The U.S. military are busy building something in Chad. Not a huge
facility, not a mini-American town, but a small camp. U.S. Africa Command
(AFRICOM) still insists that there is no Chadian base, that the camp serves
only as temporary lodgings to support a Special Operations training exercise to
be held next year. It also refused to comment about another troop deployment to
Chad. It is an U.S. alliance with a regime whose “most significant human rights
problems,” according to the most recent country report by the State
Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “were security force
abuse, including torture; harsh prison conditions; and discrimination and
violence against women and children,” not to mention the restriction of freedom
of speech, press, assembly, and movement, as well as arbitrary arrest and
detention, denial of fair public trial, executive influence on the judiciary,
property seizures, child labor and forced labor (that also includes children),
among other abuses. Amnesty International further found that human rights
violations “are committed with almost total impunity by members of the Chadian
military, the Presidential Guard, and the state intelligence bureau, the Agence
Nationale de Securité.” Chad’s peacekeeping forces were accused of stoking
sectarian strife by supporting Muslim militias against Christian fighters.
Then, on March 29th, a Chadian military convoy arrived in a crowded marketplace
in the capital, Bangui. There, according to a United Nations report, the troops
“reportedly opened fire on the population without any provocation. At the time,
the market was full of people, including many girls and women buying and
selling produce. As panic-stricken people fled in all directions, the soldiers
allegedly continued firing indiscriminately.”
In all, 30 civilians were reportedly killed and more than 300
were wounded.
The new American compound is to be located near the capital,
N’Djamena. The U.S. has previously employed N’Djamena as a hub for its air
operations. What’s striking is the terminology used in the official documents.
After years of adamant claims that the U.S. military has just one lonely base in
all of Africa -- Camp Lemonnier in the tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti
-- Army commercial contracts documents state that it will now have “base camp
facilities” in Chad. An Army solicitation from September sought “building
materials for use in Chad,” while supporting documents specifically mention an
“operations center/multi-use facility.” That same month, the Army awarded a
contract for the transport of equipment from Niamey, Niger, the home of another
of the growing network of U.S. outposts in Africa, to N’Djamena. The Army also
began seeking out contractors capable of supplying close to 600 bunk beds that
could support an American-sized weight of 200 to 225 pounds for a facility “in
and around the N'Djamena region.” And just last month, the military put out a
call for a contractor to supply construction equipment -- a bulldozer, dump
truck, excavator, and the like -- for a project in N'Djamena.
Even without a base, the United States has for more than a
decade poured copious amounts of money, time, and effort into making Chad a
stable regional counterterrorism partner, sending troops there, training and
equipping its army, counseling its military leaders, providing tens of millions
of dollars in aid, funding its military expeditions, supplying its army with
equipment ranging from tents to trucks, donating additional equipment for its
domestic security forces, providing a surveillance and security system for its
border security agents, and looking the other way when its military employed
child soldiers.
This increased U.S. interest in Chad follows on the heels of
a push by France, the nation’s former colonial overlord and America’s current
premier proxy in Africa, to beef up its military footprint on the continent. In
July, following U.S.-backed French military interventions in Mali and the
Central African Republic, French President François Hollande announced a new
mission, Operation Barkhane (a term for a crescent-shaped sand dune found in
the Sahara). Its purpose: a long-term counterterrorism operation involving
3,000 French troops deployed to a special forces outpost in Burkina Faso and
forward operating bases in Mali, Niger, and not surprisingly, Chad. In recent
years, the U.S. military has been involved in a continual process of expanding
its presence in Africa. Out of public earshot, officials have talked about
setting up a string of small bases across the northern tier of the continent.
Indeed, over the last years, U.S. staging areas, mini-bases, and outposts have
popped up in the contiguous nations of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and,
skipping Chad, in the Central African Republic, followed by South Sudan,
Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. A staunch American ally with a frequent
and perhaps enduring American troop presence, Chad seems like the natural spot
for still another military compound -- the only missing link in a long chain of
countries stretching from west to east, from one edge of the continent to the
other -- even if AFRICOM continues to insist that there’s no American “base” in
the works.
In June, according to the State Department, the deputy
commander of U.S. Army Africa (USARAF), Brigadier General Kenneth H. Moore,
Jr., visited Chad to “celebrate the successful conclusion of a partnership
between USARAF and the Chadian Armed Forces.” Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus
arrived in that landlocked country at the same time to meet with “top Chadian
officials.” His visit, according to an embassy press release, “underscored the
importance of bilateral relations between the two countries, as well as
military cooperation.” And that cooperation has been ample.
Earlier this year, Chadian troops joined those of the United
States, Burkina Faso, Canada, France, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
Senegal, the United Kingdom, and host nation Niger for three weeks of military
drills as part of Flintlock 2014, an annual Special Ops counterterrorism
exercise. Then soldiers from Chad, Cameroon, Burundi, Gabon, Nigeria, the
Republic of Congo, the Netherlands, and the United States took part in another
annual training exercise, Central Accord 2014. The Army also sent medical
personnel to mentor Chadian counterparts in “tactical combat casualty care,”
while Marines and Navy personnel traveled to Chad to train that country’s
militarized anti-poaching park rangers in small unit tactics and patrolling. A
separate contingent of Marines conducted military intelligence training with
Chadian officers and non-commissioned officers. The scenario for the final
exercise, also involving personnel from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mauritania,
Senegal, and Tunisia, had a ripped-from-the-headlines quality: “preparing for
an unconventional war against an insurgent threat in Mali.”
As for U.S. Army Africa, it sent trainers as part of a
separate effort to provide Chadian troops with instruction on patrolling and
fixed-site defense as well as live-fire training. “We are ready to begin
training in Chad for about 1,300 soldiers -- an 850 man battalion, plus another
450 man battalion,” said Colonel John Ruffing, the Security Cooperation
director of U.S. Army Africa, noting that the U.S. was working in tandem with a
French private security firm.
In September, AFRICOM reaffirmed its close ties with Chad by
renewing an Acquisition Cross Servicing Agreement, which allows both militaries
to purchase from each other or trade for basic supplies. The open-ended pact,
said Brigadier General James Vechery, AFRICOM’s director for logistics, “will
continue to strengthen our bilateral cooperation on international security
issues... as well as the interoperability of the armed forces of both nations.”
With Chad, the United States finds itself more deeply
involved with yet another authoritarian government and another atrocity-prone
proxy force. In this, it continues a long series of mistakes, missteps, and
mishaps across Africa. These include an intervention in Libya that transformed
the country from an autocracy into a near-failed state, training efforts that
produced coup leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso, American nation-building that led
to a failed state in South Sudan, anti-piracy measures that flopped in the Gulf
of Guinea, the many fiascos of the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership,
the training of an elite Congolese unit that committed mass rapes and other
atrocities, problem-plagued humanitarian efforts in Djibouti and Ethiopia, and
the steady rise of terror groups in U.S.-backed countries like Nigeria and
Tunisia.
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