Capitalist greed behind aborted coup in Africa
By Monica Moorehead
Zimbabwean officials have announced that they
will bring legal charges against 67 mercenaries detained March
7 after a plane full of the professional killers and their
high-tech equipment touched down at Harare International
Airport.
The leaders of the mercenaries have admitted that they were
flying from South Africa to a secret military base in Came
roon, with the objective of kidnapping the president of nearby
Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema. They intended to
replace him with a leader of the Spanish-based opposition,
Severo Moto Nsa. Equatorial Guinea is a former colony of
Spain.
The mercenaries included South Africans, at least one of
whom holds British citizenship, Angolans, Namibians, Congolese
and one Zimbabwean, according to an official of the South
African Foreign Ministry. The Toronto Globe and Mail reported
on March 16 that "all were reportedly carrying South African
passports, and are said to be ex-South African military or
police personnel."
Since the downfall of the apartheid regime, its former
operatives have been a thorn in the side of the South African
coalition government, dominated by Black representatives of the
African National Congress. The South African government is
reported to have tipped off Zimbabwe about the group's arrival.
It says they will be tried in Zimbabwe, although South African
law does allow for citizens arrested in another country to be
transported back to South Africa.
Since these arrests, the big-business media have focused a
lot of attention on the so-called corrupt nature of the Nguema
government in Equatorial Guinea. But the United States,
Britain, Spain and other imperialist governments have installed
and supported many reactionary puppet regimes around the
world.
Executive Outcomes, a British-based firm that provides
mercenaries to private corporations, was an integral part of
this ill-fated operation. According to the March 14 Sunday
Herald of Harare, "The firm's latest planeload of mercenaries
included many former personnel of the notorious 32 Buffalo
Battalion of the South African special forces and Civil
Cooperation Bureau, which was responsible for the deaths of
several anti-apartheid activists."
It has been confirmed that U.S., British and Spanish
intelligence agencies are the masterminds behind the aborted
coup, on behalf of big-business interests. The British citizen
arrested was Simon Mann, "an ex-Royal Scots Guard and troop
commander with the British Special Air Services. He also has a
lead role in Sandline International, a murky company with oil
and mining interests, and ties to U.K. intelligence services.
Sandline absorbed Executive Outcomes in 1998. Zimbabwe's Home
Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi says Mr. Mann was offered $2.3
million and oil rights in Equatorial Guinea for the plot."
(Globe and Mail, March 16)
Zimbabwe also target of imperialist
destabilization
When these arrests first took place, there was justified
suspicion that the United States and Britain were attempting to
remove Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe from office. It is no
secret that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony
Blair are close cohorts in their efforts to economically and
politically destabilize Zimbabwe.
They hate President Mugabe because he has publicly sided
with dispossessed Black farmers who are seeking to regain
ownership of the arable lands stolen by white commercial
farmers over many decades of racist colonialism.
Bush and Blair claim that Mugabe stole the presidential
election in 2002 from opposition forces that the West supported
both financially and politically. Observer teams from Nigeria,
Namibia and South Africa, however, stated that Mugabe won a
majority of the votes fair and square.
Why were the mercenaries targeting a small country like
Equatorial Guinea? Certainly one reason is that the imperialist
secret agencies felt they could take advantage of the
geopolitical situation. But the motive lies in the greedy
nature of imperialism.
Oil, oil and more oil
EG is one of the poorest countries in Africa and the world.
It was a colonial possession of Spain for 190 years until its
formal independence in 1968. Its population is less than
500,000; life expectancy is 50 years for women and 48 for men.
The average yearly income is $700. (World Bank, 2001)
EG's territory includes the island of Bioko off the coast of
neighboring Cameroon. Its capital, Malabo, is located there.
Large deposits of oil and natural gas were discovered off Bioko
during the mid-1990s. As a result, EG has become the
third-biggest producer of oil in Africa, after Nigeria and
Angola.
The abundance of oil has meant very little for the people of
EG. In fact, as in the rest of Africa, the minerals and wealth
are being sucked out by Western multinational corporations
headquartered in the large imperialist countries.
The theft of Africa's natural resources under colonialism
and now neocolonialism--in which these countries' economies are
controlled through debt and "structural adjustment" programs
devised by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank--has
kept this long-suffering continent from economic development
and, along with it, true independence.
The biggest exploiters of EG's oil are all U.S. companies:
ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco and the Houston-based Mara thon Oil.
The United States buys 28 percent of the country's
exports--mostly petroleum products. Spain buys 25 percent.
(allAfrica.com, March 12)
The imperialists could not care less that the majority of
the 600 million people on the African continent suffer from
poverty, HIV/AIDS, civil wars and illiteracy. Any government
corruption and mismanagement stem from having local economies
undermined and destroyed by imperialist greed for profits.
Right now, the Pentagon is sending troops into all parts of
Africa, especially the north and west, under the pretext of
fighting al-Qaeda and "terrorism." In truth, the most important
reason is to protect the economic domination of U.S. foreign
capital against its rivals in Europe and Japan.
Whether through open colonialism or setting up neocolonial
puppet states, today's imperialist powers got rich through the
plunder and super-exploitation of Africa as well as Latin
America, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. The masses in
those developing countries need international, revolutionary
solidarity from the workers in the imperialist centers,
especially through the demand that the exploiters pay
long-overdue reparations for their theft.
Reprinted from the March 25, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page