According to an RTE news report of the 6th
of February, 2013, the Irish government is considering sending Irish Defence
Forces troops to Mali to aid in the training of the Malian military, as part of
the intervention by Western powers, led by the French, in Mali’s internal
conflict with Islamist militants. Despite the benevolent sounding nature of
this exercise, if it indeed comes to pass, it will in fact be just the latest
in a long line of collaborations that successive Irish governments have
undertaken with the Western imperialist powers, to further the agenda of those
powers in establishing political, economic and military dominance over the
world’s poorest, yet most resource-rich, countries.
The story of the conflict in Mali, as told
in the Western media, is the usual formula of the noble West intervening to
help save another poor backward African nation from the evils of Islamic
radicalism, and restore democracy and freedom. This fairytale would at this
stage in the ‘War on Terror’ be utterly laughable if it were not for the deadly
serious consequences of its acceptance by the populations of the Western
countries.
The conflict in Mali is in fact, and
unsurprisingly, quite a bit more complex than we are told on the news; it has
its roots in the decades-old fight by the indigenous Tuareg peoples of North
Africa for independence from a number of states in the region. But with the
fall of Muammar Gaddafi and the destruction of the Libyan state by NATO and the
West in 2011, the conflict in Mali took on a new dimension – the increasing
hold of Islamic fundamentalist forces in the north of the country, sometimes
allied with the Tuaregs, sometimes in conflict with them, but massively
strengthened by the abundant flood of weapons throughout North Africa as a
result of the instability caused by the destruction of Libya. Essentially, the
‘Islamist problem’ facing Mali and other countries in the region is largely a
result of the policies of the West of arming and supporting these groups to do
their dirty work; thus the argument of ‘rescuing’ Mali from the evil Muslims
becomes a bit fallacious. One has only to look at the situation in Syria at the
moment, where Islamic fundamentalist rebels are supported, armed, funded,
trained and co-ordinated by the West and its allies to see the glaring
hypocrisy of the French argument for intervention.
As for restoring democracy in Mali, it
would be a fair argument to make for intervention if there was any democracy
there to restore. The elected government of Mali was toppled in a military coup
in 2012 led by an officer named Amadou Sanogo, who received extensive military
training in various fields in the United States throughout his military career,
in Georgia, Virginia and Texas. Yet, when this coup took place, there was no
intervention by Western military forces to restore democracy. Other than
hand-wringing, the cutting off of some development aid, and standard
pronouncements on the apparently undesirable nature of military coups in
Africa, the ‘international community’ did nothing. One could speculate that
Sanogo is now the West’s favoured military strongman in the country, the latest
in a long list of corrupt puppet rulers used to maintain the neo-colonial
interest of the Western powers on the continent; even though historical
parallels make this very likely, it would still only be speculation.
Thus, from a glance at the facts, we can
safely conclude that the French intervention in Mali, along with the continuing
Western proxy wars in Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and other countries, is simply one
more step along the road of Western re-colonisation of Africa and Middle-East,
to plunder their resources and ensure that up-and-coming global capitalist
powers such as Russia and China do not get their foot in the door first. Africa
was, is and will be a key battleground in the resource wars of the 21st
century, and, as always, it is the poorest, most downtrodden people of the
world who live there that will have to suffer and die for the power games of
the rich countries.
So where does Ireland fit into this global chess
game? Historically, Ireland has always occupied the same position as the
countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Indeed, Ireland is unique in the
world, as the only white, Western, European nation to feel the boot of
colonialism and imperialism on its neck, and for far longer than many others.
Ireland, alone of the European nations, has been the colonised, and not the
coloniser, the oppressed, and not the oppressor; and this places us firmly in
the camp of the other oppressed nations of the world. Ireland has more in
common with Vietnam than it does with Britain, would ideally be more at home in
the company of Africa, Asia and Latin American than with the butchers and
exploiters of the United States, France or Germany.
Would that it were actually so. For today,
Ireland, more than almost any other of the nations who share our historical
experiences, has been subsumed and incorporated into the very same Western
power structure that for so long ground our people into the dirt and pillaged
our country. Our unique position, as a European nation, has also meant that we
lie in the heart of one of the new, emerging imperialist powers, the European
Union. Our joining of the EEC in 1973 was the first step on a road that few who
voted for it at the time could see leading to where it is today. The various
treaties of ever-increasing EU economic and military integration, the likes of
the Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon treaties, have meant that the EU is more and
more becoming a monolithic economic and military power in its own right, allied
to the United States and a new bulwark against rising capitalist powers in the
East.
The results are obvious: the participation
of Irish Defence Forces troops in integrated EU military exercises and
trial-runs for future wars, so-called ‘peacekeeping’ missions abroad, the
participation of Irish soldiers in training local forces to defend the new US
client state in Afghanistan, the current government’s knee-jerk support of the
so-called rebels in Libya and now in Syria in blatant ignorance of the facts, and
of course, who could forget successive Irish governments’ criminal refusal to
stop the US military using Shannon airport as essentially their own airfield
for their imperialist adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere? Who knows
how many hundreds of thousands of US troops, how many tens of thousands of tons
of weapons and equipment, how many secret CIA rendition flights, have really
passed through Irish soil, willingly facilitated by Irish governments, on their
way to slaughter innocent people and pillage their resources for the profit of
the capitalist system? We could cite many more examples of Irish complicity in
imperialist adventures, but we have neither the time nor the space.
And so, Irish troops could soon be on their
way to Mali, to help train the army of a country that will invariably take on
the role of another puppet state in Africa, run for the benefit of the
imperialists, its resources hoovered up by foreign corporations. The Malian
army, like others on the continent, will in all likelihood be used to crush any
real resistance by the people of Mali to the rape of their country by the West,
that will also likely come when the pro-French sentiments of the population
have faded away and the truth becomes apparent. Malian forces have already been
accused of atrocities in the areas they have occupied. They will also be used
to mop up the nuisance elements in large part created by the West’s scheming
elsewhere in the region, namely the Islamists; and Irish military personnel
will play their part in training up such a force.
Perhaps the Irish government actually
believes that it is doing the ‘right thing’ in sending Irish soldiers to train
Western proxy forces in Africa. Perhaps they actually do believe that the
benevolent West really does have the best interests of the poor African people
at heart. Or, as is more likely, perhaps the Irish government, like Irish governments
before them and certainly after them, have readily accepted the Irish state’s
new role as a small cog in a much larger imperialist war machine, the European
Union, in return for the scraps and crumbs from the capitalists’ table that
keep our pathetic economy, an insignificant little tax haven for the mega-rich
corporations of the US and Europe, labouring on.
In conclusion: Irish troops have no place
in Mali, or anywhere else in Africa, or indeed anywhere else but in Ireland.
Ireland itself, as a country, has no place in the power games of the very same
imperialists that for hundreds of years have kept our country subservient,
downtrodden and strangled economically, culturally and socially. Ireland’s place is not curled up under the
table of the oppressors of the world, begging to be praised – it is with the
oppressed peoples of the world, resisting the very imperialism and
neo-colonialism that today is taking place in Mali and all across Africa and
the Middle East.
Alán. C. Cienfuegos, February 6th, 2013
The blog would like to thank Alan for submitting this original piece of writing to us.
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