U.S.-Algerian plot aimed to open up Africa

The conspiracy that Jeremy Keenan’s book “The Dark Sahara” examines grew out of the kidnapping of 32 European tourists in seven separate parties in early 2003, a few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq. The tourists, all German speaking, vanished in an area of southern Algeria called the “Graveyard Trail,” a well-known tourist destination in the German-speaking world. Keenan shows U.S. collusion in the conspiracy with the goal of opening Africa to further U.S. intervention.

It is easy to make the charge that this or that event is the result of a vast conspiracy, especially given the pervasive cynicism in capitalist societies. This cynicism is based on the difference between what governments and politicians say and what they do. Take the occupation of Iraq, which the U.S. government claimed was part of the “global war on terror,” or the invasion of Afghanistan, called “Operation Enduring Freedom,” as two recent examples.

When the conspiracy unfolds in the midst of the Sahara, that vast desert roughly the size of the entire United States, stretching across Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, the conspirators could hope to remain unmasked. Charges might be made but those behind the plot would maintain plausible deniability.

Keenan, a social anthropologist who is a professor at the University of Bristol and a recognized academic expert with a number of books on the central Sahara, told Democracy Now Aug. 10 that “by a thousand-to-one chance, million-to-one chance, I was ... there in the region for two or three years, more or less continuously, before this incident took place. I was there for much of the time while it happened and afterwards.”

This wasn’t the first time Keenan had been in this part of southern Algeria. He lived in the area for three years beginning in 1964, speaks the local language Tamahak, and has a wide network of friends and children of friends among the Tuareg nomads who call this part of the Sahara home.

Keenan’s doubts regarding the official explanation that these kidnappings were the work of the armed Islamic organization called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat were reinforced by the local people, mainly Tuareg, who saw the hand of the “dirty tricks” department of the Algerian secret police in this affair.

Keenan spent the next few years investigating the kidnappings, interviewing hostages after they were released, obtaining documents from the Algerian police, reviewing press accounts and consulting with friends and contacts throughout the Sahara, Algeria, and in Germany and France. His book “The Dark Sahara: America’s war on Terror in Africa” (Pluto Press, 2009) summarizes and documents his main points, and puts them into context, in particular the context of Algeria’s recent political history.

He establishes that the United States participated in this kidnapping by supplying intelligence and political cover to Algerian secret police operatives. Washington’s motive was to fabricate a terrorist incident in the empty spaces of the Sahara in order to enable its military expansion into Africa in pursuit of African oil and the vast mineral resources on the continent, particularly in the Sahara.

The Algerian government cooperated because it needed modern military equipment to end the armed struggle that grew out of the coup designed to keep the Islamic Salvation Front from winning a decisive parliamentary victory in early 1992. Washington rewarded the Algerians with these weapons.

Salima Mellah, an Algerian journalist living in Berlin, and his collaborators in Algeria-Watch have published a series of articles in Le Monde Diplomatique and Politis essentially supporting Keenan’s conclusions. Inter-imperialist rivalry in Africa between French and U.S. imperialism creates an atmosphere in France that is conducive to anti-U.S. revelations. Monthlies like Le Monde Diplomatique and Politis, however, expose U.S. imperialism from a progressive perspective.

The Algerian secret police had experience fabricating “terrorist” incidents.

Mellah and Keenan describe how the Algerian army, pretending to be Islamic militants during its civil war, carried out bloody massacres in which hundreds of civilians were killed. This depiction of Algerian police tactics, documented in books by Nesroulah Yous, Habib Souaïdia and Mohammed Samraoui, was upheld by a French court which dismissed defamation charges brought by the Algerian minister of defense.

“The Dark Sahara” is a book rich in lessons about the role of the United States in Africa, how it uses agents provocateurs and fabricated “terrorist” incidents. It is well worth reading.