Scramble for Africa

A renewed scramble for Africa is underway. The recent surge in investment in Africa by China has been much remarked upon in the press, but what has seen less discussion is the spread of the war on terror to an entirely new continent. As in the 19th century, outside powers are lining up to divide and exploit in the pursuit of natural resources. Now the guise has changed. Where in the past the British would talk of the 'white man's burden' and the French of a mission civilisatrice, today the talk is of terrorism.

In 2001 there was no AL-Qaeda threat to the United States or Britain and their allies from Africa. Now David Cameron warns of a war against terrorism in North Africa that could last decades. Even on their own professed terms the war on terror has been an abject failure. The reality of Western intervention in Africa was made plain by John Kerry, when he told the US senate that "foreign policy is increasingly economic policy", and that America needed to "win" in Africa. The record of the last decade suggests America's idea of winning would be to militarise the entire continent.

The sheer scale of the US military presence in Africa is staggering:

A dozen air bases have been established in Africa since just 2007;
AFRICOM have a major base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti. The only 'official' US base in Africa, it has more than 2,000 personnel and is set for expansion;
The CIA run a sprawling secret site at the airport in Mogadishu;
US surveillance plans have operated out of Mauritania, where the Pentagon is spending $8.1 million to upgrade a forward operating base and airstrip;
100-200 US commandos share a base with the Kenyan military in Manda Bay. Special Operations forces are stationed in shadowy posts in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The US also had troops deployed in Mali despite officially having suspended military relations with that country following the coup;
The US Army is training and equipping militaries in at least eleven African countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal;
The Washington Post revealed that since 2009 the US has been hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory and that this has become a cornerstone of US military activity on the continent.

Britain, too, has played a bloody role from the arms sales to Mubarak's Egypt to the bombing of Libya. More recently Cameron's government has taken a particular interest in Somalia, which he termed "a failed state that directly threatens British interests". The British government now plays host to regular conferences in London to decide the future of that country (that Somalia has the seventh biggest reserves of oil in the world is surely not on his mind at all).

It is for these reasons that the Stop the War Coalition campaigns to highlight issues around overt and proxy military intervention in Africa by the British government and its allies.