I did note in past posts about Russian mercenaries in the Sudan and North Africa.
But today's Strategypage has an essay about recruiting Africans to join their fight in the Ukraine.
Some of these are of course Africans studying or living in Russia (before the cold war ended, a lot of Africans got scholarships to study in Eastern Europe or in Russia: Sometimes the training was good, e.g. doctors, but it also included a lot of political indoctrination back then, However, the help from the USSR was seen as good by some, in contrast to the exploitation by European countries. One wonders where the atrocities of the Wagner group in the Sudan (or the presence of Ukrainians in several conflicts there) etc and the economic exploitation of China comes into this: I should note that I am no longer in touch with what is going on in Africa.
However today's essay is about the missionary outreach of the Russian Orthodox church in Africa.
Currently Africa has over 730 million Christians, the largest number of any region in the world. Russian Orthodox Church missionaries are actively seeking new converts from other Christian sects as well as Moslem Africans.
the problem: The Russian Orthodox church is a quasi religious organization that is associated with the state and obeys their policies. Unlike the west,where 800 years ago the separation of church and state was pushed through, this is not true for Russia.
and now the Russian government is pushing converts to join Mother Russia to help them support the military (non combat roles) and of course with promise of good payment, some of these volunteers (and students studying in Russia) end up as soldiers.
this Reuters article from last year is about one African student who joined the Wagner group fighting in the Ukraine.
Wikipedia article notes the number of Orthodox in various countries around the world (something that the western Protestant oriented MSM is blind to).
but yes there is a Wikipedia page on the Russian Orthodoxy in Africa. and notes the changes in jurisdiction of the Orthodox in that continent in recent years.
Masaman has a short video about the Orthodox Christians in the world
The headlines shout all about Gaza Genocide, but the deaths and refugees there are small next to other wars around the world. (Syria, Chcchnya, Rohingye from Burma to name a few).
The worst genocide is in Sudan.
of course the expert wants the US to go in and voila make peace there. But why? It is Europe who messed the area up, and before that it was the Ottoman Empire and Muslim extremists who messed up the area.
Sounds like the Europeans want TeamAmerica World police to fix it, so they can then criticize the USA and their policies. But the election of Trump suggests that the US is tired of being the world policeman while an affluent Europe sits back and ridicules the USA.
And with Trumpieboy as president, they are chomping at the bits to find why he is the great Satan. (just like they did when Reagan was President)...
there is a Russian aspect of this: the Wagner Group is working with the rebels.
it's about gold....
this is a recent report on the Wagner group in the central African republic.:
Russia used to offer oodles of scholarships to Africans during the cold war: Often the degrees were useless and mainly learning propaganda.
Actually if the want Africans to succeed, they should teach them Chinese, since China is running the economy in many African countries. But that is another story for another day.
Nigeria, warmly referred to as “Big Brother” by many people across Africa, teeters on the edge of chaos. Discontent among Nigerians has reached a boiling point, and their voices of frustration are growing louder. The protests that took place across the country from August 1–10 were a cry for help, a call to action, and a demand for change.
Those protests, organized under the hashtag #EndBadGovernance, have largely subsided, but unrest continues to smolder in a handful of states with frangible stability and an especially aggrieved citizenry who have a distrust of security and governing entities. Their continued dissatisfaction may well reemerge as further protests or manifest more broadly in unrest and conflict that could turn violent. However, it is more likely that the protest movement will slowly dissipate and that the government response will not fully address their concerns.
Nigerians are staging a protest over hardship and bad governance, tagged #EndBadGovernance, in Ojota, Lagos, Nigeria, on Aug. 2, 2024. (Photo by Adekunle Ajayi)
since january 1, 2024, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has reported more than 31,000 suspect mpox cases and nearly 1,000 deaths.
There have also been confirmed clade I cases in Central African Republic (CAR), which borders DRC to the north. Clade I mpox occurs regularly in ROC and CAR, but the new cases appear to be linked to spread from DRC.
In late July 2024, the disease spread to countries that are not known to be endemic for the virus that causes mpox: Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, which sit on the eastern border of DRC, and Kenya, which has reported cases of travel-associated mpox only. Although contact tracing is ongoing, some cases have links to DRC. Person-to-person transmission has occurred during this outbreak, including through sexual contact, household contact, and within healthcare settings, when personal protective equipment was not available.
CDC is working with Ministries of Health and in-country partners across the region on disease surveillance, laboratory capacity including testing materials, strengthening workforce capacity, case investigation, case management, infection prevention and control, border health, and risk communication and community engagement.
In some provinces, patients have acquired infection through contact with infected dead or live wild animals, household spread, or patient care (transmitted when appropriate PPE wasn't used or available); a high proportion of cases have been reported in children younger than 15 years of age.
In other provinces, the cases are associated with sexual contact among men who have sex with men and female sex workers and their contacts. These are the first reported cases of sexual transmission with clade I mpox.
more here
The Republic of the Congo (ROC), which borders DRC to the west, declared a clade I mpox outbreak in April 2024. There have also been confirmed clade I cases in Central African Republic (CAR), which borders DRC to the north. Clade I mpox occurs regularly in ROC and CAR, but the new cases appear to be linked to spread from DRC. In late July 2024, the disease spread to countries that are not known to be endemic for the virus that causes mpox: Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, which sit on the eastern border of DRC, and Kenya, which has reported cases of travel-associated mpox only. Although contact tracing is ongoing, some cases have links to DRC. Person-to-person transmission has occurred during this outbreak, including through sexual contact, household contact, and within healthcare settings, when personal protective equipment was not available.
CDC is working with Ministries of Health and in-country partners across the region on disease surveillance, laboratory capacity including testing materials, strengthening workforce capacity, case investigation, case management, infection prevention and control, border health, and risk communication and community engagement.
reports that after a year the vaccine doesn't give protection even after two doses.
Not mentioned: Is this in all cases or just in the MSM type who have HIV?
the reason for western countries to get worried about this disease is partly because it could morph into smallpox like epidemics, but also because mpox in the west is a sexually transmitted disease (unlike Africa, where touching lesions will spread it especially to children because of lack of lots of water and basic protective equipment such as gloves)....
the dirty little secret is that sex tourists have been bringing cases into Europe and the USA, and instead of stressing behavior modification or shutting down places in the west where the disease spreads, they will rely on vaccine.
when my granddaughter tried to take a plane from Manila to Thailand for a job teaching, the government stopped her, until paper work and investigation of her and her job offer could be investigated.
They explained that Thailand was a center for human trafficking.
Filipinos, especially attractive young women, are hired to be maids or workers and end up as prostitutes. There is also a lot of drug smuggling, where poor folk are enticed to become mules to deliver drugs to their destinations.
Well, everything cleared, and she flew out last week with her mother to check on the job and housing, and everything was fine.
The background of this is organized crime, and the POGOs, gambling casinos linked to organized crime that were opened 20 years ago despite the warnings by the Catholic bishops, President Arroyo allowed the POGOS as a way to get jobs for locals and money for the government.
According to the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR), POGOs began operating in 2003 but it was only in 2016, after Duterte came to power, that the government began regulating online gaming hubs.
which brings us to this story I found today on twitter/X:
His company, Yatai International Holdings Group (abbreviated Yatai IHG), is registered in Hong Kong and headquartered in Thailand.[2] He became a fugitive in 2012, after fleeing Chinese authorities.[7] In 2014, a Shandong court convicted him of running an illegal lottery business in the Philippines that targeted Chinese online users, and had netted US$298 million in profits.[8]
so convicted in China 2014, but that didn't slow him down.
In 2015, he began building a business in Cambodia, involved in the illicit business of helping Chinese gamblers front-load gambling bets made in Cambodian casinos.[2]
From there, he expanded his business interests to the Philippines and acquired ownership of one of Manila's largest spa and entertainment centers.[2]
the US Institute of Peace (a US Govt think tank) in 2020 posted this report on what was going on in Myanmar.
To circumvent Chinese laws against gambling, ethnic Chinese with citizenship in other countries spearhead these projects.
Of concern to Beijing, they have co-opted Chinese government institutions and agencies to present their activities as central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
notice that several of these articles mention the Philippines? that is an ongoing scandal here which I have not been following.
But recently, instead of watching soap operas, everyone here is following the Senate hearings on Alice Guo, a fake citizen who became mayor of a small town in Pampanga. that has been linked to casinos and crime (and is near a military base but no spying found...yet).
n what was supposed to be the final hearing on Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO), Guo deviated from her usual responses to assert her innocence—and to hint at a bigger boss.
“Your honor, hindi ako mastermind. Masasabi ko po is isa akong victim (Your honor, I am not a mastermind. I can say that I am a victim) ,” Guo said.
For most of her appearances in the Senate since being detained by Indonesian authorities in September, Guo has typically given one of three responses: she either claims ignorance, invokes her right against self-incrimination or cites a death threat.
Sen. JV Ejercito then asked Guo if she was a pawn of an international criminal syndicate.
Guo responded that she was not exactly used, but acknowledged that she has a reputation for being helpful.
This article from the Straits Time Singapore notes connections with organized crime there.
Guo had incorporated the company behind the scam compound, Baofu Land Development, in 2019 with two convicts in Singapore’s $3 billion money laundering case, Chinese nationals Zhang Ruijin and Lin Baoying.
alas, I am not an expert on the Chinese Triad but WIKIPEDIA page discusses their long history
and the liberal Brookings Institute has a long analysis of the relationship between organized crime and the Chinese government
Indeed, these criminal networks provide a variety of services to the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Chinese legal enterprises. They help build networks of corruption and influence among foreign politicians and businesses.
In interviews with Vanda Felbab-Brown, current and former law enforcement officials from the United States, Asia, Australia, and Africa stated that China-linked criminal groups monitor the Chinese diaspora and act as extralegal enforcers on behalf of Chinese authorities against those who speak and act against the Chinese government and CCP. Thus, Chinese government officials often unofficially extend the umbrella of party protection and government authority to these actors.
Hey Donald, instead of worrying about Haitians eating Garfield you need to check out some of the Chinese ethnics entering the USA illegally.
sorry: I accidentally posted it here, but you know, with all of those Chinese investments in Africa, and now that Africans are being recruited to work overseas, I wonder if there is a story about the Chinese triads in Africa too.
China has overfished and dug up the sea bed in the West Philippine sea, harming our fishing industry. But their fishing trawlers have also been busy stealing maritime resources from South America,
but now they are destroying the fishing grounds off of West Africa:
......
these reports are not recent.
But Global voices has a report on what is going on recently:
The impact of China's fishing policies on West Africa
Large trawlers are destroying the ecosystem in West African ocean
Senegal is one of many countries affected by devastating overfishing due to illegal Chinese fishing vessels. Senegal’s unemployment rate remains high because, according to Greenpeace, an environmental organization working in more than 50 countries in the world, including West and Central Africa, the introduction of mass-scale fishing techniques by Chinese vessels has devastated local fishing industries, leaving many without their livelihoods....
One of those using YOUTUBE to push ideas is Ramaswami.
He has this video discussing Mugabe against white farmers and compares it to the war against the white farmers in Rhodesia.
Well, it ignores how Africans were removed from good farmlands so that it could be sold to white immigrants and the Africans were resettled in other areas, including some of those resettled into lower altitudes where malaria, to which they had no resistance, was common.
I post this even though I disagree with his idea that this was about ethnicity but post it for your information
The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent.
and it's not just the war: It is the danger of a massive famine that could kill millions.
At least 77 people have been killed in an attack on Mali’s capital, Bamako, on Tuesday, according to AFP, in the first major attack on the Malian capital since 2015.
JNIM members appeared to have killed scores of Malian soldiers and Russian fighters from the Wagner mercenary group during the nine hours the attack is believed to have lasted for. The Wagner Group, now called Africa Corps, is deployed in the country to assist the government in repelling armed groups.
backstory
When anti-French sentiment began to rise in the region around 2015, partly due to continued attacks by armed groups, Goita ordered French forces and MINUSMA to leave. The troops started withdrawing in 2022 and completed their exit by December last year.
Goita’s government has instead turned to Russia’s Wagner forces for support. There are now about 2,000 Wagner fighters in the country.
========================
StrategyPage has a long discussion about the war in that country
it's not just islamicist vs the present Government, it has roots in tribal difference: the Tuareg (desert tribes) vs the Arab influenced culture of the north and the black tribes of the south. The Tuareg used to run the place and is now getting payback: and now the Islamic crazies have gotten involved.
CSP was formed in 2021 and mainly consists of Tuaregs, a North African Berber group that dominated the region for over two thousand years until European colonial forces showed up in the early 19 th century.,,,
The French colonial governments used the Tuaregs as their enforcers and this backfired on them when the French left and the newly independent governments of Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso sought to suppress Tuareg power in the region.....
In 2023 and 2024 the economic and political situation in Mali has gotten worse, with more Islamic terrorist violence and growing areas of northern and central Mali coming under the control of Islamic terrorist groups.
the guys in the World tour (aka Top Gear 2) do their last show in Zimbabwe, showing the beauties of the land.
this is a big boost for tourism.
alas, not their best show, and it could have shown more of the country, but it is a welcome change from most of the reporting by western outlets, showing the good part of the country in their trip from Mutare to Botswana.
No, it's not the culture: The culture was destroyed by Arab slave traders (east Africa slave trade was documented by Livingstone, but sort of ignored by the western historians) and later the Europeans who wanted cheap labor, and of course, the desire of everyone to get gold (and now other rare earth metals).
Over a decade ago, political leaders and celebrities from around the globe made a high-publicity pledge to put an end the use of rape as a weapon of war. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, met survivors in eastern Congo, which amid years of back-to-back and parallel conflicts, had become known as the “rape capital of the world.” The U.K.’s then-foreign secretary, William Hague, who visited Goma, the biggest city on Congo’s border with Rwanda, with actress Angelina Jolie, likened sexual violence in conflict zones, and the world’s quest to end it, to “the slave trade of our generation.”
But it gets worse: Congo’s Forgotten Curse: Epidemic of Female-on-Female Rape. “Rape in conflict zones has long been the subject of news reports and academic study and large amounts of donor funding is channeled to organizations that respond to it. But rape specifically perpetrated by women has received less attention. Recent studies suggest the problem is more widespread than many experts previously believed. In 2010, Harvard academic Lynn Lawry and a team of researchers conducted a survey of human-rights abuses in over 1,000 households in conflict-ridden eastern Congo. It was the same year that Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, dubbed Congo ‘the rape capital of the world.’ Lawry’s study asked victims of sexual violence to specify their assailant’s gender. It found that 40% of the women — and 10% of the men — who said they were subjected to sexual violence were assaulted by a woman.”
And of course, there’s lots of rape of men in Congo too. “During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn’t the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him.”
The ongoing war has severely damaged Sudan’s ability to offer essential public services, including national banking services. The Electronic Banking Services Company (EBS), which oversees governmental e-banking operations, lost the ability to offer clearing services, which disrupted bank-to-bank transactions. Furthermore, the RSF looted banks in several cities in Sudan, leading to long queues at bank offices and further complicating traditional banking operations.
long article about the internet which enables bank transfers, but alas the military on both sides are using it too.
Pro-democracy activists in Zimbabwe are being prosecuted for ‘public disorder’
Detained activists said they were tortured and threatened with rape
Go to link (copyrighted article).
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabwe police have arrested 18 political activists and hauled some of them off a plane, their lawyers said Thursday, in the latest clampdown by the government after warning it would crush opposition protests ahead of its hosting of a meeting of the southern African heads of state this month.
The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights group said it was representing the activists, who were detained on Wednesday.
Among the activists arrested is Namatai Kwekweza, a 25-year-old pro-democracy campaigner and the inaugural winner of the Kofi Annan NextGen Democracy Prize in 2023. The prize is awarded by the late United Nations secretary-general’s foundation to young people committed to the principles of democracy.
and follow the money:
Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe's first lady and others were sanctioned by the United States earlier this year for alleged involvement in gold and diamond smuggling and human rights abuses.
"Even if the Tanzanian government’s concerns about land use pressures on the biodiversity of the conservation area are valid, addressing them should not justify human rights abuses."
Even if people can afford to pay the bills, the provision of urban services by state actors (or commissioned firms) is erratic and often not available. The daily infrastructure provision remains the responsibility of individuals and groups, mostly organised in complex yet fragile and changing networks. Drawing from the research on the existing, largely informal water supply in slum communities, this article argues for the recognition and pro-active implementation of hybrid approaches in the planning, implementation and administration of urban infrastructure. It calls for co-production and ‘hybrid water governance’.
the more recent articles blame global warming of course, but what is not mentioned: Corruption. How bad is corruption? So bad that it has a wikipedia page about it.Nigeria ranked 145th among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector.
2021 BBC article.
Replacing aging infrastructure is often low priority even in the USA, but when aid money is easily diverted or shoddy work on the infrastructure is done, the result is disease. I cannot prove how much this contributes to the cholera epidemic, but in Harare and even parts of the Philippines, it was a major cause of cholera.
I worked with Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, but was aware of the large Hmong refugee population of Minneapolis, and later the resettlement of thousands of Somalis, who by the way did not assimilate with the small native African Americans who were living there.
However, on looking into why they were settled there as refugees, I found that many of them were actually Bantu Somalis: Webpage here.
When civil war broke out in Somalia, the Somali Bantus were sent from their homes and farms by armed people of the Somali clan. The legacy and stigma of slavery made the Bantu population particularly vulnerable and many Somali Bantus were killed, tortured, and raped by the ethnic Somalis as the famine increased. The ones who were able to flee walked anywhere from two to four weeks to reach the Kenyan border.
a long complicated history there about slavery, assimilation, the various tribes in Somalia, and the civil war (including the pasturalist vs the SomaliBantu agricultural workers being part of the background) and a report on how many ended up fleeing to nearby countries.
the refugee program has come to be shaped by a global human rights agenda, divorced from the previous grounding in foreign policy and national interest. The most recent evidence for this is the decision to resettle a tribe known as the Somali Bantu from UN refugee camps to the United States, rather than explore the very real possibility of solutions within Africa itself.
... Under this new model refugees to the United States are more likely to be direct referrals from UN-run refugee camps. The U.S. State Department has committed to taking at least 50 percent of those refugees, ... Since 1992, 77 percent of refugees who were resettled permanently in industrialized countries came to the United States.
The UNHCR has three options for dealing with the refugees in its care, who by definition have fled their country of origin to another country of “first asylum.” Besides maintaining the supposedly temporary camps where the refugees reside, the UNHCR pursues “durable solutions” which include 1) voluntary repatriation — return to the country of immediate origin; 2) integration and permanent residence in the country of “first asylum;” or 3) resettlement to a third country. Repatriation is by far the most commonly used solution.
so who are the Somali Bantu?
The Somali Bantu, which comprise several tribes, are viewed as two subgroups in their relationship to Somali majority society. One group’s ancestors migrated to modern-day Somalia roughly a thousand years ago and consider themselves to be Somalis.
The other group, numbering about 300,000 to 400,000 are descendants of Bantu brought to East Africa by Arab slavers in the 19th century. Severely discriminated against by ruling class or “dominant clan” Somalis, part of this group, also known as Mushungulis, sought refuge in neighboring Tanzania and Kenya with over half of those who fled winding up in UN refugee camps in Kenya.
It is the Somali Bantu in Kenyan UN refugee camps that the United States has agreed to admit on its refugee program.
the article discusses the decision of resettling far away instead of what would be cheaper and better for all involved: Resettle in nearby countries.
StrategyPage has a long essay on the Congo, and the elections.
but the part I want to quote is this, and I wonder how China managed to control their mineral wealth.
Just defeating Kabila in an election was a remarkable feat because the former president had enriched himself with corrupt dealings. The worst corruption was in eastern Congo (Ituri, North and South Kivu provinces) and southern Congo (Katanga province). These provinces are where foreign firms mine and export valuable minerals.
what it comes down to is that China is investing in the cobalt mining, and it's easy to bribe and let authorities steal the profit (and probably the Chinese firms will also divert some of that money).
In southeastern Congo (Lualaba province) the state-owned cobalt monopoly, Entreprise Generale du Cobalt (EGC), had been paying artisanal, or informal, cobalt miners a minimum price of $30,000 a ton for cobalt that was selling for $50,000 a ton. The government contended that unregulated minral brokers paid artisanal miners much less than $30,000 a ton. For a long time these independent miners have produced about ten percent of Congo’s Cobalt.
Most of those mineral brokers work with or for Chinese companies which control an estimated 70 percent of Congo’s mineral deposits and mining industry. The Chinese state-owned CNMC (China Nonferrous Metal Mining Company Ltd.) owns huge cobalt and copper reserves in Congo.,,,
Congo is the world’s biggest cobalt producer, each year producing a growing majority of the world’s total cobalt. In 2020 Congo produced about 100,000 tons of cobalt, which was 71 percent of the world total.
By 2021 industry sources estimated that Chinese companies controlled around 40 percent of Congo’s cobalt mining capacity.
Why cobalt? China is planning to take over the world with their electric cars.
it is not just exploiting the workers and stealing the profits: It is also destroying the environment and displacing people from their traditional land.
In the report Powering Change or Business as Usual? published on Tuesday, Amnesty International and the DRC-based organisation IBGDH, or Initiative pour la Bonne Gouvernance et les Droits Humains (Initiative for Good Governance and Human Rights), detail how the expansion of multinational mining operations has led to communities being forced from their homes and farmland.,,“Climate justice demands a just transition. Decarbonising the global economy must not lead to further human rights violations. The people of the DRC experienced significant exploitation and abuse during the colonial and post-colonial era, and their rights are still being sacrificed as the wealth around them is stripped away.”
Amnesty International report:“The forced evictions taking place as companies seek to expand industrial-scale copper and cobalt mining projects are wrecking lives and must stop now,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
NPR reports:How 'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy
much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called "artisanal" miners — freelance workers who do extremelyKara says the mining industry has ravaged the landscape of the DRC. Millions of trees have been cut down, the air around mines is hazy with dust and grit, and the water has been contaminated with toxic effluents from the mining processing. dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day.
Tessa Dooms, a director at Rivonia Circle, a think tank in South Africa, said it was a historic result that diminished the ANC’s three decades hold on power. “The election in South Africa is an important watershed moment that fundamentally changes politics,” she said...The ANC will now have to form a coalition government with one or more opposition parties for the first time, to remain in power...
The radical left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and populist uMkhonto we Sizwe refused to participate in a government that included the DA.
“History will judge you and judge you harshly,” Malema said. “This is not a government of national unity. This is a grand coalition between the ANC and white monopoly capital.”
Global voices has more discussion of the pact including social media commentary at the link.
this is not right vs left, but about the corruption in the ANC, and the economic problems making the income disparity there worse.
By the way: China is SA's major trade parner, so how does this affect the economy? Here, cheap Chinese imports have destroyed local industries, and people resent the Chinese for not hiring locals. So economically the talk of worrying about white money is more complicated: Will this lead to more investment in the South African economy (and maybe lead to SA businesses being able to fight off Chinese competition)?
