Protests in Niger denouncing European imperialism in the African continent. Photo: PSUV official site.
By Geraldina Colotti—Aug 4, 2023
Gold, silicon, oil—with reserves estimated at 2 billion barrels, and above all uranium are essential for both French nuclear power stations and atomic bombs. They are strategic raw materials for imperialism, which needs to consolidate its dominion at the expense of the southern countries. This is the key to understanding the fibrillation provoked in the United States and especially in the European Union, by the coup d’état in Niger.
On July 28, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, head of the Presidential Guard, was proclaimed the new leader of Niger and assumed the presidency of the National Council for the Protection of the Homeland (CNSP), after having ousted the Western-backed President Mohamed Bazoum. The communiqué of the rebel military denounces the “lack of measures to face the economic crisis and the deterioration of the security situation,” undermined by the violence of the jihadist groups. Bazoum is accused of having “tried to convince people that everything is going well, despite the harsh reality of a lot of death, displacement, humiliation and frustration. Today’s approach has not brought security despite great sacrifices.”
Niger is in fact the main supplier of uranium to the EU, covering 24% of its needs. With its 3,527 tons (5% of world production), it is the world’s sixth largest uranium producer. However, it is a resource from which Niger does not benefit, considering that, according to World Bank data from 2021, only 18.6% of the 27 million people living in Niger have access to electricity.
Furthermore, large amounts of depleted uranium that comes as waste from nuclear power plants is used for military purposes. Nuclear energy multinationals save millions of dollars in safe storage by passing it on to weapons companies, who use it as virtually free raw material to produce anti-tank munitions for war.
France directly controls two uranium mines, Akouta and Arlit, through the company Orano, which changed its name from Areva in 2018 when the mine going by the same name was closed. Akouta, the so-called world’s largest subway mine, managed by a French-Japanese-Spanish joint venture 6 km from the town of Akokan, was closed in 2021, after having extracted 75 thousand tons of uranium over 43 years of activity. It left behind 20 million tons of radioactive sludge, 600 unemployed and cancer-stricken workers, houses without electricity and water, and an entire area that would need 145 million euros to be rehabillitated.
History reminds us that when the people of the Congo decided to regain control of their resources by electing Patrice Lumumba, imperialism unleashed secession in the Katanga mining region and killed the president in 1961. The pro-Western dictator Mobutu was put in his place, to ensure that the Congo’s strategic resources, such as the plutonium that was used for the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did not end up in the hands of the people and under the influence of the Soviet Union. Times have changed, but the purpose and nature of imperialism have not.
Paris has threatened military intervention in what, during his last visit US Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised as an “example of democracy in the Sahel;” an African region in which Moscow’s influence is advancing. This was made clear at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, which brought together 49 African delegations (from 54 nations), 16 of them heads of state, and gave space to the new anti-imperialist military figures of Burkina Faso and Mali, spokespeople for the growing intolerance towards Western powers.
Also on the African continent, the number of countries oriented towards the BRICS (a political and economic coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is increasing. BRiCS nations offer military and economic aid that is not conditional on structural reforms or adherence to cultural models different from the local ones. Collaboration with progressive countries in Latin America is increasing, following the historically consolidated collaboration with Cuba and Venezuela, which supports a south-south model of relations based on equality.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva has confirmed that he intends to strengthen Brazil’s ties with the African continent, as he had already done during his previous periods in power. In the framework of the G7 summit, during a bilateral meeting with the President of Comoros, he said that he wanted to support the entry of the African Union into the G20, in order to favor a global diplomatic rebalance. In the same perspective of South-South integration, which characterizes Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s policy, we should look at the trip made in May by Francia Márquez, Vice President of Colombia, to Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa – three key countries in their respective geographical areas and on the continent.
The governments of Burkina Faso and Mali have responded harshly to threats of military intervention by France and its allies in the region, who do not intend to recognize the patriotic council. The High Representative for European Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell considers the coup unacceptable and announced, as did the US, the interruption of economic aid and the suspension of security cooperation programs. This is an unprecedented decision after the supposed end of the cold war, which definitively subjects Africa to a new era of colonialism, following the failure of the independence movements.
In June, the EU Council approved the allocation of 5 million euros in military aid to support Niger’s armed forces. The measure was financed by the European Peace Facility (EPF), the same fund used to send arms to Ukraine. In Niger, which has remained in the Western orbit, along with Chad, there are about 2,000 soldiers from the French anti-jihadist force Barkhane, and those from the European-mandated mission Takuba, in which Italy participates with about 300 soldiers.
However, the failure of the neo-colonial security model for the Sahel shows that it is not the security of the citizens that the European military has gone to guarantee, but the EU’s own material interests. Another sign is that the rebel officers in Niger had been trained by Western forces.
In Niger, the M62 Movement, which includes associations and trade unions, and which has been fighting for years against colonial presence, has brought thousands of people waving Russian flags and shouting pro-Putin slogans to protests, in support of the military council that took power. Faced with the spread of radical Islamism, used as a weapon of control by the US and its allies, the Sahel, like the rest of the African continent, has seen the spread of a new colonial occupation, through the military missions of multinational forces.
Military insurgents have denounced multinational interventions such that despite being in the “core of the French and Western intervention in the Sahel,” Niger has remained exposed to jihadist attacks along the three borders (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) which, in 2023 alone caused more than 400 deaths.
Historically, the colonial division of Africa was sanctioned by the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), in which African rulers did not participate. One strikingly fact that marked the legitimization of the hegemonic design of European colonialism over the entire continent, was dividing territories, creating forced separations and inclusions, generating borders that unite or separate different peoples who previously lived together, and sowing the seeds of devastating conflicts, disguised as so-called ethnic conflicts.
The recent example of Libya confirms the same colonial logic, the same strategy of “balkanization” of the world (and of people and brains) that is part of the fourth and fifth generation of wars deployed by imperialism. On May 26, 2011, the then Niger President Mahamadou Issofou, who was invited to the Deauville summit, was the only one to tell Western leaders that intervention in Libya would transform the country into another Somalia, offering an incredible opportunity for radical Islamism.
He said: “We evaluated the war in Libya as a threat to our country and to the region that will continue for years to come. We warned the West against the destruction of the Libyan State, we told the West not to lose sight of reality and to take Libyan society into account.” A lone voice crying in the wilderness, as was that of the ALBA countries, which proposed, unheeded, a symmetrical negotiation based on peace diplomacy.
The failure of the neocolonial model in the Sahel presents a scenario similar to that of the Arab world where today, especially among the Gulf monarchies, there is a marked detachment from American protagonists who, with the Obama Administration, supported the so-called Arab Spring, which destabilized or attempted to destabilize the Arab regimes, including many governments friendly to the West.
Niger is also a center of migratory routes, and the issue of Libya, a neighboring country, has much to do with the management of migratory flows imposed by Europe, where migrant smuggling is rampant. Into this picture fits the so-called Mattei Plan that the extreme right Italian government of Giorgia Meloni is trying to impose in Africa, and especially in the Sahel, which has great importance in the management of migration flows and which relies on rulers friendly to the West.
In recent years, Libya has become a transit point for millions of people of different nationalities trying to reach Europe. Since the signing of the infamous Italy-Libya Memorandum in 2017, more than 100 million euros have found their way into the pockets of the so-called Libyan coast guard in training and equipment. One billion from Italy and the EU for the various missions in Libya and the Mediterranean, often used more to counter volunteer rescuers on NGO boats than to save lives. Since 2017, more than 100,000 people have been turned back after being intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard in central Mediterranean waters.
Italy, like all EU member states, needs oil and gas from Libya, a country that imperialist forces have dismembered by killing Gaddafi in 2011, and which now has three so-called governments. Meloni recently signed an $8 billion deal between Eni, the Italian national hydrocarbon company, and the Libyan National Oil Corporation, for the exploitation of an offshore gas field on the coast of Tripoli.
Following NATO and European Union directives, Italy does not recognize the Libyan government legitimized by a duly elected parliament, that of Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha, who controls most of Libya’s territory and energy resources, and who operates on a parallel track from the cities of Syrte and Benghazi because Dbeibah government militias prevent him from entering Tripoli. Bashagha would be willing to offer Italy, whose Libyan gas imports have fallen from about 8 billion cubic meters per year before 2011 to about 2.5 billion in 2022, gas and oil at low prices. Italy, however, refuses.
In addition, it is estimated that from 2015 to 2022, the European Union spent between 93 and 178 million euros to reinforce Tunisia’s land and maritime borders. To this must be added a final tranche of 105 million euros. A trend that will certainly not diminish with the rhetoric of the Mattei plan for the so-called development of Africa, launched by Meloni with a new intention of colonialism. although in disguise.
As Immanuel Ness, author of the book Migration as Economic Imperialism rightly explains neoliberal capitalism and economic imperialism in its present form cannot survive without third-world migration. Ness says in an interview with El Salto, if we examine the demographics of the richest countries, migrant labor, mostly temporary migrants, represents more than 10% of the population.
In Qatar, foreign immigrant labor constitutes 90% of the population, without any rights to citizenship. They are integral to the satisfaction of a whole range of needs of the capitalist class: from agricultural products, housing, and manufactured goods, to domestic and welfare services. Benefits that, without workers from the global periphery, would not be possible.
But these migrant workers, who are used to ensure that capitalist profitability is not reduced and the working class in northern countries maintain a high standard of living, cannot enter and remain in the global north permanently. Rather, they are considered temporary or illegal in most of Western Europe and North America, as well as in other rich states and economic centers, where they are under relentless threat of detention, imprisonment, and deportation. This, according to Ness, is a central feature of the depravity of 21st century economic imperialism.
In Niger, the military rebels issued a warning: “Any external military intervention, whatever its origin, would risk having disastrous and incalculable consequences for our populations and would be chaos for our country.” These words echo those of Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, leading figure in the history of decolonization and pan-Africanism, born in 1909 and died in 1972: “Dedicated as I am to the total destruction of colonialism in all its forms, I do not support any colonial government of any kind. The British, French, Portuguese, Belgians, Spanish, Germans and Italians, at one time or another, have ruled parts of Africa or continue to do so. Their methods may have been different, but their objectives are the same: to enrich themselves at the expense of their colonies.”
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/ECS/DD/BLA
