Category: Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Turkish Airlines cause change in visa policy

    Turkish Airlines cause change in visa policy

    New Visa Rules For African Citizens Turkish Airlines cause change in visa policy

    By Wolfgang H. Thome, eTN | May 03, 2011

    thy visa(eTN) – Turkish Airlines has reportedly prevailed upon their immigration service in changing visa rules for African citizens, flying with Turkish from the airline’s growing network across the African continent, connecting in Istanbul for their final destination.

    A source close to the airline in Kampala confirmed, while discussing the related issue of a Turkish Food Festival, that any passenger, wishing to do a stopover in Istanbul, or travel to see the ancient sites along the Mediterranean Sea and further inland, could now do so, as long as s/he already holds a valid Schengen visa, a visa to the United States or the UK.

    This change in policy seems to emulate the successful campaign Emirates has been running for decades now in which they assist travelers from Africa with the procurement of a visitor visa, and Turkey will have taken a lead from this success and now implemented measures to bring more visitors and more cash into their own country.

    Travelers from Africa, especially those already cleared for visa to Europe, the UK and the US/Canada pose a minimal risk to jump and remain while enroute outbound or homebound, and it was probably for such considerations that the Turkish authorities listened to Turkish Airlines in their quest to capture more passengers and bring more visitors to Turkey.

    The airline presently flies several times a week between Istanbul and Entebbe, before flying on to Dar es Salaam.

    Alongside these changes, Turkey has also of late embarked on a diplomatic offensive in those African countries they fly to, bringing in government and private sector delegations aimed to discuss increased trade links, tourism, and generally closer economic and political ties with key African countries. Turkish Airlines has one of the fastest-growing fleets and is a member of Star Alliance, the global aviation industry leader.

    via New Visa Rules For African Citizens Turkish Airlines cause change in visa policy – eTurboNews.com.

  • Turkey eases visa requirements for African businessmen

    Turkey eases visa requirements for African businessmen

    Turkey has said it will grant visas at border gates for businessmen from African countries for stays up to 30 days if certain conditions are met as part of its ongoing efforts to facilitate visa requirements for African businessmen.

     

    The Foreign Ministry said in a statement released on Tuesday that Turkey has decided to issue visas at the entry point in İstanbul’s Atatürk International Airport starting today for businessmen and citizens from 46 African countries who travel with Turkish Airlines (THY) and for businessmen who hold a valid 6-month Schengen, British or American visa. This will be applicable to the citizens of 46 sub-Saharan African countries, including Angola, Chad, Somali, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria.

    The statement also said Turkish authorities will consider those who enter Turkey for tourism purposes or on business to be eligible to obtain a visa at Atatürk International Airport if they also have the necessary documents in line with their travel purpose such as a hotel reservation, sufficient financial funds for the duration of their stay ($50 per day) and a roundtrip ticket from THY. They will also be required to pay 15 euros, or $20, as a visa fee.

    The statement also added that citizens of the African nations included on the list should have entered the US, the UK or a Schengen-area country at least once prior to their arrival in Turkey and that they should not have been denied entry or deported from these countries in order for their visa, of at least six months, for these three areas to also be applicable for entry into Turkey.

     

  • Turkish Group to Invest USD 1.4 bln in Ethiopia

    Turkish Group to Invest USD 1.4 bln in Ethiopia

    By Yonas Abiye

    ADDIS ABABA, March 9, 2011 (Ezega.com) – A group of business delegation which is visiting Addis Ababa on Wednesday announced that Turkish investors are ready to engage in multi-sectors investment in Ethiopia with a total investment outlay of  USD 1.4 billion as part of bilateral trade between Ethiopia and Turkey.

    The announcement was made at Sheraton Addis during the ongoing three days bilateral meeting of  ‘Ethio-Turkish Trade and Investment Forum held between the two countries business communities with the participation of high governments officials at ministerial level.

    Over 150 Turkish delegation headed by Zafar Caglayan, State Minister of Foreign Trade of the Republic of Turkey, and including company owners, manufacturers and exporters offered their Ethiopian counterparts the opportunity to enhance the already existing “strong” trade and investment relation between the two countries,

    State Minister Caglayan noted that “we are here to develop our relationship as Ethiopia is an important country in Africa. As a result over 1.4 billon dollars of investment would be made by Turkish investors”.

    He explained that Turkish investors want to use Ethiopia as a base and a gateway to Africa.

    “We want to provide African people particularly Ethiopian all mutual business opportunity to ensure development. Hence many Turkish investors are ready to invest in various sectors in Ethiopia, including this 1.4 billion dollar,” he said adding that “though we have strong trade and investment relations in many parts of Africa, we invest much of it in Ethiopia that may make other countries jealous”.

    The Turkish State Minister also hoped that when the newly proposed investment comes to operation, it will provide more than 30,000 job opportunities to Ethiopians.

    On the occasion Mr. Caglyan also indicated that Turkish state owned Exim Bank has extended a soft loan grant to Ethiopia worth 100 million USD with low interest rate that Ethiopia would pay back in the long term.

    The State Minister also extended his offer for Ethiopian business community to visit Turkey to participate in the Turkish-Ethiopia Trade and Investment Forum which is scheduled for this year in May.

    Representing Turkish private sector, Mehamet Buyukenks, who is also Chairman of Turkish Exporters Assembly, on his part noted that they are working to increase the existing trade volume between the two nations.

    He also underlined that the Turkish business community is looking for new investment in Ethiopia in addition to the existing engagement his country’s investors have in Ethiopia.

    So far, 225 Turkish investors are engaged in Ethiopia since the last decade. Notably, Turkish investor are working in textiles, leather and hide, and agro-processing industry, among other things.

    Moreover the visiting delegation team have expressed their readiness to engage in various sectors such as transportation, textile and apparel, mining, construction, building material, food stuffs, automotives and spares, medical equipment, household items machineries, package, plastic, IT system, electrical and electronic products, chemicals, and Agro-Processing business.

    Despite the growing trade between the two countries, Turkish delegation told Ethiopian officials, particularly addressed to Ethiopian Minister of Finance (MoF), Sofian Ahmed, that they have at times faced “bottle neck procedural and bureaucratic problems” here in Ethiopia.

    According to Mehamet, the major problems and “serious barriers” include the banking sector like shortage of foreign currency, long and hectic paper work and procedures to establish a company, high custom tax and transportation cost as well.

    Commending the contribution of Turkish investment and the bilateral relation, the Minister of Finance, Sofia, told the delegation that Ethiopian government is now ready to curb all the barriers and he pledged them a promise to assist them in fulfilling all the necessary procedures.

    “I assure you that government is ready more than any time to reduce all the problems. We’ll meet all your needs about custom related problems, and transportation with no unnecessary procedure while you come to get your investment licenses and facilities,’ he said.

    He also challenged them to participate on problem solving, citing that they, for instance, can do to engage in transportation sector.

    However, despite all the growing of the bilateral relation of the two countries, both Turkish and Ethiopian officials in common agree that the trade volume of the two countries is, of course, big and in favor of Turkey.

    ____________________________________________________

     

    Yonas Abiye is Addis Ababa based reporter for Ezega.com. He can be reached by sending email through this form.

    www.ezega.com, March 9, 2011

     

  • Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011
    Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction.”

    The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.
    Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.
    No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. Noone can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.
    What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

    To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder sounding “New Middle East.”

    As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

    The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.
    Egypt rising?

    The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

    Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.
    Washington ‘soft’ revolutions

    The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

    They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

    At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

    The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.
    April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.
    According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process.”4

    Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

    Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

    ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6 Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

    Kefaya—Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’

    Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”
    Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED)7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

    Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare.”8

    The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.
    The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood.9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

    Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

    RAND and Kefaya

    No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”11

    A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.
    In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:
    “The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.
    However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country.”12

    RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13

    Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:
    “The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions.14

    The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:
    “The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

    “Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. “15

    As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.
    The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements.16

    In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

    Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.
    Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

    If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.
    Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.
    The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.
    The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order.18

    As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA19

    The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.20

    The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.
    NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.
    The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,
    “NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.”21

    Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.22

    In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,
    “The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end… We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow…”23

    The US Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’

    The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.
    The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
    That policy recommendation was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon.24

    Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky. By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch war hawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.
    Greater Middle East orthographic projection

    Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

    In May 2005, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a USMiddle East free trade area within a decade.” 25

    Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership.” Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

    The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each.” 26

    The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

    Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife.27 It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

    Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

    Will it work?

    At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a USdominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

    It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ‘Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ‘If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region.28

    The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

    1 DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, accessed in www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often contain interesting leads for further investigation.

    2 Ibid.

    3 The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to Nasser’s secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic ideology.

    4 Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm

    5 Ibid.

    6 Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31, 2011, accessed in .

    7 National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africahighlights.

    8 Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.

    9 Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9

    10 Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya

    11 Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

    12 Ibid.

    13 For a more detailed discussion of the RAND “swarming” techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

    14 Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

    15 Ibid., p. 50.

    16 Ibid., p. iii.

    17 Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, January 29, 2011, accessed in https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-protest-movement-in-egypt-dictators-do-not-dictate-they-obey-orders/22993

    18 George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order…”

    19 Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.

    20 National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in

    21 Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in .

    22 National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.

    23 George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005,accessed in http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.

    24 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

    25 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.

    26 Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in https://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

    27 Ibid.

    28 William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

    http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Creative%20Destruction%20Washington%20Style.pdf

  • Sudan vote creates new country

    Sudan vote creates new country

    Southern Sudanese
    Southern Sudanese men watch the televised announcement of the result of a vote which will see them granted independence from Northern Sudan (AP)

    Southern Sudan is to become the world’s newest country in July after more than 98% of votes cast in last month’s poll were for independence.

    Sudan president Omar Al-Bashir said he accepted the outcome of the vote.

    North and south Sudan fought a decades-long civil war that ended in 2005 with a peace agreement that guaranteed last month’s vote. More than two million people died in the war between 1983 and 2005. The two sides must still negotiate citizenship rights, oil rights and border demarcation.

    The result will bring its own set of problems, experts warned.

    Global children’s organisation Plan International’s regional director said: “One of the biggest challenges we must deal with now is the influx of returnees, most of whom had moved to the North during more than a decade of political turmoil in South Sudan”.

    Mr Kebede said an estimated 850,000 to 1.5 million people flooding back are expected to cause shortages of food, shelter, water, health care and sanitation. There are also fears that 2.7 million people could suffer food shortages.

    He said access to affordable food was proving difficult for returnees and also the rest of the Southern Sudanese population. As demand for resources increase, the price of basic commodities such as flour, sugar, beans and rice has risen sharply, especially in the border areas.

    Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed the results of the referendum. He said: “This moment is testament to the leaders in both north and south Sudan who ensured a credible and peaceful process.

    “I particularly welcome the positive reaction of the government in Khartoum and their clear statements that they will respect the wishes of the south to secede from the north and establish an independent nation.”

    US President Barack Obama announced the United States intends to formally recognise Southern Sudan as a sovereign, independent state in July. Obama said that after decades of conflict the image of millions of southern Sudanese voters deciding their own future was an inspiration to the world. He also said it is another step forward in Africa’s long journey toward justice and democracy.

    www.thisislondon.co.uk, 8 February 2011

  • Sudan Division: Mossad Wrote the Script

    Sudan Division: Mossad Wrote the Script

    PH FactotIsraelis can tell the whole story of Sudan’s division – they wrote the script and trained the actors

    By Fahmi Howeidi

    Now that we have been unable to defend the unity of Sudan, it might benefit us to understand what has happened there. Perhaps that will alert us to the fact that secession of the south is not the end, but is one of a series of splits intended to dismantle the Arab world surrounding Egypt.

    From very early on, Zionists realized that minorities in the Arab world represent a natural ally to their state of Israel and so they planned to build bridges with them. Zionist representatives communicated with the Kurds in Iraq, the people in southern Sudan, the Maronites in Lebanon, Kurds in Syria, and the Copts in Egypt; Zionism adopted the principle of divide and conquer, and saw that the most effective way to fragment the Arab world was to create secessionist movements within it. In doing so, it sought the redistribution of power in the region in such a manner to make a group of marginal countries lacking unity and sovereignty, all the easier for Israel, in cooperation with non-Arab countries to control them one after the other later. All the rebel movements triggered by ethnic and sectarian groups in the Arab world have drawn support and advocacy from Israel, which has adopted these separatist movements, as witnessed by the Kurds in Iraq and the rebel movement in southern Sudan.

    This situation helps us to understand Israel’s strategy towards the Arab world, which is designed to encourage minorities to express themselves so that they may eventually seize self-determination and independence from the state. What helps in all of this is that the Arab world, contrary to what the Arabs claim, does not consist of one cultural and civilized unity – the mythical “Arab nation”   but it is a diverse mix of cultures, religions, ethnicities and multilingualism. Israel has been used to  portraying the region as a mosaic that includes in its midst a complex network of multi-linguistic, religious, nationalism forms between Arabs, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Israelis themselves, Kurds, Baha’is, Druze, Jews, Protestants, Alawites, Sabians, Shiites, Sunnis, Maronites, Circassians, Turkomans, Assyrians and so on.

    According to Israel’s view, when a land or part of a land has minority groups within it but no collective history, the real history is the history of each minority. This has the purpose of achieving two main objectives:

    First, it rejects the concept of Arab nationalism and the call for Arab unity; Arab nationalism in the Israeli perception is an idea shrouded in mystery, if not irrelevant. Arab unity is a myth because the Arabs pay lip service to one nation, but live within mutually incompatible states. It is true that most are united by language and religion, but that is also the case with people across the English- or Spanish-speaking worlds, but that does not make them one nation.

    Second, this is used to justify the legitimacy of Israel’s presence in the region as just one more to add to the mix of nationalities, peoples and languages, for which the perception of unity is an illusion. The logical conclusion of this train of thought is that each group of people (whether calling themselves a nation or not) has its own state; thus does Israel gains its legitimacy as one of many nation-states in the Middle East.

    The preceding thesis is taken from a text book: “Israel and the South Sudan Liberation Movement”, published in 2003 by the Dayan Centre for Research on the Middle East and Africa. The author is retired head of Mossad Moshe Faraji. I have referred to him on more than one occasion. He is worth looking at again as the crop sown by Israel and its allies since the 1950s is beginning to bear fruit.

    Another senior Israeli, former Minister of Internal Security Avi Dichter, referred to Sudan in his 2008 lecture delivered to the Institute for Zionist National Security Studies. “There have been Israeli estimates since Sudan’s independence in the mid-fifties that this country, although far from us, should not be allowed to become a force added to the power of the Arab world because if its resources continue under stable conditions, it will make it a power to be reckoned with.” Hence, Israel’s attention has been directed towards Sudan, hoping to exploit the situation.

    Sudan provides strategic depth to Egypt. This was evident post-1967 when Sudan and Libya provided training facilities for the Egyptian air force and army; Sudanese forces were sent to the Suez Canal zone during the war of attrition waged by Egypt between 1968 and 1970. For these two reasons, Dichter added, Israel had to work on weakening Sudan and prevent it from becoming a strong, unified state. This strategic perspective is necessary, he said, for Israeli’s national security. It is worth noting that Dichter’s lecture took place almost thirty years after the peace agreement signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

    When asked about the future of southern Sudan, Dichter replied: “There are international forces led by the United States that are determined to intervene in Sudan so that the South will become independent, and the same for the Darfur region, like the independence of Kosovo. The situation in southern Sudan is not unlike that in Darfur and Kosovo, in that the two regions aspire to independence and acquire the right to self-determination after their citizens fought for that.”

    Israeli support for the rebels in southern Sudan has gone through five stages notes Colonel Faraji:

    Phase 1 started in the fifties. For nearly a decade, Israel focused on providing humanitarian aid (medicines, food and doctors) and was keen to provide services to refugees who were fleeing to Ethiopia. The first attempts to invest in the tribal differences in southern Sudan itself began in order to intensify the conflict and encourage the South to secede from the Arab north. Israeli intelligence officers stationed in Uganda opened channels of communication with the leaders of the southern tribes to study the demographic map of the area.

    Phase 2 began in the sixties with Israel providing military training in special centres established in Ethiopia. At this stage, the Israeli government became convinced that keeping Khartoum busy with internal wars was sufficient to make sure that it would be unable to provide any support for Egypt’s struggle with the Zionist state.

    Proselytizing organizations active in the south encouraged Israel to send members of its intelligence services under the cover of humanitarian aid; the prime goal was to train influential people to sustain the tension in the region. At this stage, Israel also expanded its support to the rebels by providing weapons through Ugandan territory; the first of such deals was in 1962, with mainly Russian armaments which had been captured by Israel when it took part in the aggressive Suez campaign in 1956. Fighters were trained in southern Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya before being pushed over the border to fight inside Sudan.

    Phase 3 extended from the mid-sixties into the seventies, when the flow of arms to Southern Sudan was facilitated by an Israeli arms dealer called Gabi Shafine, who was working for Israeli intelligence. Shipments of Russian weapons won by Israel in 1967 were dropped by Israeli cargo planes. Israel also established a school for infantry officers to train the cadres necessary to lead the rebel factions. Israeli elements were involved in the fighting to lend their expertise to the South. At this stage groups were taken to Israel to receive military training. At the beginning of the seventies another channel for the delivery of Israeli support to South Sudan through Uganda was opened officially.

    When it seemed that the rebel movement was about to collapse in 1969, Israel made a tremendous effort to urge the rebels to continue their fight, and used every method available to them to persuade southerners that they were engaged in a national struggle between Arab-Muslims in the north who were dominating a Black-African-Christian-Animist south.

    Phase 4 from the late seventies through the eighties saw the African continent witness several major diversions (e.g. drought in Ethiopia) which did not stop Israel from supporting the rebels; indeed, support increased after Ethiopia became a regular conduit for the delivery of weapons to the South. John Garang emerged at this stage as a leader supported by Israel; he was received in Tel Aviv and given money and weapons. Israel was keen to train his men in various martial arts; ten pilots were trained to use light fighter aircraft.

    Phase 5 started in late 1990 with expanding Israeli support; shipments reached the south through Kenya and Ethiopia. Israel provided the south with heavy anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft guns. At the beginning of 1993, the coordination between Israel and the SPLA (the southern army) included funding, training, armament, information and supervision by Israeli technicians of military operations.

    It is clear that Israel has been eyeing southern Sudan for more than half a century.

    A worthy observation is that the insurgency in the south began in 1955, one year before the Declaration of Independence of the state of Sudan. This illustrates that the oft-cited reason for southern secession – the implementation of Shari’a Law by the government of Al-Turabi in 1989 – is merely an excuse; this is a struggle that has gone on long before such proposals were even mooted.

    While Israel was supporting the southern rebels with arms, Western countries were continuing their diplomatic efforts to arrange the division of Sudan through a referendum. The peace accord signed between the Khartoum government and the rebels was reached with British, American and Norwegian sponsorship. For more than fifty years, the people of Sudan have faced armed insurrection on one side and diplomatic pressure and dirty tricks on the other. If just a quarter of such an effort had been applied on the situation in Palestine, the problem would have been resolved decades ago. Self-determination appears to be acceptable, indeed highly desirable, if it will weaken a predominantly Arab state, but off the agenda when it involves the Palestinians obtaining their rights against the Zionist state of Israel.

    They have planned for this division of Sudan and look set to get what they wanted. As for the Arabs, they have stood and watched as mere spectators. I hope that this is not a precursor for further disappointments to come.

    Source: Al-Khaleej Times

    www.shoah.org.uk, 16 January 2011