123 - The Merciless Wars of Africa, II: Jihadists in the West
Islamist attacks threaten to spread south from the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger) to the hitherto largely untouched wealthy coastal countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Nigeria already has its several internal civil conflicts as well as the long-running major battle with Boko Haram, which spills over into northern Cameroon, southern Niger, and Chad. Cameroon is fighting its own separatist rebels in the south. The Central African Republic, adjoining Cameroon, Chad, and the Congo, is embroiled in an internecine struggle between Muslims and Christians. West Africa, in other words, today harbors far more militant combats, deadly clashes, and destruction than any time since the French colonialists formally departed in 1960.
Heads of state from seven West African countries met last week in Ghana’s capital to address violent extremism in the region. Members are “considering establishing a standby force” to tackle armed insurgencies. But whether and exactly how such a force would be established, who would fund it, and exactly how it would operate, is still unclear. Yet the need is immediate; Islamist insurgent successes in Mali and Burkina Faso are again emboldening their rapacious and trigger-happy cadres.
Jihadist armies swept out of Libya in 2012, after Muammar Qaddafi’s demise, traversed the Saharan desert, and swiftly captured much of northern Mali. After these shadowy fundamentalists took fabled Timbuktu and sacked much of its historical legacy, France –the onetime colonial power –intervened and returned most (but not all) of northern Mali to its civilian government (based in Bamako, far to the south). Ever since these successes in 2013, French forces (assisted by German, British, and American contingents) have tried to contain the Islamist invading armies, associated as they now are with al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara.
The French containment of these two major Islamist groups could not prevent successful raids into southern Mali, across much of Burkina Faso, and into western Niger. Indeed, as of this writing, the governments of those three countries no longer control large swaths of their national territories. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates have moved robustly south and east from the Sahara and constitute a continuing threat to those Sahelian countries (two of which have been afflicted by military coups).
In Mali, both the first and second coups led their rulers to accuse their French protectors of still being “colonial.” The French have since arranged to depart and reconfigure the manner in which French forces will continue to be active against the Islamists of the Sahel. Compounding the erasing of French assistance, the new military government of Mali invited the notorious Russian Wagner Group to send (now several thousand) recruits to battle al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. (See # 80, “Russian Thievery Without Shame,” July 25; #81, “The Battle for Africa: Fallout from Ukraine,” July 29 ).
The Wagnerites have not proven successful against the jihadist upsurge. They also have perpetrated atrocities against civilians, looted, and behaved as the undisciplined mercenaries that they are. Likewise, they have transferred some of Mali’s mined gold to their own pockets and generally impeded, rather than facilitated, economic growth in Mali and in Central Africa, where they also gather gold and diamonds from artisanal miners.
Meanwhile, militants from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda Islamists in the Sahel have made worrying incursions to the south, raiding northern Benin and menacing the other coastal states. Although the U. S. has Special Forces and drone bases in the region, they and the remaining French defenders have been unable to repulse the Islamists or to cut supply lines (and lucrative smuggling routes) employed by both groups north across the Sahara.
Civilians throughout the region suffer, as they do in northeastern Nigeria, where Islamists have raided Borno state continuously since 2010. Boko Haram, the jihadists, are loosely linked to the Islamic State. Earlier in this decade, Boko Haram sustained itself by kidnapping and manipulating teenagers, especially girls, and by ransoming others. It also trafficks in heroin and in the potent precursor ingredients of methamphetamines. Nigeria’s army, riddled by corruption in its upper ranks, has proven no match for Boko Haram despite a recent splintering within Boko Haram top echelon. (See #88, “The Other Invasions that Kill Innocents,” Sept. 13)
Just as the Democratic Republic of Congo, which we wrote about last week (#120, “The Merciless Wars of Africa, I: the Congo’s Killing Fields,” Nov. 21), is riddled with internal wars and warlords, so much of West Africa from the borders of the Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean is inflamed. One further tiny country in the region, the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, consists of a petroleum rich island just off the Cameroonian coast and a poor and largely neglected farming territory sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon. Equatorial Guinea is deeply troubled, but without visible civil conflict. Its despotic ruler has managed cruelly to maintain tight control over his now 1.5 million people for forty-three years.
Eighty-year-old President Teodoro Obiang and his family live off the rich proceeds of oil beneath Equatorial Guinea’s island, sharing very little of their wealth with the country’s impoverished and politically neutered inhabitants. Indeed, Obiang was reelected last week; 99 percent of the ballots supposedly favored his name; opponents cried rigged fraud. Many of those long opposed to Obiang had been imprisoned and tortured, five were killed, and others were brutalized and voters intimidated in recent months – standard and repeated occurrences in one of the world’s longest dictatorships. Obiang’s hold has been sustained by its vast under-island oil reserves; American companies pump and export these black riches and, consequently, sustain one of the least democratic regimes in Africa. “Tropical gangsters” was the fitting name of a book about Equatorial Guinea.
Slightly farther south and more offshore in the Atlantic Ocean than Equatorial Guinea lies the former Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Principe. Its highly regarded democratic government was attacked last week; an internal coup led by the loser of last year’s president election and last week’s parliamentary poll was successfully rebuffed – one more testimony to unrest and volatility in a West Africa that was once leaning into stability and popular rule. According to Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada, “Certain individuals do not conform to the will of the ballot box and the will of the sovereign people, and thus tarnish the country” -- words appropriate for other democracies world-wide.
When Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is finally rebuffed and reconstruction begun, whenever today’s injurious and massive famine in Somalia, Ethiopia, and northern Kenya is ameliorated, Washington will have to turn back to the conflagration in West Africa. Meanwhile, amid other priorities, the U. S. and its allies need to continue to help Burkina Faso and Niger, and their southern neighbors, reduce the sway of both Islamists and the Russian Wagnerites. If the U. S. can eventually help restore democracy to the Sahel, to Central Africa, to Cameroon, and to Equatorial Guinea we will have made troubled and desperate parts of Africa and the globe better, and their peoples more secure.