03/06/13 – Thomas C. Mountain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Our first guest today is Thomas Mountain.
He writes from Eritrea about Africa issues.
Boy, there sure are a hell of a lot of them these days.
You can find them oftentimes at counterpunch.org.
Welcome back to the show, Thomas.
How are you doing?
Great to be back, Scott.
Keep up the good work.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So I guess since the last time we've spoken, the French invaded Mali, and they just cleaned up that al-Qaeda problem.
What can you tell us about the war there now?
Yeah, I don't know.
I think the French are entering a major problem.
You see, French has got a neocolonial empire in West Africa.
And, you know, after what they call independence, they installed their own elite and maintained the control of those countries through their military.
And, you know, French actually had military bases in places like Niger and Senegal and Central African Republic.
So, you know, the French have been one of the most overt neocolonial powers maintaining a military presence on the continent.
On the other hand, you know, there's been a steady influx internationally.
I mean, the Saudi Arabian royal family has been a major funder, the major funder, of what the code word now is Talafis.
It's basically the word Wahhabi.
It's become such a dirty word that now people don't want to be seen as Wahhabis.
They see themselves, they call themselves Talafis.
But if you look at all these Talafis movements, all their money has been traced back to the Saudi royal family.
Every time there's been a Wahhabi movement, whether it's in Pakistan or Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Mali, you trace it back to the Saudi royal family.
And much of Al-Qaeda has been funded by Saudi royal family.
Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been, continues to be funded by the Saudi royal family.
And much of the Al-Qaeda rank and file in Yemen are actually Saudis.
So we know that for many, many years the Wahhabis and the Saudi royal family have been funding these very conservative, reactionary, fanatic, religious institutions within Mali itself.
And that, you know, because of the failure of the Mali government to provide any schooling or public schooling or infrastructure, many times the only places the young people get in, young boys get an education is within the mosques or the mosques, the Islamic mosques.
So the Saudis fund these mosques, and that's how they spread their influence internationally.
Places like Pakistan, where it's 70 percent illiteracy, the few places people can learn to read is within the Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.
So there's been this Wahhabi movement.
Now, suddenly this Wahhabi movement in Saudi exploded with this extremist group, Ansar al-Din, that it really took off after the fall of the Qaddafi government in Libya.
And up to that point, there'd been many decades of Tureg resistance, because the Turegs were never consulted in any of this so-called independence in West Africa.
They've been terribly marginalized.
In the case of Niger, the big French came in and mining uranium and permanently destroyed the groundwater there and poisoned it with the radioactive waste from their uranium mining.
So there's been a lot of legitimate grievances of the Turegs, and the Turegs have actually been in a state of armed uprising at various degrees for the last 40, 50 years.
Now, the Turegs took an opportunity within the context of the arms outflow from Libya and launched an offensive in the northern Mali.
And as a part of this, the Saudi-funded Ansar al-Din came in, and with a massive influx, sudden influx of funding, which no one's really been able to explain.
How come all of a sudden these guys have all this money to buy fuel, to buy brand new pickup trucks to supply their fighters, you know, in a region where it's in the middle of a years-long drought?
I mean, there was something like 300,000 people starving in Mali and Niger because of this drought.
And the economy's collapsing, and yet all of a sudden there's a lot of money for a military offensive?
So, you know, that's the, show me the money.
That's been really the basis of what's been going on in Mali.
Who's funding these fanatics that have come in and, you know, destroyed world heritage sites, which are the tombs of Islamic monsters, or kings, in Mali?
So, you know, all the hallmarks of this Wahhabi sect that have operated in Afghanistan, Pakistan, murdering Shia and other things like that are there in Mali for all to see.
And every Wahhabi sect that's been competently investigated has been traced back to funding from the Saudi royal family.
All right, now I guess during the period of the Iraq war, the last Iraq war, the Saudis were really fighting against the American side.
The Americans had chosen the side, they kind of had to choose the side of the Ayatollah Sistani or start the war all over again.
So they put the Shiite powers, the Shiite alliance in power in Baghdad and fought against the Saudi interest there.
But right now, America's working with Saudi Arabia in financing the jihadist civil war against Assad in Syria.
In fact, there's a funny headline about Nouri al-Maliki is asking for American help to fight against al-Qaeda in Syria that's coming across the border and causing trouble inside Iraq.
And I don't know what position the Americans are supposed to take in that one.
We support the jihadists in Syria and in Libya, but oppose them in Mali.
But so I wonder whether you think or what you think is the relationship between the Americans and the Saudis on this particular issue of the war in Mali.
Are the Saudis backstabbing the Americans here?
Or are the Americans and the Saudis working together?
Because as Jeremy Keenan put it, they would like to have a little more terrorism in North Africa.
So they have an excuse to intervene further, that kind of thing.
Well, you know, if you look at the Americans and the French have a rather strange relationship in Africa.
The French are the traditional colonial masters in this area and they established neocolonialism.
And they've been very, very determined and almost desperate to keep control of the region.
Now, the French are looking at this massive, potential massive natural resources in the region and, you know, saying, this is ours.
Well, you know, the French used to control Rwanda and Burundi.
And now the Americans, basically, through their close relationship with Uganda, Museveni in Uganda and Paul Kagame is right hand in Rwanda, have now become one of the major players there to the point where, you know, they're teaching English in the schools rather than French in Rwanda now.
So, you know, the Americans have been really low key.
I mean, they did spend a lot of money training the Mali army, which turned out to be a complete joke.
I mean, when the Islamic rebels came into the Mali, the Mali army literally fled, in many cases, tearing off their uniforms and melting into the population, abandoning all their equipment.
And all this training the Americans did turned out to be for nothing.
But the Americans have not been that active, you know, in this thing.
They're letting the French be the, you know, the Americans have been holding the French coats, so to speak, and letting the French militarily directly intervene.
The Americans were actually reluctant to get in.
They eventually were about the pressure on the war on terror in France and did provide some logistic support.
But this is the French, see, and the French really had no choice but to militarily intervene because the Mali army and the Mali government, because, you know, the Mali army overthrew the government, and that precipitated the collapse of the Mali infrastructure and allowed the rebellion to come in and take over and establish what they call Hazawada, the independent state they're claiming.
Okay, so, you know, Well, Ryan, I mean, that was the thing, was the jihadists and the Tuaregs, or maybe it was just the jihadist guys who'd kind of taken over the rebellion from the Tuaregs, they didn't just settle for stealing or running off with northern Mali.
They crossed the line and marched on the cities of the south, and that's what really provoked the French invasion at that point, right?
Right, well, the Mali government, the country of Mali was about to collapse.
The army is completely divided, even though, you know, within the army itself, the old loyalists and the old prime minister and the new captains and lower-level guys that were fighting with them.
I mean, there was going to be about to be a collapse of Mali, and if there was a collapse in Mali, it could lead to collapse in the Central African Republic, which has got its own major rebellion, and Niger.
I mean, Chad, it wasn't a few, but a few years ago, that the French helicopters were rocketing the central marketplace in the capital of Chad, because the rebels in Chad had been decades-long rebellion there, had taken over the rocket place, and the whole, the French basically burned down the whole central market in the capital of Chad.
I mean, this whole area is pretty shaken.
The rebellion is not just Tuareg rebellion, there's other major rebellions as well, and, you know, the whole French control of West Africa was on the verge of collapse if the jihadists came in and took over Mali, okay?
So the French had to intervene.
They had no choice.
It's not something they wanted to do.
They had to do it, okay, if they're going to continue to control that area.
So they came in, and they made all their promises.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
We're going to drive them out.
We're going to be out of here by March.
Well, it's the beginning of March, and, you know, there's talk about all this very bloody fighting going on, and yet we haven't heard a single report.
I haven't seen a single report in international news channels of any French being killed, wounded, let alone even being killed.
So we know that the Chad army is in there.
We know that especially the Niger army is in there fighting these rebels, but they're up in the famous Badlands on the Algerian border.
It's a very desolate, rocky, mountainous region that's been famous for millennia for being the hideout of, you know, armed resistance, banditry, and other things like that.
And, you know, the well-funded jihadist elements have had ample time to stockpile weapons and arms up in these mountains, and they know these mountains very well.
You know, they've been holding out there for years now, some of them, and this has been their hideout.
Now they're trying to go in with the, you know, with the Chadian army and Niger army and the French army trying to clean these guys out.
So it's going to be bloody.
It's going to last a while.
And the success of the mission, even if they claim they've won the fight, you know, it's always going to be something that's problematic because the problem is not going to go away.
The basic problem there, people in the region, is not going to go away.
So even if they do militarily defeat the jihadists, which I don't think that's a done deal at all.
I think there's going to be serious problems for the French.
I think, you know, the rainy season is supposed to be about to start there.
And when it does, the roads in northern Mali are going to become impassable.
And it's going to make it very difficult.
I mean, the African Union forces, the West African forces that were supposed to come in, have been very reluctant to get involved until after the rainy season passed because they know there's a potential logistic nightmare to get the troops in there and how they're going to supply them.
So, you know, this could turn into, you know, a serious problem, just supplying the army that's up there in the north fighting along the Algerian border.
So, you know, but it comes back to the funding.
Who's paying for all this?
Now, there's been people like Pepe Escobar and others that have said, oh, it was from the drug trade.
The cocaine is, you know, that some wild claims by the UN, who's historically been famous for covering up CIA role in drug trafficking.
You know, the UN is claiming that 60% of Europe's cocaine is coming into Mali.
It's really a wild, ludicrous, you know, claim because something like 2,000 tons a year from the best estimates I've seen, and I've been involved in this, you know, following the international drug trade for decades now, the best estimates is something like 2,000 tons.
And that's probably a conservative estimate, a shift into Europe of cocaine every year, 2,000 tons.
Now, that's all coming in by boat mainly from, you know, from Colombia.
Maybe it's transiting to West Africa, but to ship 2,000 tons a year across the Mali desert and then they'd have to smuggle it into Algeria and then across from Algeria into France and Spain.
Now, it comes directly in big ships.
It's oftentimes offloaded in a speedboat and brought ashore.
It's not coming up to Mali, okay?
Maybe tons of cocaine are coming up to Mali, but not hundreds of tons, let alone 2,000 tons.
All right, now, Thomas, let me ask you.
I saw one report that said that some of these jihadists, as you said, they're, you know, they're insurgents, so they just melt away, live to fight another day kind of thing.
And one of these things said that, and I guess you mentioned Chad there, but I read one thing that said that they're showing up in Darfur in Western Sudan in...
You talked about how some of the American-trained members of the Malian army had defected and joined up with the Tuaregs and fled and all that.
Well, here they are in their American-bought trucks showing up in Western Sudan, perhaps, you know, threatening to destabilize that situation.
I'd like for you to comment about that.
And then also I wanted you to, if possible, tell us a little bit about what's going on lately with the war in Somalia.
Speaking of insurgents who melt away and colonial powers claiming victory every time that they do.
Well, you know, the situation, you know, in all of West Africa is, you know, it's very unstable.
And, you know, weather stretching from West Sudan, the Darfur region, where the United Nations is spending like a billion and a half dollars a year in that relief project there.
I mean, it's just this huge boondoggle now.
At one point, it was the successful refugee effort by the United Nations in their history.
Their largest, most successful.
Now it's turned into another big sinkhole.
And, you know, they've got Ethiopian troops in Darfur.
They've got particularly, especially Rwandan troops in Darfur.
The U.N. is condemning Rwanda for arming the M23 rebels, and yet they're giving them tens of millions of dollars to fund the so-called peacekeepers in Darfur.
The whole area is a very complex geopolitical mess.
But, you know, I was mentioning drug trades up to Mali.
For funding, that doesn't pan out.
There used to be a major human trafficking going on up to Mali, from West Africa up to Libya.
But when the war broke out in Libya a couple years back, that all pretty much ended.
So, you know, that actually the human trafficking was a major, major force of funds for many of the gangster elements in the Turek community.
But that's all pretty much dried up.
It is some, but very little.
So, I mean, where's the money coming from?
And, you know, so, any case, you know, Darfur is unstable.
You know, the elements that, you know, the original Darfur peace treaty was hammered out here in Eritrea.
And then, you know, of course, the U.S. and U.N. have to get involved in it all and destabilize the whole deal.
And the saying goes that all roads to peace in Africa run through Asmara.
That the peace deals that get hammered out in Asmara, painstakingly negotiated in Asmara, are peace deals that work.
And it isn't until Americans and the Western powers and their flunkies in the African Union come in that these peace deals are destabilized, which is what's happened in Sudan.
And now, you know, it's happening in Darfur.
So, you know, the leadership of reach where I live has done its best and continues to do its best to try to see that, you know, keep the region from going up in flames and, you know, murder and mayhem.
But they're fighting up against some very powerful enemies that form the U.S. and the Western allies.
And it's the same situation in Somalia.
Now, we've got a situation in Somalia where we've got some 15,000 to 18,000 Kenyan, I mean, Ugandan peacekeepers there.
You've got peacekeepers from Burundi, thousands of peacekeepers from Burundi.
You've even got special intelligence people from Rwanda.
So, you know, you've got over 20,000 African Union so-called peacekeepers in, mainly in the Mogadishu area of Somalia.
You've got another 25,000 or 30,000 Ethiopian troops, either on the border of Somalia or inside Somalia itself.
And now you've got something like 5,000 Kenyan troops in the south.
So you've got something in the range of 60,000 foreign troops in Somalia.
And these are heavily armed.
I mean, the Mogadishu forces alone have something like 300 tanks and heavy armored vehicles and helicopter gunships.
And the Kenyans are there, I mean, 60,000 heavily armed foreign troops fighting some 20,000 lightly armed al-Shabaab fighters.
You know, so it's like asymmetrical warfare.
Al-Shabaab can't hold ground.
They have to retreat.
You know, they hit the supply lines and drive these guys crazy.
And, you know, every time they say we're winning the war, it turns out there's just a reason to add more troops.
Well, I mean, you know, when you do a surge in Somalia, why?
Because you're winning?
No, it's because you're losing control of the situation.
You know what I'm saying?
So you may have flattened 30 square miles of Mogadishu and created a million Somali refugees, you know, by the African Union and previous to that Ethiopian invasion.
But, you know, the reality is the Somalis are very nationalist people.
They're just not going to accept foreign pirates coming in or an army, 60,000 and more even, to come in there and occupy their country.
So, you know, and the thing about al-Shabaab is people have to realize al-Shabaab's not just one, you know, Wahhabist organization.
There's many different factions in al-Shabaab, including Sheikh Alwais, who was the real founder behind the Union of Islamic Courts, who's, you know, unified the entire movement by joining al-Shabaab.
But he's very moderate.
He's actually fought really strong ideological warfare with the real fanatic elements in al-Shabaab, saying that they shouldn't be linking up with al-Qaeda.
They shouldn't be attacking the Shia in Somalia and other things like that.
So al-Shabaab is not monolithic by any means.
And it's broken up into many clan-based factions that cooperate with each other.
But, you know, when the enemy comes, they retreat.
When the enemy hunkers down, they harass their supply lines and attack them.
And the whole situation in Somalia continues to be really unstable.
And because the Kenyans have gone in there, and they're carrying out a kind of a warfare against the Somali people, not only in Somalia, but the Somalis that are Kenyan citizens, they've destabilized the whole northern Kenya.
They've become a major problem for Kenya now, that what some people call the largest minority, the Somalis in Kenya, in northern Kenya, are actually very, you know, really fed up with the Kenyan army coming in and kidnapping and murdering their people and suspected for attacking the Kenyan supply line coming up from Kenya into Somalia.
So it's destabilizing Kenya.
The whole area is kind of a mess.
And you've got to realize this is right, you know, right next to the Baab al-Mandeb, the gate of tears between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, to which passes the major world trade between Europe and Asia.
Now, the major trading partners in the world is between Europe and Asia.
It's no longer between Asia and North America.
This is a shift that took place in the last five years.
So, and it doesn't just pass through the Suez Canal, guarded by an Egyptian army funded by the United States.
It also has to pass through a potential choke point called Baab al-Mandeb, the gate of tears between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
And that's right there where Somalia is.
So, you know, it's a very strategically critical part of the world.
All right, now, hang on one second.
Let me ask you, as far as the war in Somalia as it's going on right now, the so-called government such as it is, I know that at least at one point they have brought in the former members of the Islamic courts union that they had hired Ethiopia to invade and overthrow back Christmas 2006 in the first place.
Are those people still members of, and by they, I'm sorry, I mean, Connelisa Rice, the USUN sock puppet, foreign created government in exile installed in Somalia kind of a thing.
Now, are those former Islamic courts union people still involved in that quote-unquote government?
And does that quote-unquote government even really exist in any sense?
Or is it just as long as the Kenyan and Ethiopian militaries are there propping them up and Ugandans?
Yeah, it's a complete puppet regime.
There was a parliament that was elected the president of Somalia.
Well, that parliament was appointed by the government headed by Sheikh Sharif, who was originally the head of union of Islamic courts and was overthrown because there were Islamic terrorists.
He was on the US most wanted list as an al-Qaeda linked terrorist.
The world went to bed one night with Sheikh Sharif being an al-Qaeda linked terrorist and woke up the next morning to find out that he'd been a democratically elected president of Somalia.
But the government he headed, the Somali members of parliament, okay, most of whom don't even live in Somalia, are businessmen and live outside.
These guys flew in for an election, which they weren't elected.
The Somali people didn't vote for anybody.
The parliament was handpicked.
They elected, and they were chosen by Sheikh Sharif, and they elected the president who was a businessman living in a hotel in Mogadishu.
He was almost assassinated a couple of days after he was elected.
The whole area is completely unstable.
The security at the election was provided by the African Union troops.
There's not even a functioning Somali militia or police department that could protect their own government officials.
That's just a puppet regime.
It's a complete joke.
The election was a farce.
And this is just an example of a sort of distorted...
For example, I call him Jeffrey Gentleman from the New York Times newspaper.
They reported there was an alleged coup in Eritrea.
There's no such thing.
He's won the Pulitzer Prize for 2012 for his reporting from East Africa, where he's done a, you know, working, just like he's reading from the CIA briefing, to tell the latest lies about what's going on in Somalia.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, no, Gentleman is ridiculous.
I've read him for years and years as well, and you can tell he hardly ever leaves his hotel room.
He's certainly, you know, not out there really figuring out what's going on.
He is a spokesman for the national security state, as you put it.
Yeah, New York Crimes newspaper, I call him.
That's what he is.
He's a part of all that.
But in any case, you know, so the situation in Somalia is like spreading into Kenya.
It's destabilized Kenya.
You know, I'm predicting a major change in Ethiopia this year, by the end of 2013.
It may stretch on a little longer than that, but there's some big changes coming in.
And, you know, the Kenyan election itself, you know, they haven't, they're supposed to announce the results tomorrow, and the whole country's on edge.
The last time that they, you know, there's obviously some major fraud because a minority ethnic group headed by one of the famous Kenyattas, who's stolen most of the land in the country, put it under their name, is supposed to be winning by a large margin, but he's from a minority tribe.
And the majority tribe, the Luo, is headed by Odinga, is supposed to win all these elections, because Kenyans are famous for voting by the ethnic group.
But something fishy is going on in Kenya.
Kenya could explode tomorrow, the day after when they announce this election, or it may take a little while.
But, you know, the whole region is pretty unstable.
And if Kenya goes up, that means that the Ugandan economy, the South Sudan economy, the Rwandan economy, are all going to collapse because they're all dependent on trade with Kenya.
The Mombasa region on the Kenyan coast is populated by Muslims who historically were part of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and they've been demanding their independence.
So the whole region is very unstable.
And, you know, the one really peaceful, tranquil part of the whole Horn of Africa is why we're here in Eritrea.
It's almost like this island of calm and a sea of storm here in Asmara, or I'm actually down on the coast right now, in Vistala, enjoying our beautiful wintertime, wet sea weather.
But, you know, the region is pretty unstable.
And I wouldn't personally, I wouldn't live anywhere in the region except here in Eritrea, because even Sudan, I mean, things are kind of intense there as well.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, I got to cut you off here.
I'm way over time.
I got to get Marcy Wheeler up here to talk about Obama's claimed authority to murder me or you, if he feels like.
Hey, well, listen, one last plug.
To you readers out there, to you listeners out there, guys like you, Scott, are playing a very invaluable role, almost like a citizen journalist.
And people got to support you.
And your readers out there, your listeners out there, really, you got to dig down.
I know times are tough in the U.S., but without guys like Scott Horton, where are you going to get the truth?
So you keep up the good work.
And thanks for having me on.
Cool.
Hey, thanks a lot.
I appreciate that.
Okay, tell him.
All right, everybody, that is Thomas Mountain reporting from Eritrea.
And you can read what he writes at Counterpunch and also all over the place, too.
And we'll be back with Marcy Wheeler right after this.
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