The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) announced this week the closure of two temporary operating bases in central regions of the country, in Mbrès (Nana-Grébizi prefecture) and Dékoa (Kémo prefecture).

According to the U.N. mission, the decision is part of a reorganization of its security posture, following a relative improvement in security conditions in those areas and the gradual transfer of responsibilities to Central African authorities. The two sites were closed days apart in March.

MINUSCA stressed, however, that the move does not constitute a withdrawal, but rather a realignment of its presence with security priorities. “This development in no way signifies a disengagement by the Mission. On the contrary, MINUSCA remains committed to supporting the government and the population in stabilization and development efforts. The Mission will continue to support security through long-range patrols, particularly along the Dékoa-Mala and Dékoa-Bouca routes,” said Claude Yao Bouaka, the representative of the head of office.

The move comes as the country remains fragile after years of conflict. Despite the signing in 2019 of the Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation, insecurity persists in certain regions, particularly in the east and southeast, where armed groups remain active and continue to threaten civilians. MINUSCA continues to support Central African authorities, including through the redeployment of forces to insecure areas. Deployed since 2014 under a U.N. Security Council mandate, the mission is tasked with supporting the peace process.

Infrastructure left at the sites is expected to be handed over to Central African security forces as part of efforts to extend state authority.

Source: ecofin agency

A Somaliland official has revealed that the country’s leadership is prepared to give the United States access to its mineral resources and military bases in exchange for recognition of the breakaway entity as an independent state.

“We are willing to give exclusive access to our minerals to the United States. Also, we are open to offer military bases to the United States,” Minister of the Presidency of the Republic of Somaliland, Khadar Hussein Abdi, told AFP in an interview on Saturday.

He added, “We believe that we will agree on something with the United States.”

The Somali government has canceled security and defense agreements with the UAE concerning key ports, citing breaches of the country’s sovereignty.

The Israeli regime is the only entity in the world that has recognized the area as an independent state.

Somaliland’s president said he would give the Israeli regime privileged access to its mineral resources in exchange for its recognition.

Nevertheless, it remains to be recognized by the rest of the world as a breakaway region of Somalia, covering the northwestern area once considered a British Protectorate.

Source: Presstv

Africa’s heads of state are gathering in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, for their annual meeting this weekend at a time when the continent’s place in the world appears to be in flux.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking in Davos last month, described an arresting image of the future of international relations: either countries were at the table or they were on the menu.

For Africa’s leaders, who for years have been arguing that they should be dining at the top table, it was not an unfamiliar analogy.

But in his second term, US President Donald Trump has accelerated the trend towards great-power domination of world affairs and the ditching of multilateralism.

As the White House’s updated security strategy says, not every region in the world can get equal attention. Trump’s pivot towards the Western hemisphere, as well as time spent on the Middle East, has implied less focus on Africa.

The less powerful nations, who may have once relied on the norms, as well as the finance, of global bodies such as the UN, World Bank or World Trade Organization, are now having to re-evaluate relationships.

These moves have given fresh urgency to the question of how the continent should deal with the rest of the world.

For Tighisti Amare, director of the Africa programme at the UK-based Chatham House think-tank, there is a danger that African countries will be “left behind” if they fail to develop an effective common strategy.

But already, for the US, there is a menu full of tempting bilateral deals involving minerals and natural resources, which bypass any opportunity for collective bargaining on the part of the continent.

When it comes to Africa, the policy shift reflected in pronouncements from Washington is dizzying.

A little over three years ago, then-President Joe Biden told the continent’s leaders at a summit in the US capital, that “the United States is all-in on Africa’s future”.

This followed a White House strategy document on sub-Saharan Africa which described the region as “critical to advancing our global priorities”.

Critics, however, have questioned whether this really did penetrate the Oval Office, with Biden’s only visit to sub-Saharan Africa as president – to Cape Verde, briefly, and Angola – coming in the last full month of his term.

In contrast to the official statements from his predecessor, Trump’s America First approach has a much narrower idea of US interests.

“We cannot afford to be equally attentive to every region and every problem in the world,” the White House’s National Security Strategy stated last November.

The three paragraphs on Africa at the end spoke about partnering with “select countries to ameliorate conflict, foster mutually beneficial trade relationships” and move from supplying aid to encouraging investment and economic growth.

For Peter Pham, who was a special envoy to Africa during Trump’s first administration, this is a more honest approach.

“I was trained in the realist school of international relations,” he told the BBC, “and I’m not delusional enough to think that Africa is front and centre of US interests as much as it’s maybe front and centre of my life.

“There’s no way any country, even a superpower, can be all things to everyone. The reality is we don’t have the bandwidth nor the resources, as generous as the American people have been, to do everything for everyone.

“So we have to husband those resources and steward them as best we can to achieve the optimal outcome for obviously our own citizens, but also our partners writ large.”

One of the clearest expressions of this was the minerals deal that the US struck with the Democratic Republic of Congo in December, which happened in tandem with the signing of a peace deal with Rwanda.

It was aimed at “building secure, reliable and durable supply chains for critical minerals” for the US, according to the text, as well as encouraging investment in DR Congo, which has huge reserves of minerals essential for the manufacture of electronic goods.

Pham himself is part of another deal as he is chairman of Ivanhoe Atlantic a company involved in the development of the “Liberty Corridor”, a project building new infrastructure linking Guinea’s vast iron ore mines to a Liberian port to boost exports of the raw material.

Ken Opalo, an Africa specialist at Georgetown University’s school of foreign service in Washington, is worried that the US’s transactional, bilateral approach “means that the bargaining position for African countries will be terribly weak and therefore they may not get the best deals possible”.

He told the BBC that if “the DR Congo example is anything to go by, the US focus on minerals is about merely securing mining rights for American companies and little else in terms of the broader economic co-operation, which is not what the region needs.

“The region needs deeper market access, investment treaties and the ability to attract US capital for all sectors not just mining.”

DR Congo’s Mines Minister Louis Watum Kabamba dismissed these concerns. Speaking at a mining summit in Cape Town this week, he said his country was not going to “sell everything for nothing to America”.

Of course, the US is not the only big power involved. China, for more than a decade, outspent the US in terms of foreign direct investment in Africa, though this position was reversed last year.

Other countries, such as Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are also striking their own investment and security deals.

The transactional approach is not necessarily bad, Opalo said, but he argued that there is not the strategic depth of thinking going on, or diplomatic expertise, in African governments “to play this game well”. This means leaders may go for easy wins without considering the long-term implications, he feared.

On the security front, Africa’s failure to resolve the civil war in Sudan, triggering what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, could be seen as an example of this, Opalo added.

Despite its officially neutral stance, Turkey has been accused of supplying the Sudanese army with weapons. Iran and Russia also face the same accusation. All have been met with denials, but last February Russia signed a deal with Sudan’s military government to set up a naval base in the country.

On the other side, the UAE has been accused of backing the Rapid Support Forces, which it also denies.

“The failure to sort Sudan out is symptomatic of the lack of agency that the continent has,” Opalo said.

Ghana’s President John Mahama, for one, is trying to shift this assessment.

Mahama, like Carney, also spoke at the Swiss ski resort Davos.

He said that with “an unpredictable ally across the Atlantic” and shrinking development assistance, the world was at an “inflexion point”.

“Africa must pull itself up by its own bootstraps,” he argued.

In a passionate address he declared that the continent had lost its sovereignty and was caught in a dependency trap. This was true both in areas of aid spending – such as health and education – as well as security matters, he said, adding that when it comes to natural resources, “we supply the world’s critical minerals but capture almost none of the value”.

The president’s prescription, through his Accra Reset project, is more investment in relevant skills, co-ordinated industrialisation across Africa’s regions and joined-up continental negotiation with outside partners.

But these are calls that have been heard before and the question is whether there is a greater chance now that something will change.

For analyst Tighisti the “key challenge is that to create a united front, leaders should be more focused on regional interests. Sometimes this means that national interests have to be put aside if they really want agency in international negotiations.”

In his Davos speech, the Canadian prime minister called for the world’s “middle powers” to act together. In Africa these could include Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa.

But Tighisti said that while “these are the countries that everyone is looking up to, there is a lack of continental leadership to really push the integration agenda”.

One key problem is that many leaders are very inward-facing, as “they themselves have huge domestic challenges that they need to address at the same time”.

She added that there was already the framework for countries to work more closely through things such as the continent’s free trade area – a project aimed at boosting commerce between African countries – and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, described as a master plan for transforming the continent, but progress on these has been slow.

Laying out his pitch in Switzerland, Mahama said that “Africa intends to be at the table in determining what that new global order will look like”.

But there is still a lot of work to do to get the most out of the shift in US foreign policy as well as the continent’s other partners – the dinner invitations are not yet being sent out.

Culled from the BBC

France and the United Kingdom are reportedly involved in the assassination of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the prominent son of former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, as he was seen as the man who could reunite Libya after the NATO-backed uprising.

Saif al-Islam was killed by unknown gunmen who stormed his home in the town of Zintan on Tuesday.

Gaddafi’s political team said in a statement that “four masked men” killed him in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination,” adding that he tried to fight off the assailants, who shut off the security cameras at the house “in a desperate attempt to conceal traces of their heinous crimes.”

“Our sources on the ground in Libya told us that they suspect that British intelligence used local proxies to assassinate the man seen by many as the one who could reunite Libya, 15 years after NATO bombed Libya into a failed state during their campaign to kill Muammar Gaddafi,” said British broadcaster and former Press TV presenter Afshin Rattansi.

He also hinted at France’s involvement in the assassination, saying “We also know that France has deep motives in Libya, we know from Wikileaks cables that France wanted a ‘greater share in Libya’s oil production’ in 2011, and [former President Nicolas] Sarkozy was negotiating to reserve as much as 35% of Libya’s oil production.”

According to his remarks, Saif al-Islam was seen by many as “the most likely candidate to win any Presidential election” and unite the country after years of instability, especially as he had support from tribes that originally fought against his father in 2011.

“Watch now as the US, UK, and France start to steamroll ahead with the long-delayed elections in Libya, now that the one leading candidate who would have united Libya, and not followed their orders to allow Libya to be a de facto colony that is perpetually looted for its oil reserves, is now dead.”

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’s (SVR) press bureau noted that Saif al-Islam’s assassination came as France has reportedly been preparing “neo-colonial coups d’etat” in Africa and seeking opportunities for “political revenge” on the continent.

The report said the influence of the former colonial power in African countries is waning, as they refused “to serve as puppets of the financial and political oligarchy of French globalists.”

“Whether inspired by the American operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or imagining himself as the arbiter of the fate of African peoples, [French President Emmanuel] Macron has authorized his special services to launch a plan to eliminate ‘undesirable leaders’ in Africa,” the SVR press bureau added.

Source: Presstv

A plot to kill Burkina Faso’s military leader, Capt Ibrahim Traoré, has been thwarted, the West African nation has announced.

The sophisticated plan had been hatched by Lt Col Paul Henri Damiba, the military officer ousted by Traoré in September 2022, the security minister said in a late-night broadcast.

“Our intelligence services intercepted this operation in the final hours. They had planned to assassinate the head of state and then strike other key institutions, including civilian personalities,” said Mahamadou Sana, further alleging that the plot had been funded from neighbouring Ivory Coast.

There has been no comment from either Col Damiba or Ivory Coast.

Since seizing power, Capt Traoré has faced at least two coup attempts and is also grappling with growing jihadist violence that has forced millions from their homes.

Despite these challenges and his authoritarian reputation, the 37-year-old military leader maintains strong popular support and has gained a following across the continent for his pan-Africanist vision and criticism of Western influence.

Source: BBC

Rebel forces have entered the last government-held city in mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in an offensive that has forced thousands to flee across the border into Burundi, residents say.

Heavy artillery and gunfire could be heard in Uvira, with terrified residents describing the situation as chaotic.

The escalation in fighting comes despite the peace deal brokered by US President Donald Trump last week between DR Congo’s President Félix Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame to end the long-running conflict.

The M23 rebel group said it had “liberated” the city, while UN-backed Radio Okapi quoted residents as saying that rebel fighters were on major streets.

However, South Kivu Governor Jean-Jacques Purusi told local media that the army and allied militia remained in control of the city, which is just 27km (17 miles) from Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, across Lake Tanganyika.

Burundi has shut its border with DR Congo, a Burundian military source was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

One resident told the BBC that armed M23 fighters had marched in a single column into Uvira from the north-east on Wednesday, meeting no resistance.

Some residents cheered their arrival, the resident said.

The city was in lockdown, with shops and schools closed as most people stayed indoors.

“Three bombs have just exploded in the hills. It’s every man for himself,” one resident told AFP, while another added: “We are all under the beds in Uvira – that’s the reality.”

A local rights official told AP news agency that there was a “risk of a massacre” if the remaining soldiers mounted strong resistance.

“It’s chaotic, nobody’s in charge. Uvira is done for,” a Burundian officer told AFP.

Source: BBC