslem, another Catholic, etc. They may even act differently on the political plane, none might be of one Party, another of another. One might be for the status quo, another might be for the opposition. That is ,persons different from each other, each one feeling different from the other, but in the same football team. And if this football team, when it comes to playing, does not succeed in achieving a unity of all its elements, it will not be a football team. Each one can preserve his personality, his ideas, his religion, his personal problems, even a little of his style of play, but they must all obey one thing: they must act together to score goals against any opponent with whom they are playing, that is act around this specific aim of scoring the maximum number of goals against the opponent. They have to form a unity. If they do not do this, there is no football team, there is nothing. This to show you a clear example of unity.”
- Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory
This is a reminder that tonight at 6 PM CST is our 1st Annual Meeting. Siphiwe Baleka is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: BBHAGSIA Mandatory Members Meeting
Time: Oct 14, 2020 06:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 859 8891 7396
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BBGHSIA Meeting Agenda
Date 14 Oct 2020
Time 6:00 pm CST
Type of Meeting: BBGHSIA Formal Business Meeting
Meeting Facilitator: President
Invitees: All BBGHSIA Members
I. Call to order
a) Binham Brassa Pledge
II. Officers Roll Call
III. Approval of minutes from last meeting
IV. Committee Reports
a) Membership Committee
b) Language Preservation Committee
c) Fundraising Committee
d) Aid Committee
e) History committee
V. Executive Board Reports
a) Treasures Report
b) Secretaries Report
c) Vice-Presidents Report
d) President Reports
VI. Open Issues
f) Committee volunteers/chairs
g) Fundraising projects
h) Family narratives
i) Certificates/ Directory
j) Gambia Balanta Students Association
k) Balanta Peoples Union
VII. New business
a) World Africa Day 2021
b) Additional Fundraisers
a) T-Shirts other BBGHSIA Apparel
c) 2nd annual Balanta Day 2021
VIII. Balanta Anthem
IX. Formal Adjournment
X. Virtual Fellowship
Gold and Oil: Petrodollars and the United States Attacks in Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran; Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People
Gold and Oil:
Petrodollars and the United States Attacks in Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran; Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People
“Towards the end of World War II, when it became obvious that the allies were going to win and dictate the post war environment, the major world economic powers met at Bretton Woods, a luxury resort in New Hampshire, in July 1944, and hammered out the Bretton Woods agreement for international finance. The British Pound lost its position as the global trade and reserve currency and its place was taken by the US dollar (part of the price demanded by Roosevelt in exchange for the US entry into the war). Without the economic advantages of being the world’s central currency, Britain was forced to nationalize the Bank of England in 1946. The Bretton Woods agreement was ratified in 1945, and in addition to making the US dollar the global reserve and trade currency, obliged the signatory nations to tie their currencies to the dollar. The nations which ratified Bretton Woods did so on two conditions. The first was that the Federal Reserve would refrain from over-printing the dollar as a means to loot real products and produce from other nations in exchange for ink and paper: basically an imperial tax. That assurance was backed up by the second, which was that the US dollar would always be convertible to gold at $35 per ounce.
Of course , the Federal Reserve, being a private bank and not answerable to the US Government, did start overprinting paper dollars, and much of the perceived prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of foreign nations’ obligations to accept the paper notes as being worth gold at the rate of $35 an ounce. . . . .
In the years leading up to 1970, expenditures in the Vietnam War made it clear to many countries that the US was printing far more money than it had in gold, and in response, they began to ask for their gold back. This, of course, set off a rapid decline in the value of the dollar . . . .
Then in 1970, France looked at the huge pile of paper notes sitting in their vaults, for which real French products like wine and cheese had been traded, and notified the United States government that they would exercise their option under Bretton Woods to return the paper notes for gold at the $35 per ounce exchange rate. Of course, the United States had nowhere near the gold to redeem the paper notes, so on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon ‘temporarily’ suspended the gold convertibility of the US Federal Reserve Notes:
‘I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily, the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets except in amounts and in conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.’
This ‘Nixon Shock’ effectively ended Bretton Woods and many global currencies started to disengage from the US dollar. Worse still, since the United States had collateralized their loans with the nation’s gold reserves, it quickly became apparent that the US Government did not in fact have enough gold to cover its outstanding debts. Foreign nations began to get nervous about their loans to the US and understandably were reluctant to lend any additional money to the United States without some form of collateral. So Richard Nixon started the environmental movement, with the EPA and its various programs such as ‘wilderness zones’, ‘Road-less areas’, ‘Heritage rivers’, ‘Wetlands’, all of which took vast areas of public lands and made them off limits to the American people who were technically the owners of those lands. But Nixon had little concern for the environment, for the real purpose of this land grab under the guise of the environment was to pledge those pristine lands and their vast mineral resources as collateral on the national debt. The plethora of different programs was simply to conceal the true scale of how much American land was being pledged to foreign lenders as collateral on the government’s debts eventually almost 25% of the nation itself.
With open lands for collateral already in short supply, the US Government embarked on a new program to shore up sagging international demand for the dollar. The United States approached the world’s oil producing nations, mostly in the Middle East, and offered them a deal. In exchange for only selling their oil for dollars, the United States would guarantee the military safety of those oil-rich nations.
[Siphiwe note: this is called “extortion” and “gangsterism”]
The oil rich nations would agree to spend and invest their US paper dollars inside the United States, in particular in US Treasury Bonds, redeemable through future generations of US taxpayers. The concept was labelled the ‘petrodollar’. In effect, the US, no longer able to back the dollar with gold, was now backing it with oil. Other peoples’ oil, and the necessity to control those oil nations in order to prop up the dollar has shaped America’s foreign policy in the region ever since. . . .
This was not a temporary suspension as Nixon claimed, but rather a permanent default, and for the rest of the world who had entrusted the United States with their gold, it was outright theft. In 1973, President Nixon asked King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to accept only US dollars in payment for oil, and to invest any excess profits in US Treasury Bonds, Notes and Bills. In return, Nixon offered military protection for Saudi oil fields. The same offer was extended to each of the key oil-producing countries, and by 1975 every member of OPEC had agreed to only sell their oil in US dollars.
The act of moving the dollar off gold and tying it to foreign oil, instantly forced every oil-importing country in the world to maintain a constant supply of Federal Reserve paper, and in order to get that paper, whey would have to send real physical goods to America. . . . Paper went out, everything America needed came in, and the United States got very, very rich as a result. It was the largest financial con in recorded history.
The Arms Race of the Cold War was a game of poker. Military Expenditures were the chips, and the US had an endless supply of chips. With the Petro Dollar under its belt, it was able to raise the stakes higher and higher, outspending every other country on the planet, until eventually US military expenditure surpassed that of all of the other nations in the world combined - the Soviet Union never had a chance. . . .
The collapse of the communist bloc in 1991 removed the last counterbalance to American military might. The United States was now an undisputed Super-power with no rival. . . . Within that same year, the US invaded Iraq in the first Gulf War, and after crushing the Iraqi military, and destroying their infrastructure, including hospitals and water-purification plants, crippling sanctions were imposed which prevented Iraq’s infrastructure from being rebuilt.
These sanctions which were initiated by Bush Senior, and sustained throughout the entire Clinton administration, lasted for over a decade and were estimated to have killed more than five hundred thousand children . . . .
But as America’s manufacturing and agriculture has declined, the oil producing nations faced a dilemma. Those piles of US Federal Reserve notes were not able to purchase much from the United States because the United States had little (other than real estate) which anyone wanted to buy.
Europe’s cars and aircraft were superior and less costly, while experiments with GMO food crops led to nations refusing to buy US food exports. Israel’s constant belligerence against its neighbors caused them to wonder if the US could actually keep up their end of the petrodollar arrangement. Oil-producing nations started to talk of selling their oil for whatever currency the purchasers chose to use. Iraq, already hostile to the United States, following Desert Storm, demanded the right to sell their oil for Euros, in 2000, and the United Nations agreed to allow it in 2002 under the Oil for Food program instituted following Desert Storm. . . . In response, the US Government with the assistance of mainstream media, began to build up a mass propaganda campaign claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to use them. . . . One year later the United States re-invaded Iraq, lynched Saddam Hussein, and placed Iraq’s oil back on the world market only for US dollars.
Following 9-11, the US policy shift away from being an impartial broker of peace in the Middle East to one of unquestioned support for Israel’s aggressions, only further eroded confidence in the Petrodollar deal and even more oil-producing nations started openly talking of oil trade for other global currencies.
Over in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi had instituted a state-owned central bank and a value-based trade currency, the Gold Dinar. Gaddafi announced that Libya’s oil was for sale, but only for the gold Dinar. Other African nations, seeing the rise of the Gold Dinar and the Euro, even as the US dollar continued its inflation-driven decline, flocked to the new Libyan currency for trade. This move had the potential to seriously undermine the global hegemony of the dollar. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a ‘threat’ to the financial security of the world.
According to General Wesley Clark, the master plan for the ‘dollarification’ of the world’s oil nations included seven targets, Irag; Syria; Lebanon; Libya; Somalia; Sudan; and Iran (Venezuela- which dared to sell their oil to China for the Yuan - is a late 8th addition). . . . On 2nd March 2007, US General Wesley Clark said,
‘So I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said “oh it’s worse than that’. He said as he reached over on his desk and picked up a piece of paper and he said “I just got this down from upstairs today (meaning from the Secretary of Defense’s Office), this is a memo which describes how we are going to take out seven countries in five years, starting off with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran.’
What is notable about the original seven nations originally targeted by the US is that none of them are members of the Bank for International Settlements, the private central bankers private central bank, located in Switzerland. This meant that these nations were deciding for themselves how to run their nations’ economies, rather than submit to the private international banks. So, the United States invaded Libya, brutally murdered Gaddafi“
According to Gold Dinar: the Real Reason Behind Gaddafi’s Murder
"In 2009, Colonel Gaddafi, then President of the African Union, suggested to the States of the African continent to switch to a new currency, independent of the American dollar: the gold dinar.
The objective of this new currency was to divert oil revenues towards state-controlled funds rather than American banks. In other words, to stop using the dollar for oil transactions. Countries such as Nigeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Angola were ready to change their currencies. Unfortunately in March 2011, the NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya in the name of freedom….
Free water, almost free gasoline, free health system and free education were commonplace for Libyans under Gaddafi’s dictatorship.
The leader, who has been in power for 41 years, has managed to gain the support of all the major tribes and buy social peace through radical measures and a policy of shared oil revenues.
Jihadism, the number one enemy of the West, Gaddafi eliminated it with Napalm in the 1990s. Although he financed many armed groups in the Sahel, Libya itself was a stable country where the risk of being kidnapped or even murdered by an armed militia was non-existent.
With an excellent management of oil revenues, the Libyan state had managed to store hundreds of tons of gold (143 tons according to WikiLeaks) and the same amount in silver.
All these resources were going to make Libya the most influential country in Africa, supplanting France for example.
Gaddafi wanted to avoid American influence in his oil transactions by using this gold. He launched the gold dinar project, and other major African governments were ready to support him in this project. It was both an African dream and a nightmare for the West’s financial system.
The end of the African dream
This information was discovered through Hillary Clinton’s electronic mailbox. One of the 3000 emails showed NATO’s willingness to overthrow Gaddafi’s government. NATO mainly wanted to to neutralize the African gold currency supported by Libyan oil reserves.
At the beginning of March, the Libyan army and the many militias loyal to the government had already crushed the rebellion, thanks to their numbers and equipment. However, with Western intervention, the dream of a unified monetary system based on gold and independent of the dollar perished…’
“(the object lesson of Saddam’s lynching not being enough of a message, apparently), [the US] imposed a private central bank, and returned Libya’s oil output to dollars only. The gold that was to have been made into the Gold Dinars is, as of last report, unaccounted for.
Now the banker’s gun sights are on Iran, which dares to have a government controlled central bak and sell their oil for whatever currency they choose. The war agenda is, as always, to force Iran’s oil to be sold only for dollars and to force them to accept a privately owned central bank.
The German government just recently asked for the return of some of their gold bullion from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve. France has said it will take 5 years to return Germany’s gold. The United States has said the will need 8 years to return Germany’s gold. This suggests strongly that the Bank of France and the NY Federal Reserve have used the deposited gold for other purposes, and they are scrambling to find new gold to cover the shortfall and prevent a gold run.
NOTICE THAT MALI ISN’T ON THE LIST…..
![In 2013, gold exports were of the order of 67.4 tonnes, nearly a 50% increase over the production in 2012 which is attributed mainly to the contribution of 20.7 tonnes made by artisanal mining.[1][3] Gold, followed by cotton, is the top export …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d8396d6e57474059d685116/1602529820992-8B2RJ1EE25W7TXJMWP3H/Mali+gold+mining.png)
In 2013, gold exports were of the order of 67.4 tonnes, nearly a 50% increase over the production in 2012 which is attributed mainly to the contribution of 20.7 tonnes made by artisanal mining.[1][3] Gold, followed by cotton, is the top export item making a large contribution to the economy of the country.[4]
So France suddenly invades Mali, ostensibly to combat Al Queda, with the US joining in.
Mali just happens to be one of the world’s largest gold producers with gold accounting for 80% of Mali exports. War for the bankers does not get more obvious than that!
Americans have been raised by a public school system and media that constantly assures them that the reasons for all these wars and assassinations are many and varied. The US claims to bring democracy to the conquered lands (they haven’t). The usual result of a US overthrow is the imposition of a dictatorship - such as the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and the imposition of the Shah - or the 1973 CIA overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, and the imposition of Agusto Pinochet) - or to save a people from a cruel oppressor, revenge for 9-11; or that tired worn-out catch all excuse for invasion: ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Assassinations are always passed off as ‘crazed lone nuts’ to obscure the real agenda.
The real agenda is simple. It is enslavement of the people by the creation of a false sense of obligation.
That obligation is false because the private Central Banking System, by design, always creates more debt than money with which to repay the debt. Private Central Banking is not Science, it is a Religion; a set of arbitrary rules created to benefit the Priesthood, meaning the owners of the Private Central Bank.
The fraud persists, with often lethal results, because the people are tricked into believing that this is the way life is supposed to be and no alternative exists or should be dreamed of. The same was true of two earlier systems of enslavement, Rule by Divine Right and Slavery, both of which ar systems designed to trick people into obedience, and both of which are now recognized by modern civilization as illegitimate.
Now we are entering a time in human history where we will recognize that ‘rule by debt’, or rule by private Central Bankers issuing the public currency as a loan at interest, is equally illegitimate.”
It only works as long as people allow themselves to believe that this is the way life is supposed to be. . . .
Behind all these wars, all these assassinations, the hundred million horrible deaths from all the wars lies a single policy of dictatorship. The private central bankers allow rulers to rule only on the condition that the people of a nation remain enslaved to the private central banks. Failing that, any ruler will be killed, and their nations invaded by those other nations which are already enslaved to private central banks.
The so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ we read about on the corporate media is really a war between banking systems, with the private central bankers forcing themselves on to the rest of the world, no matter how many millions must die for it. Indeed the constant hatemongering against Muslims lies in a simple fact. Like the ancient Christians (prior to the Knight’s Templar’s private banking system) Muslims forbid usury (the lending of money at interest), and that is the reason why the American government and media insist that Muslims must be converted or killed. They refuse to submit to currencies issued at interest. They refuse to be debt slaves.
Flag waving and propaganda aside, all modern wars are wars by and for the private bankers, fought and bled for by third parties unaware of the true reason why they are expected to be crippled and killed. The process is quite simple. As soon as the Private Central Bank issues its currency as a loan at interest, the public is forced deeper and deeper into debt. When the people are reluctant to borrow any more, that is when the Keynesian economists demand the government borrow more to keep the pyramid scheme working. When both the people and government refuse to borrow any more, that is when the wars start, to plunge everyone even deeper into debt to pay for the war, then after the war to borrow more to rebuild. When the war is over, the people have about the same as they did before the war, except the graveyards are far larger and everyone is in debt to the private bankers for the next century. This is why Brown Brothers Harriman in New York funded the rise of Adolf Hitler. . . .
Those who control the United States understand that if even a few countries begin to sell their oil in another currency, it will set off a chain reaction and the dollar will collapse. They understand that there is absolutely nothing else holding p the value of the dollar at this point, and so does the rest of the world. But instead of accepting the fact that the dollar is nearing the end of it’s life-span, the ‘powers that be’ have made a calculated gambit. They have decided to use the brute force of the US military to crush each and every resistant State in Africa and the Middle East.” (Excerpt taken from Meet Your Strawman And Whatever You Want to Know).
Understanding Obama’s AFRICOM Betrayal of African People
It is now possible to put into context the Presidency of Barack Obama and properly evaluate the foreign policy objectives that the UNITED STATES CORPORATION used him to achieve.
According to Voltairenet.org,
“Created in 2007 on the findings of an Israëli study, AfriCom (US Command for Africa) has never yet managed to install its headquarters on the continent. This structure carries out anti-terrorist operations from Germany, with the support of France in the region of the Sahel. In return, US and French transnational companies conserve a privileged access to African prime materials. . . . In Djibouti is situated Camp Lemonnier, the huge US base from which the Horn of Africa Joint Task Force has been operating since 2001. The Task Force is composed of 4,000 specialists in top secret missions, including targeted assassinations by commandos or killer drones, particularly in Yemen and Somalia. While aircraft and helicopters for these special operations take off from Camp Lemonnier, the drones have been concentrated at Chabelley airport, a dozen kilometres from the capital. New hangars are being built there, and the work has been handed by the Pentagon to a company from Catania which is already employed for the work taking place in Sigonella, the main drones base used by the USA and NATO for operations in Africa and the Greater Middle East.
There is also a Japanese and a French base in Djibouti, which house German and Spanish troops. A Chinese military base was added in 2017, the only one outside of its national territory. Apart from certain basic logistical functions, such as the housing of the crews of the military vessels that escort merchant ships, and warehouses for the storage of supplies, it represents a significant signal of the growing Chinese presence in Africa.
This is an essentially economic presence, to which the United States and other Western powers oppose a growing military presence. This accounts for the intensification of operations led by AfriCom (US Command for Africa), which has two important subordinate Commands in Italy - the US Army Africa, at the Ederle de Vicence barracks ; the US Naval Forces Europe-Africa, whose headquarters is at the Capodichino base in Naples, composed of the warships of the Sixth Fleet based in Gaeta.
In the same strategic infrastructure is another US base for armed drones, which is under construction in Agadez, Niger, where the Pentagon already uses air base 101 in Niamey for drones. This base serves for military operations that the USA has been leading for years, with France in the Sahel, especially in Mali, Niger and Chad. President Giuseppe Conte will be visiting the last two bases as from tomorrow.
These countries are amongst the poorest in the world, but very rich in prime materials - coltan, uranium, gold, oil and many others - exploited by transnational companies based in the USA and in France, who are increasingly afraid of the competition from Chinese companies who offer African countries much more favourable conditions.”
On February 19, 2008, the Ligali website reported,
“America has been forced to host AFRICOM - its military central command centre for Africa - in Germany after rejection by members of the African Union.
The American attempt to secure Africa’s natural resources by force faced a major setback after the African Union rejected US plans to increase its military footprint in the Continent. America claims it was seeking to help build the defence capabilities of African nations. This spurious claim was rejected by most African leaders who believe an enhanced US military presence in Africa would be extremely damaging to Africa’s own security and future development. Liberia, which originally accepted the proposals is now reported to have rejected the imperial plans alongside opposition from nations such as Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa.
There are already concerns with Americas existing military involvement in Africa, from its closeness with the presidents of Ethiopia and Eritrea and the role it played in the crisis facing Somalia. America which is increasingly viewing itself in a new ‘cold war’ with China who is arming the Khartoum’s regimes war in Sudan is desperate to maintain its stranglehold on Africa’s natural resources. To this end, President Bush recently embarked on a five day tour to secure US long term strategic interests and cement links with those leaders amenable to neo-colonial intervention. Arriving in Benin he visited Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia. Unsuprisingly his Africom strategy has the support of the presidential hopeful Barak Obama, speaking on the matter Obama said; "There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force. Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action.
Theresa Whelan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs claims that the Africom is needed to help develop and manage military training and exercises with African troops.
Whelan rejected revelations that America was motivated in anyway by its desire to secure African oil deposits calling such accusations ‘illogical’.
She warned Africa that if it does not accept Africom then the United States would sever its ‘military to military’ defence relations with the Continent. Whelan admits that America had hoped to be able to establish a presence on the Continent but claims they had always planned to have it partially based in Stuttgart to ferment links with their European command. The US government maintains its position that Africom was solely about providing a base for ‘military training with African nations’. Africom's commander, General William E. "Kip" Ward, said Africom was not about ‘militarisation’."
On June 24, 2012, Voltairenet. org reported,
“The White House has put in writing its policies for sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is, there’s hardly a word of truth in the document, and not a single mention of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command on the continent. The presidential paper repeats Obama’s 2009 lecture to Africans on “good governance.” He also warned that they avoid the “excuses” of blaming “neocolonialism” and “racism” for their problems. Meanwhile, AFRICOM is “positioning the U.S. to launch coups at will against African civilian, or even military, leaders that fall out of favor with Washington. . . .
The White House report does not once mention AFRICOM, the U.S. military command that has pushed aside the State Department as the primary institution of U.S. policy and power in sub-Saharan Africa. The report comes three years after Obama’s trip to Ghana, when he declared that Africa’s biggest problems were “corruption and poor governance,” rather than five centuries (and still counting) of Euro-American predation. African complaints about “neo-colonialism, or [that] the West has been oppressive, or racism” are mere “excuses,” said Obama, in a performance that scholar Ama Biney described as “imperialist lecturing” and “Obama-speak.”
Having effectively abandoned even the pretense of competing with China, India, Brazil and other rising economic powers in Africa, the Obama regime has turned the continent into a battleground, where AFRICOM is the principle interlocutor with the region’s governments and peoples. In addition to conducting year-round military maneuvers with nearly every nation on the continent, AFRICOM handles much of U.S. food distribution and medical aid to the region, while the CIA monitors Africa’s vast expanses with a network of secret airstrips and surveillance aircraft.
The White House report, a document of pure obfuscation, puts U.S. efforts to “strengthen democratic institutions” at the top of the list. It rehashes Obama’s Ghana declaration, that “Africa does not need strong men, it needs strong institutions.” Yet, Washington’s closest allies in sub-Saharan Africa are Paul Kagame, the minority Tutsi warlord in Rwanda; Yoweri Museveni, who rose to power with a guerilla army of child-soldiers and locked up two million Acholi people in concentration camps; and Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi, a military dictator who heads an ethnic-based regime. Rwanda and Uganda are the principal culprits in the deaths of six million Congolese since 1996, the worst genocide since World War Two, while Zenawi’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, instigated by the United States, led to “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur,” according to United Nations observers.
The text of the president’s statement on the “new” sub-Saharan strategy warns that “the United States will not stand idly by when actors threaten legitimately elected governments or manipulate the fairness and integrity of democratic processes, and we will stand in steady partnership with those who are committed to the principles of equality, justice, and the rule of law.” In the context of Obama’s humanitarian military intervention doctrine – and especially since AFRICOM led NATO’s regime change in Libya – this is war talk. . . .
Obama brags that: “We have been the world’s leader in responding to humanitarian crises, including in the Horn of Africa, while at the same time working with our African partners to promote resilience and prevent future crises.” In reality, George Bush and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi ended Somalia’s brief period of peace under an Islamic Courts regime, plunged the country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa,” and then, under Obama, withheld food from Somalia in order to weaken the Shabaab resistance, all of which set the stage for an even worse famine in 2011, killing hundreds of thousands. Such realities give the lie to Obama’s promise to “work to prevent the weakening or collapse of local economies, protect livestock, promote sustainable access to clean water, and invest in programs that reduce community-level vulnerability to man-made and natural disasters.” AFRICOM and U.S. policy are the disasters afflicting the continent; they are part of the disease, not the cure. . . .
Obama assures Africa that: “The United States will seek to expand adherence to the principle of civilian control of the military.” In practice, AFRICOM has cultivated a “soldier-to-soldier” policy between U.S. troops and African militaries that extends from “general-to-general” to “colonel-to-colonel” and down the ranks, positioning the U.S. to launch coups at will against African civilian, or even military, leaders that fall out of favor with Washington. As Dan Glazebrook recently wrote in The Guardian, America’s ‘great hope is that the African Union’s forces can be subordinated to a chain of command headed by AFRICOM.’”
Two years later, Foreign Policy in Focus reported,
“While the media attention in the United States is riveted on the Israeli war against Gaza, on the ISIS offensive in Iraq and Syria, accomplished for the most part with guerrillas trained by U.S. allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel), and the ongoing attempts to consolidate the neoliberal hold on the Ukraine in the name of “democracy,” some other global developments have gone largely unnoticed.
Among them is the August 6, 2014 announcement of a new Obama Administration “initiative” for Africa. Actually there are two: the so-called “Security Governance Initiative for Africa” (SGI) on the one hand and “the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership, called A-PREP for short, on the other.
SGI involves providing aid – with strings attached as usual – to Ghana, Kenya, Mali Niger, Nigeria and Tunisia. On one level SGI is a response to the threat to African development posed by Islamic radical groups Al Qaeda of the Maghreb (AQIM), Al Shabbab, and Boko Haram. But its ulterior motive – actually quite openly stated – is to make the targeted African countries more secure for foreign investment, thus, as the old cliché goes, killing two birds with one stone. The stated goal of the program is to insure the security environment of these countries as a way of encouraging future U.S. investment, and as Tunisian commentator Yassine Bellamine notes in a recent article at the Tunisian website Nawaat.org “as a way to play a more active role in what is shaping up to be a new investor El dorado in the near future, Africa.” (Author’s translation.)
A-PREP has a somewhat different, but related goal: to “address short-falls in Africa-based peace keeping forces.” Noting that a number of recent crises (Central African Republic, Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Kenya, even Algeria to name a few) have exposed the weaknesses of emergency-ready African forces, A-PREP will focus uniquely on military training and assistance to six African countries: Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to try to improve “rapid peace keeping.”
Both poorly funded and in competition with other U.S. sponsored initiatives, A-PREP is essentially an attempt to make African militaries more responsive to security emergencies. The funding of SGI in the first year entails a mere $33 million to be divided between the six countries involved. Not much really. A-PREP will disperse some $110 million to the countries it covers, perhaps a bit more that SGI funding, but in the end, not all that much. Perhaps the funding will increase in the coming years?
SGI is in some ways a more classic counter-insurgency program whose goal is to strengthen economic development by strengthening security. At least “in principle” it tries to coordinate private sector foreign investors with the African militaries and U.S. military advisers so as to make security measures a kind of team effort, thus sharing the financial and human risks. These programs appear to be a way to somewhat soften U.S. security moves into Africa after a period in which African nations have become somewhat wary of what might be called “the AFRICOM approach.” It comes after a several year effort to find an African home to host AFRICOM has failed.
To sweeten the pot, allay fears and to involve the corporations themselves in the business of securing their own profits, these initiatives have been undertaken. . . .
Both initiative were announced at the tail end of a Brookings’ Institute conference held two days prior, on August 4, 2014 entitled, “The Game Has Changed: The New Landscape for Innovation and Business in Africa” that featured a gathering of international business people, government officials, and academics concerned with Africa. The main concern of this corporate-state-academic shindig was to insure possible investors – U.S. companies, it is claimed, have already invested some $33 billion in Africa – that the security situation on the continent will be assured. As a part of this “happy think” the conference assured its participants, a bit too often it appears, that the economic and social situation on the continent is improving some and that life in general is getting better, a position that requires considerable public relations skills to substantiate.
No one stated it better than Mirangi Kimenyi, Brookings’ own Africa specialist in opening the conference:
“The game indeed has changed. We have a new Africa and the focus is no longer clamoring for aid. Today we are talking about investment, entrepreneurial-ship, innovation and so-on.”
The basis for this untoward optimism was sketched out by Yassine Bellamine (cited above) that gives projected growth rates (based mostly on African Development Bank stats) for a number of African countries. Projected growth rates for Ghana in 2015 today stand at 8%, Kenya in 2014 at 5.7%, Mali at 6.7%. The African Development Bank also predicts a turnaround in the Tunisian economy from its -1.8% shrinkage in the coming years. . . .
Bellaine goes on to indicate that initiatives like SGI have ulterior motives, noting that they have more to do with providing a safe environment for multinational corporate investment, than providing security for the nations involved. It is true that SGI gives priority to U.S. economic interests and strategic goals in Africa and at the same time, will press the governments involved to make the necessary legal and economic reforms to make foreign investment “more efficient,” with all that this implies. . . .
In the case of Africa, strengthening the “efficiency” (think of what that has meant historically) of African militaries is a part of a strategy of minimizing U.S. “boots on the ground” – to use the cliche to avoid the term “military intervention” – by trying to give Africans more of a role in supporting foreign corporate penetration of the continent as if it were in their own interest. It is based on what is now a well-worn fact that Third World militaries love getting high-tech military toys that kill. It is also based on another well-worn tradition: if a world power cannot win “the hearts and minds” of the people of Third World countries that might have some economic or strategic importance, at least through military aid, the countries’ generals – a thorough corrupt and undemocratic lot – can be bought off.
De Waal and Mohammad rightly point out that as a result of SGI-, A-PREP- type programs that the United States is “in effect providing foreign tutelage to the militarization of Africa’s politics, which undermines peace and democracy throughout the continent. American diplomacy is becoming a handmaiden to Africa’s generals.” And they might have added to multi-national energy and mining interests that are tripping over each other’s feet to exploit an already over-exploited continent.
For the second time in eight years, a U.S.-trained military officer has emerged as the leader of a coup in Mali, sparking new questions about the effectiveness of security training programs that Canada has repeatedly supported.
Colonel Assimi Goita, who participated in a U.S.-led training exercise last year and graduated from a separate U.S. training course in 2016, has declared himself the chairman of the junta that arrested Mali’s president and prime minister and seized control of the West African country this week (august 20, 2020).
A coup in Mali in 2012 was led by Captain Amadou Sanogo, who received U.S. training on six separate occasions. His involvement in that coup was “very worrisome for us,” the commander of the U.S. Africa Command acknowledged later. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-for-second-time-in-eight-years-a-coup-in-mali-has-been-led-by-a-us/
This analysis is, as the British say, “spot on.” It builds on at least two other political and human rights failures of the post-World War II period: U.S. policy in support of Latin American military dictators in the 1970s and 1980s – the Pinochets, the Argentinian, Brazilian, Paraguayan juntas, the El Salvadoran death squads of which Ronald Reagan was so fond. The other example is what is referred to as “Francafrique”, the French effort to keep the fruits of its colonial heritage in Africa alive by supporting military dictatorships in such places as Chad, Mauritania, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, to say nothing of Algeria.
De Waal and Mohammed don’t stop here. They underline the dangers to development and democracy of supporting the armed forces in Africa, concerns that have not resonated in a Washington, DC fixated on competing with China, India, and European allies like France, Italy and others in that mad race to control Africa’s oil, gas and mineral wealth. Using South Sudan and Nigeria as examples, they remind NY Times readers, and Washington policymakers the degree to which U.S. military aid to Africa have disappeared down “black holes,” essentially referencing the extraordinary levels of corruption, outright government theft that has accompanied such programs where aid money is shuttled into the private accounts of ruling generals, siphoning off millions “while much of the population (of the countries involved) lives in deep poverty.” Frankly there is a whole list of other African countries that could have been cited, the recipients of military aid from the United States, France and other countries.”
Here it would be helpful to recall Obama’s family connection to the CIA. Stanley Armour Dunham (March 23, 1918 – February 8, 1992) was the maternal grandfather of the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama. He and his wife Madelyn Payne Dunham raised Obama from the age of 10 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Stanley Dunham's distant cousins include six U.S. presidents: James Madison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Through a common ancestor, Mareen Duvall, a wealthy Huguenot merchant who emigrated to Maryland in the 1650s, Dunham is related to former Vice-President Dick Cheney (an eighth cousin once removed). Through another common ancestor, Hans Gutknecht, a German Swiss from Bischwiller, Alsace whose three sons resettled in Germantown, Pennsylvania as well as the Kentucky frontier in the mid-18th century, Dunham is President Harry S. Truman's fourth cousin, twice removed.
How did Barack Obama, who shares no lineage history with African Americans, become the African American hero? Something's going on here.
The Story of Obama: All in The Company states,
“From 1983-84, Barack Obama worked as Editor at Business Internation Corporation, a Business International Corporation, a known CIA front company.
President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.
Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.
The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.
CIA-airlifted to Hawaii, Barack Obama Sr., with leis, stands with Stanley Dunham, President Obama’s grandfather, on his right.
The CIA allegedly recruited Tom M’Boya in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”
KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”
Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. . . .
Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.
Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.
CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother. . . .
In 1967, after arriving in Indonesia with Obama, Jr., Dunham began teaching English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra. Jones left as East-West Center chancellor in 1968.
In fact, Obama’s mother was teaching English for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand. The USAID program was known as Lembaga Pendidikan Pembinaan Manajemen. Obama’s mother, painted as a free spirit and a “sixties child” by President Obama and people who claimed they knew her in Hawaii and Indonesia, had a curriculum vitae in Indonesia that contradicts the perception that Ann Dunham Soetoro was a “hippy.”
Dunham Soetoro’s Russian language training at the University of Hawaii may have been useful to the CIA in Indonesia. An August 2, 1966, formerly Secret memorandum from the National Security Council’s Executive Secretary Bromley Smith states that, in addition to Japan, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Suharto coup was welcomed by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies because its created a non-aligned Indonesia that “represents an Asian counterweight to Communist China.” Records indicate that a number of CIA agents posted in Jakarta before and after the 1965 coup were, like Dunham Soetoro, conversant in Russian.
Dunham Soetoro worked for the elitist Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Bank Rakyat (the majority government-owned People’s Bank of Indonesia), and the CIA-linked USAID while she lived in Indonesia and later, Pakistan.
USAID was involved in a number of CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia. The February 9, 1971, Washington Star reported that USAID officials in Laos were aware that rice supplied to the Laotian Army by USAID was being re-sold to North Vietnamese army divisions in the country. The report stated that the U.S. tolerated the USAID rice sales to the North Vietnamese since the Laotian Army units that sold the rice found themselves protected from Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese attack. USAID and the CIA also used the supply of rice to force Laotian Meo tribesmen to support the United States in the war against the Communists. USAID funds programmed for civilians injured in the war in Laos and public health care were actually diverted for military purposes.
In 1971, the USAID-funded Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was accused of being a CIA front. USAID-funded projects through the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (MUCIA) — comprising the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Michigan State — were accused of being CIA front projects, including those for “agricultural education” in Indonesia, as well as other “projects” in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Vietnam. The charge was made in 1971, the same year that Ann Dunham was working for USAID in the country.
In a July 10, 1971, New York Times report, USAID and the CIA were accused of “losing” $1.7 billion appropriated for the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in South Vietnam. CORDS was part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program, which involved CIA assassination and torture of South Vietnamese village elders and Buddhist clerics. USAID money was also directed to the CIA’s proprietary airline in Southeast Asia, Air America. In Thailand, USAID funds for the Accelerated Rural Development Program in Thailand were actually masking a CIA anti-Communist counter-insurgency operation. USAID funds programmed for public works projects in East Pakistan in 1971 were used for East Pakistan’s military fortifications on its border with India, in the months before the outbreak of war with India, in contravention of U.S. law that prohibited USAID money for military purposes.
In 1972, USAID administrator Dr. John Hannah admitted to Metromedia News that USAID was being used as a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos. Hannah only admitted to Laos as a USAID cover for the CIA. However, it was also reported that USAID was being used by the CIA in Indonesia, Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea. USAID projects in Southeast Asia had to be approved by the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an Asia Society group that was, in fact, answerable to the CIA.
The U.S. Food for Peace program, jointly administered by USAID and the Department of Agriculture, was found in 1972 to be used for military purposes in Cambodia, South Korea, Turkey, South Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, and Greece. In 1972, USAID funneled aid money only to the southern part of North Yemen, in order to aid North Yemeni forces against the government of South Yemen, then ruled by a socialist government opposed to U.S. hegemony in the region.
One of the entities affiliated with the USAID work in Indonesia was the Asia Foundation, a 1950s creation formed with the help of the CIA to oppose the expansion of communism in Asia. The East-West Center guest house in Hawaii was funded by the Asia Foundation. The guest house is also where Barack Obama Sr. first stayed after his airlift from Kenya to Hawaii, arranged by the one of the CIA’s major agents of influence in Africa, Mboya.
Dunham would also travel to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Thailand working on micro-financing projects. In 1965, Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard, with another American wife. The senior Obama linked up with his old friend and the CIA’s “golden boy” Mboya and other fellow Luo politicians. The CIA station chief in Nairobi from 1964 to 1967 was Philip Cherry. In 1975, Cherry was the CIA station chief in Dacca, Bangladesh. Cherry was linked by the then-U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Eugene Booster, to the 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and members of his family. . . . .
Meanwhile, Dunham Soetoro’s mother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised young Obama when he returned to Hawaii in 1971 while his mother stayed in Indonesia, was the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu. Various CIA front entities used the bank. Madelyn Dunham handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments to U.S.-supported Asian dictators like Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia. In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to covertly prop up its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region. . . .
In the 1970s and 80s, Dunham was active in micro-loan projects for the Ford Foundation, the CIA-linked East-West Center, and USAID in Indonesia. One of the individuals assigned to the U.S. embassy and helped barricade the compound during a violent anti-U.S. student demonstration during the 1965 Suharto coup against Sukarno was Dr. Gordon Donald, Jr. Assigned to the embassy’s Economic Section, Donald was responsible for USAID micro-financing for Indonesian farmers, the same project that Dunham Soetoro would work on for USAID in the 1970s, after her USAID job of teaching English in Indonesia. In a 1968 book, “Who’s Who in the CIA,” published in West Berlin, Donald is identified as a CIA officer who was also assigned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Dunham would eventually live for five years in the Hilton International Hotel while working on microfinancing for the Asian Development Bank.
Another “Who’s Who in the CIA” Jakarta alumnus is Robert F. Grealy, who later became the director for international relations for the Asia-Pacific for J P Morgan Chase and a director for the American-Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. J P Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is being mentioned as a potential replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose father, Peter Geithner, was the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-selector who funneled the money to Ann Dunham’s Indonesian projects. . . .
It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama’s step-father, were closely involved in the CIA’s operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit during the “years of living dangerously” after the overthrow of Sukarno. WMR has discovered that some of the CIA’s top case officers were assigned to various official and non-official cover assignments in Indonesia during this time frame, including under the cover of USAID, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). . . .
Not much is known about Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, who Obama mistakenly referred to as “his father” in two speeches, one recently to the Disabled American Veterans.
What is officially known about Stanley Armour Dunham is that he served with the 9th Air Force in Britain and France prior to and after the D-Day invasion. After the war, Dunham and his wife, Madelyn and his daughter Stanley Ann — Obama’s mother — moved to Berkeley, California; El Dorado, Kansas; Seattle; and Honolulu. . . .
There is a strong reason to believe that Armour Dunham worked in the 1950s for the CIA in the Middle East. An FBI file on Armour Dunham existed but the bureau claimed it destroyed the file on May 1, 1997. Considering the sour relations between the FBI and CIA during the Cold War, it is likely that Armour Dunham was being monitored by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the same manner as a number of other CIA officials and agents were being surveilled. Similarly, the pre-1968 passport records of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, were destroyed by the State Department.”
IS TURKEY THE NEW COLONIAL POWER IN
WEST AFRICA?
According to African Intelligence:
"The Turkish government is working all out to win favour with Guinea Buissau and Senegal. It aims to create a pro-Turkish African bloc stretching from Saint Louis in the north to the Nimba mountains in the south.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has hosted his Guinea-Bissauan opposite number Umaro Sissoco Embalo twice in the last six months, is developing Ankara's relations with the small African country on all fronts as he tries to create a pro-Turkish arc along the Guinean coast.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has hosted his Guinea-Bissauan opposite number Umaro Sissoco Embalo twice in the last six months (Africa Intelligence, 26/06/20), is developing Ankara's relations with the small African country on all fronts as he tries to create a pro-Turkish arc along the Guinean coast.
Last month, 36 gendarmes travelled from Bissau to Ankara to take part in a training course on intervention techniques with their Turkish counterparts. Turkey is also providing the aircraft in Guinea Bissau's colours which Embalo uses for his official voyages. He used it recently to travel to Bamako, where he was the sole head of state to attend the ceremony to install new transition president Bah N'Daw (Africa Intelligence, 01/10/20). Coincidentally, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu travelled to Bamako on 9 September to meet the putschists of the Comité National pour le Salut du People."
Atlantic opening
The arc Erdogan is seeking to create includes Gambia and Guinea, the two African countries most closely aligned to Turkey (Africa Intelligence, 06/11/19) and both of which share a border with Guinea Bissau. Turkish diplomats are also working flat out to extend the arc to Senegal, which was guest of honour at the Turkey-Africa Economic and Business Forum in Istanbul on 8 and 9 October. Erdogan visited Senegal in the early part of the year (Africa Intelligence, 05/02/20).
Moving eastward, Turkey wants Mali and Niger to be part of the African bloc. This would give Turkey an opening on to the Atlantic Ocean and a major area of expansion for the conglomerates most closely connected to Erdogan's entourage (Africa Intelligence, 24/08/20). On 8 October, in an illustration of Turkey's wish to expand its influence eastwards, the Turkish parliament authorized the Ministry of Defence to send troops to join the UN's peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA."
The Arab Weekly recently reported that:
"There is no longer any doubt about Turkey's role in dispatching jihadists and mercenaries to Libya. The latest confirmation came from French President Emmanuel Macron January 29 at a news conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
"I want to express my concerns with regard to the behaviour of Turkey at the moment, which is in complete contradiction with what President [Recep] Tayyip Erdoğan committed to at the Berlin conference," Macron said.
"We have seen during these last days Turkish warships accompanied by Syrian mercenaries arrive on Libyan soil. This is an explicit and serious infringement of what was agreed in Berlin. It's a broken promise.”
Macron confirmed the presence of Turkish ships off the Libyan coast and accused Ankara of "violating Libya's sovereignty and endangering European and West African security."
Erdoğan is sending Syrian jihadists and mercenaries to Libya to back the Islamist militias and other forces loyal to the Government of National Accord of Fayez al-Sarraj. Why is Macron talking of Turkish threats to "West African security"?
There are suspicions that some militants and mercenaries have been departing Islamist strongholds in Tripoli and Misrata for West Africa, known as an area of French influence but now infested with terrorist groups, cross-border and transcontinental smuggling organisations (Colombia-Gulf of Guinea-Sahel and Europe) and organised crime. There is also talk of Ankara seeking to establish a military base in West Africa.
There have been reports that some Syrian fighters were headed to Western Europe.
Macron has repeatedly confirmed his wariness about Ankara's designs, including in Berlin during the conference on Libya.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted at a news conference January 28 in Moscow with his South Sudanese Foreign Affair Minister Awut Deng Achuil that he had asked Erdoğan to stop sending terrorists from Syria to Libya.
The question that torments Western governments is how far will Erdoğan go in this devious confrontation in West Africa after the Middle East and the Maghreb? Is this a form of revenge against Europe in general and France in particular for slamming the gates of the European Union shut in the face of Turkey?
It has been clear, for at least a decade, that France would not accept the accession of Muslim, let alone Islamist, Turkey to this "Christian" group, even if it fulfils all required conditions. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was the most outspoken on this subject.
“To let Turkey think that it can join the EU is a monumental error,” he declared on December 2, 2015, on Europe 1 radio. “I stand by my words. Turkey is in Asia Minor, not in Europe.”
As a reminder, negotiations on Turkey's hypothetical accession to the European Union were relaunched in 2013, after a sudden interruption in 2010.
In 1963, Turkey, a central member of NATO, became an associate member of the European Common Market. Turkey was officially recognised as a candidate for EU membership in 1999 at the Helsinki summit and negotiations began in 2005 but Turkey has been knocking on the door of the union for more than 50 years, in vain.
The reasons for European distrust of Ankara are legion: Turkey’s worrisome drift, particularly after the failed coup in 2016, towards an authoritarian presidential regime; its crackdown on the media and public liberties; its support for Islamist networks; its complacency with terrorist groups in Syria and Libya; its blackmail-type policies about migratory flows to Europe; its occupation of part of Cyprus since 1974; and, most recently, its signing of a military agreement with the government of Sarraj, coupled with a memorandum of understanding on the delimitation of maritime jurisdictions in the Mediterranean Sea, the latter in clear violation of international maritime law and the U.N. Charter.
Erdoğan's possible involvement in the Sahel and West Africa could be another step on the road to the global confrontation that Turkey is waging against French and European interests. French security experts see this as a step fraught with consequences insofar as it endangers the lives of the French soldiers involved in Operation Barkhane (4,500 troops) and the U.N.-peacekeeping MINUSMA (13,500 soldiers), as well as the stability of all the Sahel countries badly damaged by militant networks and terrorist groups.
Erdoğan’s latest trip to West Africa (Senegal and Gambia) shows to what extent Africa, particularly French-speaking countries with a Muslim majority, constitutes for Erdoğan a venue for a showdown with the former European colonial powers.
If it were only a race to open new markets for the Turkish economy, which is going through difficult times, Ankara's encroachment in West Africa could be less worrisome, especially when is the known that Turkey has had an economic presence in Africa for about 20 years.
However, as shown before in other parts of the continent, such as the Horn of Africa, Turkish encroachment follows a multifaceted strategy including military bases, the establishment of intelligence networks and the promotion of Turkish economic interests.
All of this is couched in the instrumentalisation of Islamism in the colours of the Muslim Brotherhood, in alliance with Qatar. Turkey's project is much more ambitious than mere conquest of markets.
Turkey claims to offer Africans a deal more equitable than that of Western countries but many of them not convinced.
Turkey's interventions, old and recent, in the continent, follow an expansionist and aggressive agenda without many scruples. Its recent role in Libya has hardly reassured Africans who are doubtful of Turkey’s designs after Ankara's abrupt abandonment of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
ome see Turkey's African policy as a way for Erdoğan to find new inroads outside his country when Ankara finds itself increasingly isolated on the international scene because of its troubled game in the Syrian crisis, in the Gulf, Somalia, Sudan and mounting evidence of its support for jihadist groups in Syria.
Europeans, who are also attentive to Turkey’s attempts to take hold of Islam in Europe itself, have not shown a clear strategy of how to deal with Ankara's dangerous game of igniting fires everywhere but the European Union is not without possible recourse. For starters, the European Union could re-examine its economic ties with Turkey, which remains Europe's first trading partner. When this re-examination starts, worry could change sides.”
UNDERSTANDING THE ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY, ESPECIALLY IN THE UNITED STATES
Unfortunately, most of the world hasn’t studied political science and truly doesn’t understand or cant articulate why "The instrument of government is the prime political problem confronting human communities (The problem of the instrument of government entails questions of the following kind. What form should the exercise of authority assume? How ought societies to organize themselves politically in the modern world?)”
Binham Brassa (Balanta People) have from their beginning, rejected such state structures as government, but as of yet, have not explained why beyond a basic critique of the inequality such governments inevitably create.
Below is one of the clearest explanations of the fundamental problem of government and in particular, the false DEMOCRACY that is being promoted by the United States of America.
BALANTA RESPONSE TO THE UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO ON THE 47TH GUINEA BISSAU INDEPENDENCE DAY
https://www.state.gov/guinea-bissau-independence-day/
Secretary Pompeo,
We commend you for recognizing the great victory of the people of Guinea Bissau to liberate themselves from the foreign domination and colonial occupation of the Portuguese and establish their national independence 47 years ago today. The brave people of Guinea Bissau, consisting of the Balanta, Fulani, Mandinga, Papel, Manjaco, Beafada, Mancanha, Bijago, Felupe, Mansoaca, and others, took up arms against those who invaded their land in 1446 and and claimed an unnatural authority seeking to enslave them.
On August 3, 1959, in Bissau, the Portuguese invaders massacred fifty of the above people who were on strike. Exactly one year later, a day of solidarity of the struggling peoples was held and condemned the Portuguese colonialists. Another year later, on August 3, 1961, in the face of the fiercely negative attitude of the Portuguese Government which refused to adopt a peaceful solution for the elimination of the colonial domination, The African Independence Party, known as the “PAIGC”, stated,
“in consideration of the firm will of our peoples to free themselves from the colonial yoke, whatever the means needed;
in consideration that this liberation must be achieved urgently, and that our peoples are ready to achieve it;
in consideration of the peculiarly difficult circumstances that our peoples face in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism;
in consideration of the necessity to prevent new colonial wars in Africa and to maintain world peace;
THE AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE PARTY
proclaims 3 August 1961 as the date of the passage of our national revolution from the phase of political struggle to that of national insurrection, to direct action against the colonial forces;
declares that all its militants and cadres are mobilized for direct action in the national liberation struggle;
invites all the nationalist organizations of our countries to improve their organization, to strengthen their preparation for the struggle of liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde and to co-ordinate their action in the United Front for the Liberation of ‘Portuguese” Guinea and Cape Verder (FUL);
reaffirms the active solidarity of our peoples towards the struggling people of Angola;
reaffirms the will of our peoples at any moment, by way of negotiation, to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict which sets them against the Portugese Government, in accordance with their inalienable righ to self-determination and national independence;
appeals to all peace- and freedom-loving peoples, particularly African and Asian peoples, to give practical and immediate aid to our peoples struggling against foreign domination.
Forward with our liberation struggle! Down with Portuguese colonialism!”
The first stretch of territory liberated by the forces of the people, led by the great Balanta warriors, was the the island of Como. In an effort to recapture this critical, strategic area the Portuguese invaders, with a total of 3000 well equipped men, including about 2000 elite soldiers and officers transferred from Angola, attacked in January of 1964. After 75 days of fighting and 900 killed and wounded, the people of Guinea Bissau drove the “superior forces” of the Portuguese invaders into the sea!
Such was the warfare that led to the independence of Guinea Bissau, proclaimed on this day, 47 years ago.
Secretary Pompeo, I remind you that the liberation and independence of the people of Guinea Bissau is not yet complete.
From 1668 to 1829, 145,000 people were shipped from the slave trading port at St. Louis, Senegal. From 1668 to 1843, 126,000 people were shipped from the slave trading port of Bissau on the coast of modern day Guinea Bissau, West Africa. These are the lands were Balanta people were living. From these two slave trading ports, 6,400 people were brought to the Gulf Coast, 10,000 people were brought to the port at Charleston, South Carolina, 4,500 people were brought to Chesapeake, and 1,400 people were brought to New York. From 1761 to 1815, records show that 6,534 Binham Brassa (Balanta people) were trafficked from their homeland and enslaved in the Americas. That’s an average of at least 121 Balanta per year.
Though there was no Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at that time, the trafficking of these people (including children), the inhuman brutality and enslavement are all considered today by the international community as crimes of genocide. In addition, the trafficking, enslavement and genocide are also considered now as violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The liberation struggle and independence of the people of Guinea Bissau is not yet complete. The Balanta, Fulani, Mandinga, Papel, Manjaco, Beafada, Mancanha, Bijago, Felupe, Mansoaca, and others who were taken to the Americas - North, South and Central - as well as the Caribbean, are still living under foreign domination in the lands of their captivity and enslavement.
On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” At that time, no provisions to return to their ancestral homeland were given to the descendants of the Balanta, Fulani, Mandinga, Papel, Manjaco, Beafada, Mancanha, Bijago, Felupe, Mansoaca, and others. No land was given or set aside for them. Then, in 1868, without conducting any kind of plebiscite to inform the people of their rights and options and allow them the opportunity to exercise self-determination by making a free and informed decision about their future destiny, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution imposed “citizenship”, effectively nullifying their “freedom” and imposing rights and obligations that they never consented to.
Since then the Balanta, Fulani, Mandinga, Papel, Manjaco, Beafada, Mancanha, Bijago, Felupe, and Mansoaca, along with other peoples taken from other territories in Africa and brought to the United States, have suffered the oppression and crimes documented in the following presentations and appeals to the international community:
September 2, 1924 - The Universal Negro Improvement Association Petition of Four Million Negroes of the United States of America to His Excellency the President of the United States Praying for a Friendly and Sympathetic Consideration of the Plan of Founding a Nation in Africa for the Negro People, and to Encourage Them in Assisting to Develop Already Independent Negro Nations as a Means of Helping to Solve the Conflicting Problems of Race
1946 - The National Negro Congress Petition to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations Stating The Facts on The Oppression of the American Negro.
October 23, 1947 - W.E.B. DuBois AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD!: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.
December, 1951 - William Patterson and Paul Robeson We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of The United States against the Negro People . The petition detailed, among other things, 152 incidents of killings of unarmed Black men and women by police and lunch mobs between 1945 and 1951.
1977 - The New Afrikan Prisoners Organization (NAPO) petition to the United Nations.
December 11, 1978 - The National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the Commission on Racial Justice for the United Church of Christ petition to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
1994 - Mr. Silis Muhammad Petition for Reparations to the UN under 1503 Procedure – to the UN Working Group on Communications on behalf of African Americans. This was followed up in 1997, 1998, 199 and 2000 with written and oral statements urging the Commission on Human Rights
May 1997 - the National Black United Front historic Genocide Petition Campaign Against the United States Government and traveled to the United Nations Human Rights Center in Geneva, Switzerland to present the petition with over 200,000 signatures to Mr. Ralph Zacklin, Officer in Charge of High Commission of Human Rights, Centre for Human Rights. Also, this same Petition/Declaration was submitted to the High Commission of Human Rights in New York on May 27, 1997.
September 3, 2001 - Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney presented United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson two documents as evidence of the US governments violations of both US and international law and, in particular, specific violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The first document given to Robinson was a confidential Memorandum 46, written by National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski on March 17, 1978 and it details the federal government's plan to destroy functioning black leadership in the United States. This document provides a critical insight into the federal government's concern at the apparent growing influence of the African American political movement. The second document is a report entitled "Human Rights in the United States [The Unfinished Story - Current Political Prisoners - Victims of COINTELPRO]" and it was compiled by the Human Rights Research Fund, headed by Kathleen Cleaver. This document provides an overview of the counterintelligence program which, from the 1950s to the 1980s, was implemented in the United States against political activists and targeted organizations.
November 22, 2010 - The National Conference of Black Lawyers and the Malcolm X Center for Self Determination report on Political Repression – Political Prisoners to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review, Ninth Session of the Working Group on the UPR Human Rights Council.
Secretary Pompeo, like other people taken from Africa and enslaved in the colonies that would become the United States, the Balanta people have never ceased to struggle for their liberation. This has been evidenced most recently by the efforts of Balanta heroes such as Reverend Eustace Blake, militant pastor of the St. James AME Church in Newark, New Jersey, who told his 2,000 member congregation before the Newark riots, “the price of freedom ain’t cheap”; Ella Baker, the leading strategist of the Civil Rights Movement who said “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens”; John Blake, who tried to work within the system by serving as President Nixon’s Director of Job Corp. When such non-violent efforts to obtain civil rights failed to liberate the Balanta people in America, other Balanta people, like Stephen Hobbs, became more militant and joined the Black Panther Party and other organizations that were attacked by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) COINTELPRO effort to prevent the liberation and independence movement of the people from Africa suffering foreign domination in America.
Direct attacks on Balanta people were committed on January 27, 1997 by the Chicago Police department, the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and the United States Secret Service against Balanta descendant Ras Nathaniel, a graduate of Yale University studying international law at the Nkrumah-Washington Community Learning Center. He was attacked again as a combatant in America’s Drug War, on August 6, 1999.
The most recent attack, which received international condemnation, was committed against the unarmed Balanta descendant Jacob Blake on August 23, 2020 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The worldwide Balanta People’s Union, represented by six zones on four continents, condemned this attack.
Therefore, Secretary Pompeo, since you “offer your best wishes to all Bissau-Guineans all over the world” and acknowledge and congratulate the Independence of Guinea Bissau, we invite the United States Government to do its part to complete the liberation and independence of Guinea Bissau by negotiating with us and the Government of Guinea Bissau, a peaceful Reparations and Repatriation treaty that would provide the justice due to the Balanta, Fulani, Mandinga, Papel, Manjaco, Beafada, Mancanha, Bijago, Felupe, and Mansoaca people in America who have yet to be returned to their independent homeland.
Respectfully,
Siphiwe Baleka, Founder & President
Balanta B'urassa History & Genealogy Society in America
Senior Heritage Ambassador, Director of Research and Development Balanta
United House of Ancestry
balantasociety@gmail.com
BALANTA POET SIMONE ROBERTS: WHO AM I?
“Our struggle demands enlightened leadership and we have said that the best sons and daughters of our land must lead…”
- Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory
“Balanta children need to be taught history, agriculture, science and how to utilize faculties in addition to their intellect to access gnosis or knowledge of the universe contained in the inner intelligence in every atom and cell in their body. In this way, the consciousness of the young today will, tomorrow, be superior to our current collective consciousness”
- Brassa Mada (Siphwe Baleka)
Amilcar Cabral and students during the liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau.
Brassa Mada (Siphiwe Baleka) addressing students at Charles Duna Primary School in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Gifted eighth-grade student Simone Roberts, a member of the Balanta family in America, is the first Balanta youth contributor to the Balanta B’urassa History & Genealogy Society in America website. Here is her profound poem,
Who Am I?
Simone Roberts with mother Lisa Hoover-Roberts