A Hierarchy of Victims - Why?

Are African lives worth less than the lives of people elsewhere in the world? For a brief period it was fashionable to show concern for the victims of political extremism in Africa. Remember the ‘BringBackOurGirls’ hash tag when the militant Islamist organization Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls in Chibok in Nigeria in 2014? The interest however soon died away. As the media spotlight was shone elsewhere, Boko Haram continued to make major territorial gains killing thousands in the process. Today, as reported by RT, the group now controls an area of 52,000 square kilometers, the size of Slovakia. While Islamic State and their territorial advances became front page news in 2014, the gains made by Boko Haram have, like the group’s victims, been ignored. Instead the focus is on the very small ‘threat’ terrorists pose to Europe. Last week 17 people were killed by terrorists in France. The events were shocking and quite rightly the murders were subject to unequivocal condemnation. At the same time, considerably more people were reported to have been killed by gunmen in Baga, Nigeria, with figures ranging from 150 to over 2,000. But it’s the French victims who we focus on, showing our solidarity with them by declaring ‘Je suis Charlie’. Even Nigeria‘s own President was keener to condemn the Paris attacks than those in his own country. How can this be right? Surely we should be mourning all victims equally?

You’ve probably got more chance of being killed by a lightning strike than by terrorists in Europe but the odds are greater in Africa. It’s clear than in many African countries, ordinary civilians have more reasons to worry about being murdered by al-Qaeda type groups than we do in Europe. It’s certainly more dangerous going to church there than it is in Europe. Dozens of churches were attacked in Kenya and Tanzania in a wave of bombings in 2013. Two worshippers were killed and thirty injured in a bomb attack at the Roman Catholic Church in Arusha, Tanzania in May 2013. Imagine what a major story it would have been had it happened in Europe, but it was in East Africa, so you probably didn’t read about it.

Cameroon is another African country which has more grounds to worry about terrorism than France. Only this week, there’s been a fierce battle between government forces and Boko Haram militants in the north of the country. “You will taste what has befallen Nigeria, Your troops cannot do anything to us,” Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau declared on video.

In Uganda too, the terrorist threat is very real. In 2010 militants from the Somali-based al-Qaeda affiliate group al-Shabaab killed over 70 people in bomb attacks on venues which were showing the football World Cup final. In September 2013 the same group killed at least 67 people in a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Why is there the excessive focus on the threat to ‘the West’? It’s partly about furthering the interests of our political elites. The so-called “war on terror” is being used by our governments as a pretext to restrict our age-old civil liberties and gain more control over our lives. They also want to ‘big up’ the terrorist threat at home to justify their interventionist foreign policies and their continued military presence in the oil-rich Middle East. Acknowledging that Africans face bigger risks than we do also wouldn’t fit in with the dominant neoconservative narrative of a “clash of civilizations” between radical Islamists, and “the civilized West.” The West must be seen to be the prime targets of the terrorists, even though they’ve been backing the same people in Syria and turned a blind eye when they murdered civilians there.

There’s also the fact that drawing too much attention to the advance of al-Qaeda affiliates in Africa would make people ask how these groups have become so powerful. That’s a complex question for which there is no one simple answer. There’s no doubt too that Western policy has contributed significantly to the current problems, especially when one bears in mind that it was the NATO powers which toppled the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, the main bulwark against al-Qaeda in Northern Africa. Libya, like Syria, saw the West line up on the same side as al-Qaeda.

The neoliberal economic policies that many governments on the continent, including Nigeria’s, have pursued at the behest of Western financial institutions has also had a disastrous effect as it has increased economic hardship and pushed more young people towards extremism. Groups like Boko Haram have undoubtedly benefited from these shifts in economic policies.

From here

Boko Haram's Latest Attacks In Nigeria

More than 2,000 people are unaccounted for after radical Islamist sect Boko Haram torched more than 10 towns and villages in Nigeria, a local lawmaker told NBC News. Ahmed Zanna, a senator for Borno state where the attack happened, said the militants razed the town of Baga as well as "10-to-20" other communities in the country's rural northeast over the past five days. "These towns are just gone, burned down," he told NBC News via telephone. "The whole area is covered in bodies."

Zanna said he had spoken to residents who fled the towns. They reported that the spree had been ongoing since Boko Haram overran a nearby military base Saturday. During the days-long assault, the militants chased people out of Baga before returning to kill those left and torch the buildings to the ground, according to survivors who contacted Zanna. Some of those who survived fled on foot the 100 miles south to Maidurguri.

The BBC spoke to Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, who also said that 2,000 people had been killed in the raids. "This is one of the worst attacks I've seen because so many people are unaccounted for and feared dead," said Zanna, who was elected in 2011. 

Nigeria will hold general elections on February 14, a ballot many expect Boko Haram will attempt to disrupt. The group, whose name roughly translates to "Western education is sinful," has slaughtered and kidnapped thousands and wants to establish a state in northern Nigeria based on strict Islamic law. 

from here

Will this latest attack on towns and villages in Nigeria generate a similar amount of coverage to that now ongoing around the recent murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo's editorial office in Paris? If not, why not?

 

News Headlines Deliberately Hide Real Events

Foreign companies buying Africa's fertile land 

According to an ORDAF (The Association of Researchers in Middle East and Africa), political events and terror news are deliberately kept in the headlines to hide African land grabs by Western countries. According to the ORDAF report, terrorist and policital events are at the forefront of African nations while millions of hectares of land are in the hands of foreign governments. More than 60 million hectares of land that belongs to 80% of Africa are quietly being exchanged hands through sales and rentals under the smokescene of political instability and terror crises. In recent years powerful nations' have kept Africa in the headlines with the incidences of Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda, hiding behind these events while trading in international deals. 

Going back to the 19th century, fertile lands was taken away from the indigenous people of Africa and given to poor white farmers and that today modern methods are now being applied on those lands. In particular this exchange of lands between Europe, the US and Asia have been far more widespread in the last 15 years. These mostly have been covered up by keeping the issues of the Christian Sudanese, the activities of Al-Qaeda's Maghreb activites, the Libyan-Egyptian political crisis and the As-Shabab in Somalia in the headlines, distracting from the secret deals and negotiations. As a result, by keeping these news at the front and hiding behind these news, it has been hoped that the purchase of the lands will be completed as soon as possible. 

In the report, very little countries with the exception of North African Saharan countries of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco but not including Mauritania were the few countries that did not rent out land over 10,000 hectares. The report says, “In some countries, the sales were so high, that there were now groups of observers researching the movement of land sales. At the top of the list was Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo, Cameroon, Guinea, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique were being watched carefully. What was even more striking was that with lands exchanging ownership, Western countries imposed that the land that uses traditional agricultural methods by the local people must be removed from all state authority. 

It was also stated in the report that in recent years China had usage rights of billions of hectares of African land. Whether through rental or sales, China has - irrespective of the price it had to pay – with land in its hand has strongly increased its opposition. China had expressed interest in Ethiopia, Congo, Zimbabwe and Cameroon which had closed off the land.

from here