Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“The Sahel – like the Horn, where the Gulf-led proxy war in Yemen is spilling over – is  at the centre of what some are calling the ‘new scramble for Africa ’.”  However, the recent events in Tinzaouaten suggest “that private military companies and militias are no panacea, and that after the failures of French stabilisation missions, they too will likely struggle to realise their interests in the region.”

The junta belt Image via  Colonel Assima Goita  on X.

Interesting development in this small country , but the geopolitics of it is of a significance in today’s shifting balance of forces. The defeat of French imperialism in the Sahel is welcomed, but having hopes in the Russian regime although understandable is delusional.  It reminds me of some Jordanian Stalinists who have sided with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. They too are delusional. Related Mapping the Sahel Friends in state terror

No bigger picture, no bigger context A tip of the iceberg of the barbarity of French colonialism

This piece requires a long breath and focus. “A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy. In the Sahel, the French state has settled on ‘Islamist terrorists’, a sequence of adjectives that denote elusive subjects surging out of horizons of pure violence. The inability is compounded by the fact that terrorists must be picked out in terrains unknowable to the West, because the West has long considered them—still considers them—to be outside of history: Afghanistan, a redoubt against empires, those makers of history; the Sahel, a land somewhere in the continent that Hegel banished from history. “The Sahel of [Serge] Michailof and other Western experts epitomizes the trifecta of alien  demographic vitality, Islamic fanaticism and pauper migration that is the new spectre haunting the West.”

Some "liberals" are really scared and don't want to see a radicalisation of a movement. After decades of silence and complicity, they are changing tack. Understandably, one is not expecting a Foreign Journal's article to include the capitalist and imperialist settings as a wider context of class and race oppression, the economic policies imposed, the international institution involved, debt enslaving, etc. That would question the "liberal democractic way of life,", the American concept of "freedom", the "cold war" and what it was about, "the definition of terrorism" and discovering American imperialist history. The defenders of the system will do whatever it takes, including concessions and what it sounds leftish discourse, to mollify anger, co-opt resistance, mobilise their troops of intellectuals and celebrities in order to establish a new status quo. If a stronger movement that goes beyond race and racism doesn't chall...

"Whereas immigration controls are usually about stopping people entering a country illegally, the new imperialism requires African nations to prevent people leaving their territory if they might be coming to Europe. It’s the 21st century’s version of the Berlin Wall slung across the African continent." Europe's plan is working

This is not considered violence and it doesn't appear on the frontpages. Violence is mostly the one that hits the 'peaceful' cities and kills rich countries.

African migrants sold in Libya 'slave markets' — BBC: "How do you stop this?" — Me: By more aid, more celebrities showing the way, more NATO interventions ...