"No More Colonial Extension"; Gambia Quits Commonwealth of Nations

In what became another 'dictator's twist' to the African scenario, the President of Gambia has withdrawn Gambia from the Commonwealth of Nations. The Gambian President reiterated that Gambia will never again be part of any colonial arrangement. Yahyah Jammeh has ruled Gambia; Africa’s smallest mainland country since 1994, and has been often accused of human rights abuses, including unlawful detentions, media intimidation, and discrimination against minorities in the country.

The Commonwealth is made up of over 50 countries, most of which are former territories of the British Empire. A report has it that the Gambian government disagreed with a 2012 proposal by the Commonwealth to create commissions in the Gambian capital of Banjul to address human rights, media rights, and corruption.

Following the proposal, Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma met with Gambian President Yahya Jammeh and other top officials but apparently the proposal did not fall in place with the government. Jammeh accused Britain and other foreign countries especially in Europe of sponsoring the opposition and trying to destabilize his government.

Gambia announced it is immediately leaving the Commonwealth of Nations, saying it will not be part of an institution that represents an extension of colonialism. "The general public is hereby informed that the government of the Gambia has left the Commonwealth of Nations with immediate effect," the government said in a statement.

During the heinous, colossal, inhuman and inhumane slave trade, though the bulk of the slaves were taken from Nigeria, Gambia was extremely decimated. It is estimated that well over three million people from the Gambia area were also sold into slavery.  After that came the cataclysmic colonialism which plundered and sucked Africa dry. Since the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese, French, and British empires competed for colonial supremacy in Gambia.

Present Gambian boundaries were formed in 1889 as the area became a British Crown Colony known as British Gambia. Gambia formed its own executive and legislative councils in 1901, and on February 18, 1965, Gambia gained independence as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth of Nations. Jammeh might have taken a very reasonable step but he needs to do more to be responsive and responsible for the betterment of the lives of Gambians.

The reason why many African leaders who intend to fight, combat and struggle out of the colonial arrangement usually appear 'evil' is that they replace Western colonialism with indigenous colonialism. All humans crave for freedom and development and it is about time they make their citizens enviable too on the world stage not gagging them while fighting the foreign exploiters. The citizens must have better living standards and be on the same page with the government for genuine and real victory to be assured.

U.S Military Trains Coup Plotters

Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has admitted bluntly the failure of U.S. military training to instill respect for human rights in a Malian army now accused of massacring Arabs and Tuaregs as it fights its way north into rebel-held territory. "We didn't spend probably the requisite time focusing on values, ethics, and a military ethos," Ham acknowledged, saying that most U.S. training for the Malians focused on tactics, strategy, and "technical matters."

Since 1985, the United States has sponsored approximately 156 Malian military officers and non-commissioned officers at U.S. professional military schools and given them training focused on professionalizing the military forces. Over the past three years, this funding has reached at least roughly $400,000 annually, and it is possible U.S. intelligence agencies have also funneled in support as well. Sadly, Mali is hardly an isolated case of U.S. military assistance programmes operating with dangerously little oversight and lacking a compelling central rationale.

Though good examples of successful U.S. military training programmes exist but lots of headline cases have gone badly wrong over the years -- from training Indonesian troops that carried out atrocities in East Timor to the billions poured into the Egyptian military to the scores of tainted graduates from the School of the Americas that ran riot in Central America during the 1980s.

In looking at the patterns of U.S. military assistance, the question is not who gets American military aid, but who doesn't. In 2012, the United States delivered bilateral security assistance to 134 countries -- meaning that every country on Earth had about a 75 percent chance of receiving U.S. military aid. Once you weed out places like North Korea and Vatican City, you are pretty much assured of receiving military aid no matter how large or small your country, no matter how democratic or despotic your regime, no matter how lofty or minimal your GDP.

There has been almost zero discussion of how to better focus U.S. military assistance around clear objectives and direct it to countries where it can make a lasting difference. And these aren't insignificant sums when taken together. The administration requested $9.8 billion in security assistance funding for fiscal year 2013.

Much of this military assistance -- through programmes like Foreign Military Financing; International Military Education and Training; Non-proliferation, Anti-terrorism, Demining, and Related Programmes; International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement; Peacekeeping Operations; and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund -- is supposed to be overseen by the State Department with the Defense Department doing the heavy lifting of actually delivering aid and training.

The rationale on paper for such assistance is straightforward and usually receives uncritical congressional support. U.S. military aid helps train security forces, finance the purchase of military equipment, bolster the ability of law enforcement to tackle the illegal narcotics trade, and shape cooperation on non-proliferation issues.

But more than anything, the Pentagon has always insisted that spreading military assistance so broadly is all about building relationships with fellow militaries -- a cost effective way of establishing contacts who will pick up the phone in a ministry of defence when needed. For many, U.S. dollars propped up an autocratic military in Egypt, other argue that it was the senior flag relationships between the Pentagon and Cairo that kept the military from opening fire on democratic protesters during the Arab Spring.

But U.S. military aid looks much better on paper than in practice, in large part because it is often delivered as if on autopilot without a reasoned discussion of its merits. The State Department largely offers rubber-stamp approvals, and the Foreign Service currently lacks personnel with the expertise needed to engage in a rigorous debate with the Pentagon about who deserves aid and why.

As Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center has argued, the State Department's "internal capacity to plan, budget, and manage these programmes needs to be seriously strengthened." This, combined with the general tendency of Congress to treat military spending requests as something just short of a papal writ, has meant that U.S. security assistance programmes receive very little oversight.

Equally troubling, military and economic assistance are treated as quite different creatures. For economic assistance, the United States has increasingly insisted that aid recipients at least demonstrate some marginal commitment to democracy and open markets. Not so on the military side, where concerns about corruption, the rule of law, and human rights are treated as something we are too polite to ask about.

Indeed, we probably would offer military training to everyone if it were not for the minor restrictions imposed by Senate Democrats like the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. military assistance to known thugs and war criminals that violate human rights with impunity. Yes, having military-to-military contacts through U.S. military training and aid is often useful and can build important relations and lasting trust.

But it is equally true that the list of U.S.-trained officers that have led coups against their sitting governments is a lengthy one in countries ranging from Honduras to Haiti to the Gambia. Contrary to what Ham's remark suggested, a few months spent studying tactics and logistics in Kansas or Georgia rarely seems to slow down a power-hungry colonel when he is hell bent on toppling the elected government that just threatened to cut his budget.

Underwriting security assistance to countries with autocratic leadership or nations that are of little strategic significance doesn't make much sense. U.S. military aid and training should be concentrated in a far fewer countries rather than being sprinkled all around the globe like fairy dust in hopes that good relations result.

Nations should be chosen to receive such military aid and training based on their commitment to reform -- both within the military and within the broader structures of democratic governance, free markets, and respect for human rights. Such aid should be a reward for high-performing countries, not a party favour dispensed at the door.

General Ham sounded genuinely surprised that American-trained officers were up to nefarious deeds. Apparently Ham is not much of a history buff -- a U.S. trained captain led a coup against the government of Mali just last March.

Courtesy: Foreign Policy Analysis