Russia’s Great Power Status Extends to Africa

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Tales of Russia’s demise have circulated with remarkable consistency since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago. The successor state has often been written off as little more than a nuisance.

That’s just wishful thinking. Russia is, after all, heir to an old and enduring identity as a major player on the international stage. The country’s ruling class acts accordingly. And this compels Russia to act like a great power.

We can see this in Moscow’s activities in Africa. Russia has nearly tripled its arms exports there since the early 2000s, and Russian private military contractors have been instrumental in training the armies of various African regimes, securing lucrative commodity extraction rights in the process.

Sales to governments like Sudan’s have demonstrated that the Kremlin will not hesitate to supply arms to some of the world’s worst human rights abusers. In return, Russia has also gained access to a naval port in Sudan by the Red Sea. The 25-year agreement
will allow Russia to station four ships and at least 300 personnel at the base, giving it a strategic foothold in the Red Sea.

West African nations in the Sahel region have struggled to contain jihadist insurgencies by groups such as al-Qaida or the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). If the state fails to provide even minimal services in marginal areas, people will feel no loyalty and look elsewhere for authority and leadership.

At the same time, there is anger against France, the former colonial power and once the dominant player. During the early post-independence decades, France maintained a dense web of personal connections with African leaders and elites which too often slid into a mutual protection of vested interests.

 

So Russia has moved into the vacuum, displacing France. Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries are engaged in operations across the content, including Chad, Mali, South Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zimbabwe. Russian mercenaries sometimes work for both sides in conflicts, selling arms and providing training, advisory, and protective services

 

In late April last year, Chadian rebels killed the country’s long-serving president, Idriss Déby, a close ally of France. The rebels’ unexpected victory lay in Libya, where they had trained alongside Russian Wagner mercenaries.

 

In the Central African Republic, the government has deployed Russian private military contractors to guard mining locations rich in deposits of diamonds, gold and uranium. The mercenaries are there to support President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in the fight against rebels who still control many parts of the country.

 

Burkina Faso has become a battleground against Islamist terrorism, with attacks becoming more frequent. Last November, a convoy of French troops heading north to support the fight against Islamist militants was repeatedly blockaded by protesters as it crossed Burkina Faso and Niger.

 

Explosions rocked a UN camp in Mali a few weeks later while another attack targeted an international military base in neighboring Niger that countries in the region use to fight insurgencies.

 

Mali recently announced it wanted to employ about 1,000 Wagner operatives to help provide security. This followed a French announcement that it would withdraw about half of its 5,000 troops from the country. Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop said that interventions by the international community had not worked.

One member of the Malian armed forces told the French news agency AFP Jan. 7 that as many as 400 Russian military personnel could be stationed in the country. They were stationed in the northern city of Timbuktu to assist Malian forces. Many are happy for the Russians to replace them.

A military partnership between Mali and its neighbours to tackle jihadist groups in the region, the G5-Sahel, could come under strain.

Mali’s Prime Minister Choguel Maiga used a speech at the UN last September to accuse France of “abandoning his country in mid-flight” after President Emmanuel Macron began to scale back the deployment of troops in the country.

Russia is using insecurity and African countries’ diplomatic disputes with Western powers as a springboard to expand its presence in Africa. And its authoritarian example provides support for African leaders in search of alternatives to the western model of open economies and democratic multiparty political systems.

 

China is Making Significant Inroads in Africa

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Last March, a number of African ambassadors accredited to China defended Beijing’s repression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where at least a million people are believed to have been detained in a sprawling network of camps and face forced labour, forced sterilisation, torture and genocide.

Adama Compaore, Daniel Owassa, and Gafar Karar, respectively the ambassadors of Burkina Faso, Congo-Brazzaville, and Sudan, spoke at the Seventh Ambassador Lecture in Beijing, titled “Xinjiang in the Eyes of African Ambassadors to China.”

“Some Western forces hyping up the so-called Xinjiang-related issues are actually launching unprovoked attacks on China to serve their own ulterior motives,” Compaore said. Owassa announced he supports anti-terrorism measures taken by the Chinese government and appreciates Xinjiang's “great development achievements in various fields in recent years.”

Karar has visited Xinjiang and contended that the Chinese government has cracked down on terrorist activities and effectively protected the lives and property of the people.

Even South Africa, a nation that, under Nelson Mandela, was a champion of human rights and which suffered under apartheid, is silent on Beijing’s crimes.

Increasingly, Africa’s pro-China position is pitting the continent against the West when it comes to human rights. Criticizing this, Carine Kaneza Nantulya, the Africa Advocacy Director within the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch, warned that African governments’ willingness to remain silent on Beijing’s suppression of rights “has real-world consequences.”

But Eric Olander, co-founder of the China Africa Project, noted that for African policymakers, not antagonising Beijing is a much more important foreign policy priority.

“What these critics don’t seem to understand is that as poor, developing countries -- many that are also highly indebted to Beijing and depend on China for the bulk of their trade -- they are not in a position to withstand the immediate blowback that would result from upsetting China.”

Africa is a region that offers some key benefits for the rulers in Beijing – vast supplies of natural resources, cheap labour, and a new market for Chinese goods. Indeed, writes Nadège Roland of the National Bureau of Asian Research in a June 2021 report, A New Great Game? Situating Africa in China’s Strategic Thinking, by 2040 “the African labour force will be close to 1.1 billion, surpassing China and India, and by 2030, 60 per cent of the world’s population under 30 will be concentrated on the African continent.”

With the emergence of the post-1990s model of mixing aid with commercial finance, Chinese aid to African industry and other business-focused sectors has increased dramatically.

The decision by African leaders to turn to China for infrastructure funding has transformed the continent’s landscape with expansive roads, bridges, railways, ports and an internet infrastructure that has ensured the continent is not left behind in the digital economy. Some of these projects are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which 46 African countries have signed on to.

Ports are exceptionally important for the economic development of the region as 90 per cent of exports go through maritime channels. They will be spread along each coast of the continent. The Maritime Silk Road is now running as far south as Tanzania, along the Indian Ocean, and then up to the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.

China can leverage its relationship with African countries for its own geostrategic ambitions. For instance, the construction of ports offers an important advantage when it comes to access to intelligence, territorial access points, docking of its navy, access to trade zones, and maritime chokepoints.

China’s military presence in Africa has grown alongside its rising economic presence. Such concerns have already started to materialize with China’s military base in Djibouti, along the Horn of Africa.

China also established Namibia’s military staff college and provides military training to Cameroon and Rwanda. And China trains Kenya’s paramilitary National Youth Service and sponsors a “politico-military school” in Uganda.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Jan. 6, while on a visit to Kenya, announced that China would name a special envoy for the Horn of Africa. The region’s conflicts hamper its “tremendous potential for development.”

On his tour of East Africa, Wang also visited Eritrea, on the northern border of the Tigray region. Eritrea is aligned with the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in the civil war raging in that country.

Six agreements were signed while Yang was in Kenya, including one trade agreement that will see avocados from Kenya shipped to China. Kenya will also receive 10 million COVID-19 vaccine doses from China.

Western governments remain at a serious disadvantage. Chinese investment is far less restrictive than that offered by the United States, European countries, and Canada, which attach conditions on governance policies, transparency, democracy, and respect for human rights.

Many African leaders are supportive of Chinese investment activities because they feel treated as equals, unlike their past experiences with the West. And China is making political use of those feelings.

Xi has suggested the Maritime Silk Road was inspired by Zheng He, an admiral who led a fleet on seven voyages to east Africa between 1405 and 1433.

This is now exploited by Beijing, by suggesting that China and Africa share the legacy of having been exploited, humiliated and victimized by European colonial powers. Chinese intellectuals have fashioned this into an anti-imperialist discourse for acceptance by their African counterparts.

 

Albania’s Troubled Road to Democracy

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

In 1985, Europe’s last surviving war-time leader, Enver Hoxha of Albania, died after 40 years of iron rule over the small Communist Balkan state which he had turned into one of the world’s most isolated and secretive countries.

The prison system was one tool of repression. Another was the secret police, the Sigurimi I Shtetit. It was the main institution in charge of verifying the ideological correctness of party members and ordinary citizens.

There were perhaps as many as 40,000 political prisoners among Albania’s three million people. It is estimated that about a quarter of the entire population was either imprisoned or murdered during Hoxha’s killer regime.

In 1967, the Communist Party banned all religious activity in the country and declared itself the world’s first atheist state. Communist tyranny left Albania among the world’s poorest countries.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin exerted an exceptional influence on Communist Albania both before and after his death. In 1948, when the Soviet Union expelled neighbouring Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, Hoxha had to choose between the two.

His decision to back the Soviet Union led to Albania’s geographical isolation, as the country’s overland trading routes now crossed enemy states.

Every year on May1, portraits of Stalin, were carried by workers through the streets of Tirana to celebrate the advance towards communism. The cult of personality around Stalin survived longer in Albania than anywhere else in the world.

But Tirana’s relationship with Moscow began to sour in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor’s crimes. Hoxha refused to break with his late mentor’s legacy, in part because destalinization in the Soviet Union had been accompanied by the reestablishment of relations between Moscow and Belgrade.

By 1961, when Albania formally broke relations with Moscow and Soviet ships and submarines left their Albanian bases, the state became yet more isolated.

Mao’s China had also rejected the new policies emanating from the USSR and offered some help to Albania, but the two countries lay far apart, and China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, could do little for Tirana.

When that relationship, too, dried up in the wake of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, Albania, which denounced the Sino-American rapprochement, was left on its own. It would remain stuck in a time warp for the next three decades.

Albania continued to be governed by Hoxha’s successors even after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and other east European nations emerged from under Communist domination. But protests, small at first, escalated, and in December 1990 Albania became a multiparty state.

Albanians, used to a top-down rigid command economy, found themselves struggling. At one point, two-thirds of the population had invested in pyramid schemes and lost what little savings they had.

The country faced civil unrest. It experienced emigration, dislocation, anarchy on the streets, and gangsterism. UN peacekeeping troops were brought in to quell the disorder.

Albania’s experience with democracy started slowly. The former Communist Party, which was renamed the Socialist Party (SP), won the 1991 election and ran the country until 1992.

That year, a decisive electoral victory was won by the anti-Communist opposition, led by the newly formed Democratic Party (DP). Albania began integrating its politics and institutions with the West. In 2009 Albania became a member of NATO.

In 2014 Albania was granted candidate status for accession to the European Union, but progress depends on the enactment of significant political and economic reforms. In 2020, the EU finally opened accession negotiations but there’s little enthusiasm for enlarging the bloc, which is itself in trouble.

In any case, corruption remains pervasive: The U.S. State Department on May 19 designated former Albanian prime minister Sali Berisha of the DP “persona non grata “for involvement in corrupt acts.” The former chief prosecutor of Albania, Adriatik Llalla, on Nov. 10 was sentenced to two years in prison for hiding money involved in illegally owned properties.

So the former Communists still remain a force. The current prime minister, Edi Rama, leader of the SP, won the April 25 election, defeating the DP’s candidate, Lulzim Basha. The SP, which has been in power since 2013, won 74 seats in the 140-seat parliament.