Central African Republic
omg pvt military?! pmc wagner?
821
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/one-billion-children-extremely-high-risk-impacts-climate-crisis-unicef
One billion children at ‘extremely high risk’ of the impacts of the climate crisis - UNICEF
Children in the Central African Republic, Chad, and Nigeria are among the most at risk of climate change, according to UNICEF’s first child-focused climate risk index.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/putin-chef-yevgeny-prigozhin-is-now-meddling-in-africa
libya?
Putin’s Notorious ‘Chef’ Is Now Meddling Across Africa
The man indicted in the U.S. for interfering in the 2016 election is spreading Russia’s reach across the continent.
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Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin’s “chef” because of his catering company and ties to the Kremlin, and Vladimir Putin.
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The secretive businessman known as Vladimir Putin’s “chef” for his Kremlin catering work is alleged to have helped Russia seize parts of Ukraine, turn the tide in the Syrian war and meddle in U.S. elections.Now he’s reaching deep into Africa with an army of mercenaries and spin doctors in tow to cash in on his newfound expertise.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur from Putin’s native St. Petersburg, has emerged as an unlikely point man in Russia’s belated push to bolster its geopolitical might by rekindling Cold War ties across a largely underdeveloped region laden with untapped mineral wealth. Lacking the financial muscle of its main rivals, the U.S., Europe and China, Russia is carving out aniche by shoring up strongmen in unstable but potentially rich states who have a taste for Russian weaponry.
Prigozhin and his hodgepodge of contract soldiers and political operatives are offering security, arms training and electioneering services in exchange for mining rights and other opportunities, two people familiar with the matter said. He’s already active in or moving into 10 countries that Russia’s military already has relationships with: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Libya, Madagascar, Angola, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic.
Presidents of Russia and Turkey meet for talks in St Petersburg]
This spurt of activity comes as Putin prepares to host more than 50 leaders for the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019. It’s an event that will cement “Russia’s active presence in the region,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said before a sweep through the continent earlier this year.
The low-profile nature of Prigozhin’s businesses ensures some deniability for the Kremlin. Putin, who gave Prigozhin an award for his service to the state in 2014, this year compared his old ally’s international work to that of George Soros, the American billionaire financier who’s long been accused by the Kremlin of subverting governments at Washington’s behest.
“The Russians want influence with governments, they want economic access and they’re much more flexible—that’s their advantage,” said Peter Pham, head of the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “It doesn’t cost very much to send a couple of hundred guys to shore up a president.”
Prigozhin, 57, didn’t respond to email and phone requests for comment via his Concord Catering company, and officials in the countries he’s targeting had no comment on his activities.
Prigozhin and Concord were among the three Russian businesses and 13 people Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted in February for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. judge on Nov. 15 rejected a bid to dismiss the charges by another of Prigozhin’s indicted companies.
Africa has been largely an afterthought for Putin, who came to power almost two decades ago focused on regaining Russia’s lost superpower status. After the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Russia’s presence in Africa dwindled dramatically; now the region is a focus for Kremlin efforts to reassert its geopolitical prowess and open new markets for domestic companies hamstrung by Western sanctions.
Russian Influence
Moscow has been ramping up military and political ties with African nations
As relations with the West continue to plumb new lows, Putin is finally pursuing a comprehensive strategy for developing commercial and security ties with the continent as a whole, according to Polina Slyusarchuk, who runs Intexpertise, an Africa-focused research group in St. Petersburg.
Russia has suffered setbacks, particularly in South Africa. President Cyril Ramaphosa froze his predecessor’s multibillion-dollar nuclear power project with Russia after he took office in February. But Putin is increasingly putting money behind the courtships, writing off some $20 billion of debt held by African countries last year.
More recently, Egypt won a $25 billion Russian loan to build its first nuclear power plant. And Russia is in talks with Eritrea to establish its first logistics hub on the Red Sea, not far from the Pentagon’s only permanent base in Africa and China’s first military facility abroad, both in Djibouti.
In March, Lavrov, Putin’s long-serving foreign minister, made a five-nation swing through Africa that included a stop in Zimbabwe, where Russian companies are involved in a $3 billion platinum-mining venture, the country’s biggest investment project. Prigozhin wasn’t far behind.
Prigozhin’s political consultants advised Emmerson Mnangagwa on his disputed victory in the July election to succeed Robert Mugabe, who turned Zimbabwe into an international pariah during his four-decade rule, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Mnangagwa’s main opponent accused “Russians” of helping his rival manipulate the polls. The ruling Zanu-PF party has denied any Russian involvement in the election.
Putin gained a military toehold in the heart of the continent early this year, after the UN issued a waiver for Russia to arm and defend the government of the Central African Republic. The CAR, which is mired in civil conflict, appealed for help after France, its former colonial master, suddenly ended a three-year peacekeeping mission.
“Like any normal businessman, Prigozhin is looking for the most lucrative places to invest his money”
The work of Prigozhin’s mercenary venture, known loosely in the Russian media as Wagner, has already led to gold and diamond concessions in both the CAR and Sudan, according to Russian and French media reports.Three Russian journalists were murderedin the CAR in July. They were investigating Prigozhin’s activities, according to exiled tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was funding their trip.
Prigozhin is now expanding his reach across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the largest country in Africaafter Algeria and one of the world’s richest in minerals, the people said. The former Belgian colony is about to elect a new leader for the first time since 2001, when Joseph Kabila succeeded his slain father.
Kabila recently named a trusted retired general as his ambassador to Russia, tasking him with negotiating arms supplies and assistance, according to a Western official who asked not to be identified. The DRC said through its embassy in Moscow that Russia hasn’t yet supplied any weapons. It also denied local media reports that Russians are actively involved in the election.
If Kabila’s EU-sanctioned protégé wins as expected, then the DRC’s military ties with Russia will intensify, which in turn will lead to more opportunities for Russian companies, according to Jean-Jacques Wondo, a Congolese security analyst based in Brussels. China has invested heavily in the DRC, but Beijing is reportedly growing increasingly frustrated with Kabila’s shifting demands.
“Kabila is desperate for outside help,” said Martin Fayulu, an opposition candidate in the Dec. 23 poll. “It’s not surprising Russia is moving into the Congo, given our vast mineral wealth.”
Madagascar, the world’s biggest producer of vanilla and a holder of major deposits of nickel, cobalt and uranium, is another chaotic country where Putin and Prigozhin share an interest. A Kremlin envoy flew to the island in March for talks with then-president Hery Rajaonarimampianina.
Russian election consultants affiliated with Prigozhin are in the country amid a tight race for the presidency between two other former leaders that will end next month, one of the people familiar with his activities said. Russia has backed several candidates, according to Jean-Claude de L’Estrac, a former Mauritius foreign minister and expert on Indian Ocean territories. The Madagascar Foreign Ministry declined to comment.
In Guinea, Russia is supporting a bid by President Alpha Conde to scrap term limits so he can seek to stay in power after his mandate ends in 2020, said the Western official with knowledge of Russia-Africa ties. The African state is the single largest supplier of bauxite for Russian aluminum giant United Co. Rusal. Guinea Foreign Minister Mamadi Toure and government spokesman Aboubacar Sylla didn’t answer calls seeking comment.
RUSSIA-GUINEA-DIPLOMACY
Alpha Conde and Vladimir Putin
Moving into North Africa, Prigozhin attended talks this month between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar, who controls most of the eastern part of the oil-rich state. He’s providing military services to Haftar’s Libyan National Army in return for energy deals, two people familiar with the matter said. LNA spokesman Ahmed Mesmari didn’t answer repeated phone calls seeking comment.
Prigozhin’s private army, Wagner, which was sanctioned by the U.S. for its role in the 2014 Ukraine rebellion, drew international attention again in February, this time in Syria. As Bloomberg reported at the time, hundreds of its mercenaries were killed or wounded by U.S. forces as they advanced on a base held by Kurdish fighters. Wagner was trying to seize a nearby oil refinery for officials in Damascus who’d reportedly promised a share of future revenue.
“Like any normal businessman, Prigozhin is looking for the most lucrative places to invest his money,” said Irina Abramova, head of Russia’s state-funded Institute for African Studies in Moscow. “He thought, why shouldn’t I give it a go? And he should only be thanked for that if Africans benefit.”
— With assistance by Stepan Kravchenko, David Wainer, Samer Al-Atrush, Kamlesh Bhuckory, Godfrey Marawanyika, Samuel Gebre, Ougna Camara, Borges Nhamire, Alonso Soto, Pauline Bax, Candido Mendes, Paul Richardson, and Hayley Warren
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-western-media-is-ignoring-a-powerful-uprising-where-citizens-are-resisting-tyranny-and-russian-interference/
AN 119
The story of the world today is the rise of right-wing populism, or so we are told. It’s the story of Donald Trump, of Brexit, of rising nationalism in continental Europe — especially in the east — as well as almost all of the former Soviet Union. But stories can change quickly. Whatever happened to “The End of History”? Or the War on Terror? The Great Recession? Or the Arab Spring? Who knows what the story will be next? Perhaps it’s already being written in Sudan, with echoes of so many other stories folded into it.
Almost eight years to the day after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia with the startling overthrow of the 23-year regime of President Ben Ali, the current Sudan uprising began in the city of Atbara, a railroad union stronghold. That was on Dec. 19, and protests quickly spread nationwide. A month later, Sudan’s 29-year ruler, President Omar al-Bashir — who has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court — is barely clinging to power, while American media, not to mention the U.S. government, has largely ignored the entire situation.
“All residents of Atbara are now on the streets,” one eyewitness, Adel Abdel-Latif, told Sudan Tribune last month as the uprising began. “He pointed out that the demonstrators chanted slogans such as ‘Peaceful, Peaceful against the Thieves,’ saying the police and army didn’t interfere to disperse or arrest the protestors,” the publication reported.
The story we’re missing is historic, according to Jonathan Hutson, who helped expose mass human rights violations in Sudan from 2010 to 2014 — documenting 46 village burnings and locating eight apparent mass graves — as the architect of George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project.
“What we have is the Western media largely misunderstanding or ignoring a revolution in a Putin-aligned African country, ruled by an Islamic theocracy, where the resistance is committed to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion,” Hutson told Salon. Reports of food riots vastly understate the seriousness of events, and Russian involvement with paramilitary troops (reportedly under the direction ofYevgeny Prigozhin, aka “Putin’s chef”) has failed to register as echoing the predatory pattern already seen in the Ukraine, Crimea and Syria.
“News reporting on Sudan has finally begun to highlight the ongoing economic collapse of the past seven years,” veteran Sudan observer Eric Reeves wrote on Dec. 24, but even so “there is remarkable superficiality and failure to look with any historical depth at how the present catastrophe began. … Priorities in the national budget have been wildly skewed for decades toward the military and security services, with only very small amounts devoted to health, education, and the crucial agricultural sector. Arable land has been sold or leased for decades in order to raise cash for a kleptocratic regime.” In short, al-Bashir’s political affinity to Putin’s Russia are profound.
As for the Sudanese people, it’s not that they’re imitating the Arab Spring — it’s really the other way around: Civil uprisings in Sudan have twice toppled dictatorships, first in 1964 and again in 1985. “The popular uprising has become one of the political norms that Sudanese resort to in redefining their social contract with the state,” noted Luka Kuol, a Sudanese professor of security studies.
Sudan escaped the first wave of Arab Spring uprisings in part because the government learned from those previous examples: It exploited regional, racial, ethnic and religious divisions, broke the power of professional unions and keeping the army dispersed outside Khartoum, the capital city, among other measures. But the government’s continued kleptocratic misrule has pushed Sudan past the breaking point, and al-Bashir’s old tricks no longer seem to work.
The Atbara demonstrations spread quickly despite a sometimes violent response. “The numbers of peaceful demonstrators in Atbara are increasing dramatically and the city is in full civil disobedience,” the opposition youth group Sudan Change Now tweeted on Dec. 19, along with a 57-second video of a loud but peaceful march. Sudan Tribune reported that eight people were killed on the second day of protests. Barely a month later, the al-Bashir regime appears doomed. The more demonstrators have been killed, injured or arrested, the more the movement has swelled, and al-Bashir’s attempts to divide it along racial and ethnic lines have failed.
In an inspiring and informative overview, “The Chants of the Sudan Uprising,” Wa’el Jubara writes about the regime’s “sick and naive divide-and-conquer attempt” to blame the protests “on one of the armed rebel movements in the West,” conflating them with “peaceful, unorganised (politically) citizens” from Darfur in the West, whom they arrested. “The next day, Sudanese people from all walks of life and origins went out again, calling out the regime on its poor racist tactics,” Jubara wrote. “They called out the failed conspiracy of Al Bashir and said, ‘يا عنصري مغرور كل البلد دارفور‘, loosely translated to ‘You [Al Bashir] are racist and arrogant, we are all Darfur.’”
“The current demonstrations are unprecedented, in terms of scale, persistence, intensity, and geographical reach,” Adil Babikir, a U.K.-based Sudanese translator, wrote in Sudan Tribune on Jan. 18. “The momentum is building up, with simultaneous rallies staged in many cities across the country. The revolutionary mood is at its peak. New patriotic songs are hitting the social media platforms every day. Some of these are originally folkloric wedding songs reworded with the themes of the revolution.”
In the midst of all this, on Dec. 31, Hutson posted a 33-tweet thread exposing the Russian presence in Sudan with photos and information provided by activists on the ground. This information on the “illegal” Russian incursion was information further developed and promoted by Sudan Change Now, as well as by the Russia-based Conflict Intelligence Team.
Russian forces in Sudan are apparently or probably there in the guise of Prigozhin’s paramilitary Wagner Group (aka PMC Wagner), which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2017 for its involvement in Ukraine. Prigozhin, the now-infamous Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg and two related firms he controls were also sanctioned in March 2018 for their role in 2016 election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.
“As police fired tear gas and live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators in Khartoum, wounding at least four people, Sudanese observers on the ground wondered about the significance of Russian military trucks spotted in the capital,” Hutson began.
Hutson initially stopped short of definitively identifying PMC Wagner. But the group’s presence in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa was already known, if not commonly discussed. In November, Bloomberg reported thatPrigozhin was “already active in or moving into 10 countries that Russia’s military already has relationships with: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Libya, Madagascar, Angola, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic.”
Last summer,three Russian journalists were killed while investigating Wagner in the Central African Republic on behalf of exiled Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A week after Hutson’s tweet-storm, Sudan Times confirmed Wagner’s presence in the current conflict, citing a source within Sudan’s security force.
Hutson noted that Wagner “guards Sudanese gold, uranium, and diamond mines, as well as atomic energy facilities. Russian media have reported that Wagner trains Sudanese armed forces.” He identified Wagner’s typical vehicle as “a light-brown, Ural-4320, all-wheel-drive, two-door cab, 6×6 truck in troop transport mode, similar to trucks used by the Russian military, and by Russian private military contractors.” (In a later thread, he explained in detail how he identified the trucks.)
Hutson provided some background on Sudan’s Russia connection, noting that on Nov. 23, 2017, al-Bashir met with Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia. Reportedly “Bashir asked Putin to protect Sudan from ‘aggressive acts of the United States.’ In return, Bashir promised Putin that Sudan could serve as Russia’s ‘key to Africa.’”
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Position Country 2014 score Change from 2013 Change from 2012 Change from 2011 Change from 2010[9] Change from 2009[10] Change from 2008[11] Change from 2007
1 South Sudan 112.9 negative increase 2.3 negative increase 4.5 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
2 Somalia 112.6 positive decrease 1.3 positive decrease 2.3 positive decrease 0.8 positive decrease 1.7 positive decrease 2.1 positive decrease 1.6 negative increase 1.5
3 Central African Republic 110.6 negative increase 5.3 negative increase 6.8 negative increase 5.6 negative increase 4.2 negative increase 5.2 negative increase 6.9 negative increase 9.6
4 Democratic Republic of the Congo 110.2 positive decrease 1.7 positive decrease 1.0 negative increase 2.0 negative increase 0.3 negative increase 1.5 negative increase 3.5 negative increase 4.7
5 Sudan
6 Chad 108.7 positive decrease 0.3 negative increase 1.1 positive decrease 1.6 positive decrease 4.6 positive decrease 3.5 positive decrease 2.2 positive decrease 0.1
7 Afghanistan 106.5 positive decrease 0.2 negative increase 0.5 positive decrease 1.0 positive decrease 2.8 positive decrease 1.7 negative increase 1.1 negative increase 4.2
8 Yemen 105.4 positive decrease 1.6 negative increase 0.6 negative increase 5.1 negative increase 5.4 negative increase 7.3 negative increase 10.0 negative increase 12.2
9 Haiti 104.3 positive decrease 1.5 positive decrease 0.6 positive decrease 3.7 negative increase 2.7 negative increase 2.5 negative increase 5.0 negative increase 3.4
10 Pakistan 103.0 negative increase 0.1 negative increase 1.4 negative increase 0.7 negative increase 0.5 positive decrease 1.1 positive decrease 0.8 negative increase 2.9
11 Zimbabwe 102.8 positive decrease 2.4 positive decrease 3.5 positive decrease 5.1 positive decrease 7.4 positive decrease 11.2 positive decrease 9.7 positive decrease 7.3
12 Guinea 102.7 negative increase 1.4 negative increase 0.8 negative increase 0.2 positive decrease 2.3 positive decrease 1.9 negative increase 0.9 negative increase 1.4
13 Iraq 102.2 positive decrease 1.7 positive decrease 2.1 positive decrease 2.6 positive decrease 5.1 positive decrease 6.4 positive decrease 8.4 positive decrease 9.2
14 Cote d'Ivoire 101.7 positive decrease 1.8 positive decrease 1.9 positive decrease 1.1 negative increase 0.5 positive decrease 0.8 positive decrease 2.9 positive decrease 5.6
15 Syria 101.6 negative increase 4.2 negative increase 7.1 negative increase 15.7 negative increase 13.7 negative increase 11.8 negative increase 11.5 negative increase 13.0
16 Guinea-Bissau 100.6 positive decrease 0.5 negative increase 1.4 negative increase 2.3 negative increase 3.4 negative increase 5.8 negative increase 9.3 negative increase 11.8