March 07, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- On January 24th,
Burkina Faso bore witness to its third
destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It
also marked the eighth successful putsch
American soldiers launched in multiple West
African countries since 2008. The Intercept
reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel
Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many
United States led AFRICOM (Africa Command)
exercises and an American sponsored military
intelligence course. This disturbing pattern
raises serious questions about what the U.S.
army is teaching its African allies.
The U.S. developed an alarming habit for
training individuals likely to commit horrendous
crimes after the outbreak of the Cuban
Revolution in 1959. The School of the Americas
(renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation in 2001) based in Fort
Benning, Georgia spent decades teaching the dark
arts of torture and counterinsurgency warfare to
thousands of Central and Latin American soldiers
and aspiring dictators keen to annihilate
socialist or peasant movements. Distinguished
alumni include Bolivian autocrat Hugo Banzer,
Panamanian strongman turned drug lord Manuel
Noriega, and El Salvadoran Colonel Domingo
Monterrosa. Monterrosa led battalions that
slaughtered a thousand civilians in the village
of El Mozote, according to anthropologist Lesley
Gill.
Guatemalan SOA students enjoyed exceptional
careers as well. Proud graduates like dictators
Efraín Rios Montt, General Fernando Lucas García,
and various members of Guatemala’s feared D-2
intelligence agency terrorised the indigenous
and impoverished Mayan community into submission
over a nearly four decade-long civil war.
Devastating scorched earth campaigns, which
reached their apogee in the early eighties,
wiped out hundreds of Mayan villages and almost
all their inhabitants. Journalist Zach El Parece
noted that a member of the infamous “Kaibiles”
Special Forces, a unit that bludgeoned children
to death with hammers for being communist
sympathisers in the village of Dos Erres, among
many others, later became an instructor at the
SOA.
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The Guatemalan Commission for Historical
Clarification (CEH) concluded that the
Guatemalan army was responsible for displacing
1.5 million people and murdering or vanishing
most of the war’s 200,000 victims. The CEH
deemed the army’s atrocities so severe that they
amounted to acts of genocide against the Mayan
population. The report even singled out the
United States’ crucial role in reinforcing
Guatemala’s homicidal “national intelligence
apparatus and for training the officer corps in
counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which
had significant bearing on human rights
violations…”
The U.S. government also paid millions to
train Indonesian soldiers implicated in
Jakarta’s barbaric occupation of East Timor.
Amnesty International revealed that
approximately 7,300 Indonesian officers took
part in IMET (International Military Education
and Training) courses at U.S.-based army, navy,
and air-force schools between 1950 and the early
nineties. Washington promised to cancel military
aid to Indonesia after the 1991 Santa Cruz
massacre, during which Indonesian troops killed
271 protesters at a peaceful pro-independence
rally in the Timorese capital of Dili. However,
they secretly continued to train elite Kopassus
troops. This regiment, according to the
Guardian, indulged in “some of the worst
human rights violations in Indonesia’s history”.
Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s current
Minister of Defence, trained at Fort Bragg in
North Carolina, finished first in his class, and
re-joined the Kopassus after returning home.
Historian Gerry van Klinken and journalist Jill
Jolliffe believe it is highly likely that
Subianto participated in the brutal suppression
of the East Timorese uprising of 1983-84. A
former Indonesian intelligence employee alleged
that Subianto directed anti-insurgent operations
that butchered hundreds of innocent civilians.
Soldiers executed surrendering women and
children on sight, while countless others
endured starvation, torture, sexual abuse, and
arbitrary detention in overcrowded concentration
camps. Moreover, reporter David Jenkins claims
the Kopassus eagerly adopted tactics the shadowy
U.S. Phoenix program perfected during the
Vietnam War—a program that assassinated
thousands of Vietnamese peasants with impunity.
The abhorrent methods of U.S. trained “Contra”
death squads in Nicaragua proved quite
influential among the Kopassus as well.
Scholar Noam Chomsky asserts that Jakarta’s
invasion of East Timor incurred “perhaps the
greatest death toll relative to the population
since the Holocaust…” Approximately 200,000 East
Timorese perished in the Indonesian onslaught,
while survivors still suffer the long-term
effects of napalm and chemical weapon poisoning.
The Commission for Reception, Truth, and
Reconciliation in East Timor issued a damning
verdict: the U.S. backed Indonesian military
deliberately imposed unbearable conditions of
life which almost exterminated the East
Timorese. A genocide in paradise, to borrow
Matthew Jardine’s haunting phrase.
U.S. Special Forces also trained the Tutsi
RPA (Rwandan Patriotic Army) in the late
nineties as it decimated refugee camps and
massacred Hutu exiles fleeing into the jungles
of eastern Congo. Many of them were sickly and
starving civilians that had nothing to do with
the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Le Monde
and The Irish Times cited French
intelligence findings and Pentagon papers
stating that U.S. instructors and mercenaries
provided combat training to dozens of Rwandan
officers. Some reports even alleged that U.S.
advisers accompanied the RPA as it expanded its
rampage into the Congo. These destructive
incursions marked the opening salvo in the DRC’s
(Democratic Republic of the Congo) endless
“world war”—a cataclysmic conflict that has
caused, thus far, the deaths of millions.
Historians and authors like Filip Reyntjens,
René Lemarchand, and Judi Rever largely agree
that the RPA, along with the Ugandan and
Burundian-backed AFDL (Alliance of Democratic
Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire) rebel
group, killed tens of thousands of Rwandan and
Congolese Hutus in the DRC between 1996-97. A
United Nations report released in 2010 insisted
that in most cases perpetrators did not carry
out these atrocities unintentionally in the heat
of battle and may be guilty of “crimes of
genocide”.
Yet the U.S. is not alone in enabling,
unwittingly or otherwise, regimes prone to
committing egregious crimes. In December 2008,
Guinean Army Captain Moussa Dadis Camara
spearheaded the “German Coup” which brought a
military junta into power in Conakry. Deutsche
Welle reported that Camara and his
co-conspirators received extensive training from
the German Armed Forces in Bremen.
German-trained paratroopers unleashed a wave of
extreme violence against peaceful protestors in
Conakry Stadium less than a year after Camara
suspended the Guinean constitution and
threadbare republican institutions.
Amnesty International said that security
forces murdered more than 150 people, wounded
hundreds more, and raped or assaulted dozens of
women and girls with sticks, bayonets, rifle
butts, and batons in broad daylight. A failed
assassination attempt quickly disposed Camara,
only for another ruthless soldier—the Moroccan,
French, and Chinese trained Sékouba “The Tiger”
Konaté—to take his place. To this day,
undiscerning European Union member states
continue to provide military training and
weapons to African countries hampered by weak
civilian governments and very powerful armies.
It is a recipe for disaster.
Ideally, massive grassroots movements in both
the U.S. and West Africa should try to convince
representatives to bring a permanent end to
these borderline colonial military exchanges.
Following that, Congress must enact more
legislation that would strengthen background
checks for future trainees. Furthermore, any
manuals, textbooks, or instructors advocating
torture and other unlawful or inhumane tactics
need to be removed and replaced with courses
that seek to improve civic-military relations.
However, adding human-rights awareness or
international law modules to military curricula
is by no means an effective solution. Political
scientist Jacob Ricks worries that promoting
courses or practices geared towards
professionalizing and enhancing the social
responsibilities of the military is a lackluster
strategy. Survey data demonstrates that many
high-ranking Siamese soldiers, already among the
largest recipients of US IMET programs now
replete with professionalizing courses, are
statistically more likely to support a coup or
greater military interference in Siamese
politics and society. Thailand has weathered 19
coup attempts since 1932. Teaching soldiers to
respect the sanctity of human life, democracy,
and the rule of law, although necessary and
beneficial, is clearly not enough to curb such
vicious tendencies.
West African politicians and civil society
groups need to be more creative and ambitious if
they ever hope to tame their often unruly
armies. Professor Kwesi Aning, head of academic
affairs and research at the Kofi Annan
International Peacekeeping Training Centre in
Ghana, told University World News that African
states keep sending troops abroad for training
because they do not possess the resources or
facilities required to properly train them at
home. This breeds a dangerous imbalance of power
as foreign-trained troops, imbued with delusions
of superiority and entitlement after studying in
the U.S., France, or Germany, could return home
with a burning desire to take control. Depending
on the lessons, especially in the U.S.,
foreign-trained soldiers might begin to perceive
fellow citizens not as ordinary people who need
protection but as potential or internal enemies
to be eradicated.
Constructing homegrown, truly sovereign, and
well-funded military academies, devoted to
teaching civic-military cooperation and
unencumbered by harmful relations with
exploitative armies in the Global North, would
be a step in the right direction. To paraphrase
Colonel Jahara Matisek, West African nations
must develop military institutions steeped in
their own histories and cultures. Only then can
trustworthy armies emerge and the coup curse
finally fade.
Jean-Philippe Stone is an Irish
post-graduate who recently completed a PhD
in Modern History at the University of
Oxford. He works as a Senior Correspondent
at the Organization for World Peace.
Read other articles by Jean-Philippe.
The views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
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