148 - Russia Invades Africa, Exacerbating Internecine Conflict across the Continent
In addition to its almost year-old destructive invasion of Ukraine, Russia is pursuing a determined effort to profit from Africa’s miseries and instabilities. It is establishing a naval base on the Red Sea; holding naval exercises with South Africa; protecting military leaders and junta usurpers in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, and Mali; appropriating the resources of those countries; and selling vast amounts of small and larger arms throughout the continent.
Many of the countries in the Sahel region of Africa, just south of the Sahara, are afflicted by marauding insurgents. French, German, and British forces defending Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger attempted from 2013 to repulse fundamentalist fighters allied to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara. But after the 2020 and 2021 coups in Mali and the 2021 coup in Burkina Faso, the new military governments turned to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries (most of whom are now trying to take Bakhmut from Ukraine) to support their locally and regionally condemned illegal takeovers, the remaining French and other allied contingents have been pushed away, some locating nearby with American Special Forces in northwestern Niger.
The Islamists still wreak havoc in this region, having killed more than 10,000 civilians in 2022 and displaced whole villages and towns holding as many as 150,000 people. Yet, the Wagner mercenaries have failed to curtail assaults by the Islamists attacking from their bases in northern Mali and nearby Libya. Instead, Russia’s mercenaries are themselves accused by the UN and other observers of wanton deadly attacks on civilians in central Mali, and on forcibly appropriating gold and diamonds in Mali and Burkina Faso -- on grabbing anything on which they can lay their hands.
Wagner operates in the same manner and with the same motives in the Central African Republic. It helps to keep President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in office by preventing potential attacks on Bangui, the capital, by the predatory Muslim Séléka and the militant Christian Anti-Balaka movements. The Russians are alleged to have carted off quantities of Central African diamonds, gold, and ivory. As in other parts of Africa, Wagner and Russia profits from the disturbances of Africa.
Wagner and Russia do not, however, as yet seem to be involved in or influencing civil conflicts in the eastern Congo, Mozambique, or Somalia. Indeed, in Mozambique the Wagner group sought a contract to help the government contain an uprising by the al-Sunna al Jama’a, an upstart group affiliated with the Islamic State. It wreaked havoc in Mozambique’s northern provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa in 2021 and 2022, for a time halting the French and American pumping of natural gas from a field offshore from Palma. But Wagner retreated before the al-Sunna attackers, possibly because it realized that profits would be hard to come by. Troops from Rwanda helped to pacify the region, where civil war still smolders.
The Mozambique rebels and one of the 120 assault operations in the Kivu provinces of eastern Congo are loosely affiliated, both the Allied Democratic Forces of the Congo and al-Sunna having pledged loyalty - whatever that means operationally – to the Islamic State.
The most dangerous military force in the eastern Congo today, however, owes loyalty and perhaps operational support to the nearby government of Rwanda. M23 operatives have killed thousands of civilians and forced 550,000 Congolese civilians from their homes. They are near or at the doors of Goma, the principal city in North Kivu province, despite the efforts of Congo’s national army and the 18,000 soldiers of a UN peace enforcement battalion based in nearby Bukavu.
Somalia is the other major killing field after the Sahel. The Islamist al-Shabaab (youth) movement has held sway in much of Somalia since 2006, and especially in recent years despite the efforts of the American-backed Somali national army and 21,000 soldiers from the African Union. In the midst of a devastating drought, with up to 10,000 Somali currently facing acute hunger, the Somali war continues. Al-Shabaab even raids Mogadishu, the capital, and the two local armies and American and Turkish drones attack back without, so far, more than intermittent successes.
In Sudan, where Russia backed the military junta that also came to power by coup, access to gold has been a large part of the payoff to the Wagnerites. Now, too, Russia has obtained official approval from the ruling junta to build its own naval facility in Port Sudan. This will give Putin a major opening for Russian military action comparatively near American, French, and Chinese bases in Djibouti. But the base will also give Russia an ability to threaten shipping and commerce heading toward the Suez Canal. In exchange, Sudan will receive Russian weapons and war equipment plus, observers assume, cash to the Sudanese generals currently in power.
Russia has long been the globe’s major supplier of small and larger arms to the developing world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), from 2010 through 2021, Russia sold nearly more than four times the number and value of armaments to Africa than China and the United States. Russia’s arms went mostly to Algeria, with smaller but significant numbers to Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Mali, and Ethiopia.
Despite Western sanctions, last year in December alone Russia exported 214,000 barrels of refined petroleum products to Nigeria (a refined fuel importer despite producing large quantities of crude oil), Tunisia, and Morocco.
This week, Russia’s Admiral Gorshkov, a missile-equipped modern frigate, docked in Durban. Joining three South African and three Chinese naval contingents, the Russian ship and another smaller ship from its fleet will hold exercises and show force in the Indian Ocean starting tomorrow. Presumably, the U. S. will be watching.
South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance has condemned the joint exercise just as it has criticized South Africa’s refusal to take the Western side in Ukraine. "That can very easily make South Africa complicit in these war crimes," the Alliance said. "We are [being] drawn into the propaganda show of Russia." According to South Africa’s military spokesman, more than 350 South African armed forces will participate in the exercises "with an aim of sharing operational skills and knowledge" with Russia and China.
Clearly, Washington needs to counter the Russian thrust into Africa as well as to support Ukraine fully in its battle against Putin’s legions. Russia is not helping to advance Africa politically or economically. Like China, it backs despots and despoilers, coup perpetrators and local military usurpers. The path to stable democracy is just as imperiled in Africa as it has been for a long year in eastern Europe.