Foreign News and Analysis Since April 2005 -- formerly China Confidential -- What's Really Happening in the WorldForeign Confidential ™
Sunday, June 03, 2012
Taureg Rebels in Mali Break Accord With Islamists
Tuareg rebels in Mali have canceled an agreement with an Islamist group to create an independent, Islamic state in the north of the country.
In an e-mailed statement Friday, a senior member of the Tuareg-led National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad said the rebels are pulling out of the agreement to maintain their “staunchly secular” character.
The deal, signed on May 26 in the northern town of Gao, called for Tuareg rebels and the Al Qaeda-linked extremist group Ansar Dine to join forces for an independent state of Azawad.
As part of the agreement, the state was to be operated under strict Islamic law, or Sharia. Reports this week said the deal was under strain.
The Tuareg rebels and Islamist fighters joined forces in a fast-moving offensive to seize northern Mali following a March 22 military coup in Bamako. Mali's transitional government has rejected the rebels' declaration of independence in the north.
The Tuareg rebels and the Islamist group have separate goals. The Tuaregs are seeking to create an independent secular state of Azawad, while Ansar Dine wants to impose Sharia across the entire country.
Sect members have started introducing hardline Islamic law in key regional areas including Gao and Timbuktu. But residents in the region who are accustomed to a moderate form of Islam have resisted the new measures.
Related: Islamists Impose Sharia in Timbuktu Saturday, June 02, 2012
Comment: Christine Lagarde Cries Crocodile Tears for Africa
But one suspects that there is more to the Lagarde affair than mere hypocrisy. The IMF managing director's Africa reference can be seen as a telling slip of the tongue that calls attention to her true aim--the strategic objective of the global elites whose interests she serves--which is the permanent pauperization of the middle classes of the industrialized world. The objective isn't to raise Africa up to the level of Europe--not even close to that. Rather, the elites seek to lift Africa only marginally while bringing the West down--meaning, the workers who have become too prosperous and too politically powerful in the eyes of the powers that be--closer to the level of the impoverished inhabitants of the resource-rich continent that was ravaged by imperialism and colonialism. A global leveling off is the real goal. Grinding Greece down is the beginning of what is intended to be a grand restructuring for purposes of creating a new world order in which a few privileged population segments will labor in well-paying, favored industries, including high technology and finance, with decent benefits and opportunities for advancement and upward mobility, while the great masses of workers will be condemned to toil like drones, or serfs, in deadening, dead-end jobs that will barely pay subsistence wages and little or no benefits of any kind.
Hence, the seemingly irrational, international obsession with promoting austerity during times of depression and recession. For the IMF and its backers, mass unemployment isn't a problem to be solved; it's a strategy to bemanaged. Degrees of joblessness that have not been seen since the Great Depression are meant to become the new normal; meaningful social safety nets and social services, things of the past.
Already, the argument can be made that "we are all Greeks." Absent a reversal of the trend, unless the IMF's iron heel is broken before it can complete its crushing mission, we will soon all be Africans … and Asians … and Latin Americans … anything but the middle class Americans and Europeans we once were … as social services are dismantled and workers rights are shredded in the name of "reform."
The West is teetering on the edge of the abyss. It may only take one more shock--war with Iran, the collapse of the euro zone, a financial meltdown triggered by a wave of bank failures--to push the world into a global economic collapse.
Copyright © 2012 Foreign Confidential™US Fears Cyber-Boomerang
Iran Again Threatens US
Sunday, 3 June 2012
Her hypocrisy--she claims to have great concern and sympathy for poor African schoolchildren, whose plight she compares with the problems of comparatively well-off Greeks--is frankly nauseating in light of the IMF's contribution to African suffering and misery. The agency's so-called structural adjustment programs, akin to austerity for Europeans, have forced African nations to slash spending on healthcare, food, and education, and to boost exports of raw materials and privatization of industries by multinational corporations, resulting in dramatically increased national debts. Not for nothing do critics of the IMF and its partner in exploitation in the name of assistance, the World Bank, speak of Africa's new "overlords."Endnote: Ironically, the IMF and its oligarchic masters have this much in common with the radical left: support for radical--that is, rightwing political--Islam, or Islamism. Whereas the left sees the clerical fascist creed as a force to be harnessed in the interest of countering U.S. power and influence around the world and smashing Western capitalist democracy, the globalizing elites hope to manipulate Islamism in order to curb the power of troublesome trade unions and secular democratic movements and human rights groups. Not since the 1930s has democracy been so threatened.
The Obama administration is warning U.S. businesses that a mysterious cyberweapon that attacked Iran's oil industry--which Washington is suspected of creating and unleashing in order to slow down Tehran's menacing atomic advance--is potentially capable of circling back and striking computers in the United States. Read more.
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