quinta-feira, 18 de fevereiro de 2016

Jihadism, wind sowers and storm victims (1)



 One could say that on September 11, 2001, the creature bit the hand of its creator. In what follows we will consider some situations which reveal the creation acts and the creature’s inclusion in the creator’s perimeter of interests.
Contents

1 – A basis for oppression and inequality
2 - Afghanistan– a starting chapter
2.1 – The strengthening of jihadism in Afghanistan
3 – New scenarios for jihadist action
3.1 – The European debut – Bosnia
3.2 – A hatchery of crime – Kosovo
3.3 – Chechnya – Russia’s soft belly?



1 – A basis for oppression and inequalities

The root causes for the rising destabilization in the Middle East and Africa are structural and cannot be solved with the unwilling reception of refugees or, even less, with bombardments. The following two charts emblematically show the structural problems arising from the great inequalities that divide the Mediterranean edge[1]. Those are, in themselves, violent; wherever violence exists, resistance, pacific or otherwise, is also found which normally attracts further violence, destruction, and suffering. Even if editorial speeches do not explicitly refer them, at the foundation of these conflicts are the unequal relationships that characterize capitalism.



 
    PIB=GDP                     Primary source: CNUCED/UNCTAD

For decades now, occidental understanding of experienced problems is born of, and limited to, the reading of the questions related to the economical infrastructure, from which the solution of economic development – a disguise name for predatory extractive behavior – is demanded, without affecting the ownership of the production means and the distribution of generated wealth, or avoiding the destruction of ecosystems. In contrast, the stupid neoliberal litany of job generating investments, low salaries as a basis for competitiveness, and debt sustained consumption is sung.

An ideological superstructure of twitching, of civilizational clash, has been theorized by Huntington who updated for the post-colonial world the superiority complex of the colonialist, exacting on the obedience and “civilized” habits mimetics by the colonized[2] but little inclined to understand the feelings and rational inherent to the indigenous cultures, of the natives kept underdeveloped by René Dumont’s 3 M’s, in what concerns Africa[3]. That superiority, which generates rights of leadership and imposition upon the recalcitrant, is often designated as eurocentrism and is the source of a debt, less talked about than the financial one, the colonial debt.

The radical contestation that was seen in Europe during the 60s and the 70s of the preceding century was based upon European-rooted philosophies and was also the political base for anti-colonialism liberation movements. At the time, European cultures had to confront Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves by fire to fight against local dictatorship, a completely incomprehensible act to Europeans who were incapable of understanding the power of that serene and pacific protest message. Similarly, the attacks committed by Muslims, by detonating belts with explosives in order to strike their enemy, are acts resulting from the lack of hope, racist humiliation, and retribution for victimized relatives or communal revenge, in the face of an oppressor or aggressor, rather than the pursuit of benefits in a future life. Again, the root causes lie on the ground, in poverty, inequality, lack of a future, communal humiliation, external aggression, and repression. Be there in former Saigon, New York, or Paris. A policeman may be placed at every door, every computer’s IP may be watched, as well as borders, and passenger lists scrutinized, intelligence information exchange increased, and entire countries bombed, but none of those will change the essence of what is reflected by the charts above.

With all the historical truth on their side, Arabs and Muslims generally point to the occidental responsibilities on the arbitrary and artificial political carving of the extinct ottoman empire, on the 20s of the preceding century, into kingdoms handed over to families in collusion with the occidental interests, notably the British ones – the al-Saud in Arabia, the Hashemite in Jordan and Iraq, the al-Husayn in Yemen, the al-Sabah in Kuwait, and, additionally, keeping the ruling families in the Gulf area’s several English protectorates. It is of merit to make an unavoidable reference to the fact that it was the English who allowed the establishment in Palestinian lands of the genocidal entity known as Israel, whose protection was quickly taken over by the Americans, a situation that remains until today.

The gradual uncovering of the immense energy richness of the zone has been, ever since, underlying variously natured occidental interventions which have impeded the region’s autonomy and progress, notwithstanding the popular discourse about Muslim fatalism which would attract those peoples to the maintenance of poverty or to a morbid cultural attraction to the use of violence. The beneficiaries of such racist narrative who, in that context, intend to portray themselves as victims of incomprehension, are easily detected,

A mix of craving for occidental prosperity and hatred for the fact that they – and their allies on the reigning houses or odd dictators – block the access to the same prosperity in order to ensure the continuity of oil plundering is felt throughout this whole geographic area. Notably, immigration to Europe, even if restricted, results in discriminatory logics and ghettos that also encompass several generations already born in Europe.

It should be stressed as well that a dangerous segmentation of peoples is also gaining force in Europe with the increasing differences between a rich center and the peripheries where, through the mechanisms of debt, nations are urged to reduce peoples’ income, rights, and well-being by a small oligarchy that unites bankers and their cupidity, the parochial bureaucrats that swarm in the Berlin-Frankfurt-Brussels line, and their national metastases. In turn, and in the name of security, xenophobia and fascism, as well, the acceptance of police and militarized[4] intervention in public and private places is insinuated, bringing to mind the Big Brother’s kingdom.

No matter how removed from news reports you are, and from the odd sayings of the usual chartered commentators, peoples on both shores of the Mediterranean make their fight from the same trenches.

2 - Afghanistan– a starting chapter

On July of 1973 an afghan dignitary, Daud Khan, overturned the king – who was his cousin – and put an end to the monarchy with the expected help of Parcham, a faction of the DPAP - Democratic Party of the Afghan People. Initially, Daud received some support from the USSR before giving priority to the relations with Iran which, at the time, was ruled by Pahlevi, who was close to the USA.

On April 27, 1978, Daud was ousted by the army, which had great sympathy for the DPAP, assassinated (along with his family), and replaced by Nur Taraki, DPAP’s secretary-general. The new government made some modernizing reforms that divided the two DPAP factions – the Parchamis, mostly non-Pashtuns, and the Khalkis – causing a reaction from all tribes, where a strong traditionalism prevailed, as well as from the large land owners, threatened by the agrarian reform, the end of usury and the nullification of the small farmers’ debt.
Sill in Daud’s time, in 1975, Ali Butho’s Pakistan, to demonstrate solidarity with Pashtun tribes and create obstacles to the government in Kabul, supported the Jamiat e-Islami rebellion whose defeated members took refuge in Pakistan. 

Soviets had a traditionally large influence in Afghanistan, a result of the clash between Russians/Soviets and English, the colonizers of India and the future Pakistan, who, since the XIX century had created Afghanistan (and Persia/Iran) as a stop-gap state in order to contain Russian approach to the “warm seas”. Soviet support to Afghanistan, to build infrastructures, the Kabul, Herat, and other universities, as well as humanitarian and military-related, was increased, especially after WW II; the USSR was, thus, beneficiary of England’s withdrawal resulting from the extinction of their Indies Empire. On the other hand, the two contenders of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, having become nuclear powers, caused Afghanistan to be seen as an interesting support instrument for either of them,   also with Iran’s influence being felt and, on that context and still in Daud Khan’s time, the soviets strongly supported the reinforcement of the armed forces.

In the middle of 1978 the first rebel groups appear on the mountainous zones near the Pakistan border (Pashtuns) and in September of 1979 Hafizullah Amin, of the Khalki faction, takes power after the assassination of Taraki (the current practice, at the time) adding to combating the rebels the fight against the Parchamis. During this period the repression of traditional and religious powers was particularly merciless, including executions, causing those opposing the regime to flee the country. A rebel uprising in Herat (March of 1979) caused the death of 100 soviet troops followed by a strong repression, the generalization of the rebellion (to 24 of the 28 provinces) and desertions in the army. In what followed, the north-American president Jimmy Carter signed, on July 3rd, his first directive[5] on the secret support of the opposition to the Kabul regime, about six months before the arrival of soviet troops. USA’s twitching had already shown itself, foretelling a future confrontation period between the superpowers, when Carter refused to ratify the SALT II treaty on nuclear proliferation, on June of the same 1979 year.

Brejnev, knowing the soviet economy weaknesses, the political risks of an open intervention abroad, and the declared opposition of the soviet people, did not want to send troops to Afghanistan. In face of the degradation of the internal situation, the Afghan government urged the soviet intervention which, on June 16, 1979, materialized in the sending of tanks to protect Kabul and the airports; soon after (July 7), unarmed parachutists entered the Bagram base, taking care not to interfere in the local conflict, moreover because the USSR disagreed with the sectarian attitudes of Hafizullah Amin who, in September, had moved from prime-minister to president of the republic.

Amin was becoming an element whose action encouraged rebellion and thus soviet troops in Afghan uniform, on the night of the 27 to the 28 of December of 1979, assassinate Amin and replace it with the Parchami Karmal. On the same day 1.800 tanks, 2.000 armored cars and 80.000 soviet infantry soldiers enter Afghanistan unchaining a protest choir put on by 34 Islamic countries. The growth period of the various forms of jihadism was thus openly initiated, with the support of the occident.

2.1 - The strengthening of jihadism in Afghanistan 

Carter had inherited some defeats during the years prior to the soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Portuguese decolonization had not created any USA vassal states and, especially in Angola, the South-African intervention was unsuccessful, the presence of Cuban troops in the country could not be prevented by the USA. On Ethiopia Mengistu Mariam had put an end to the empire and was building a USSR-aligned regime. In 1975 the USA, still with Gerald Ford, had left the Vietnam and the Indochina, fraught by the defeat. Thus, the soviet invasion of Afghanistan would be the great opportunity to retake the initiative and cause difficulties to the strategic adversary.

The invasion would allow the support to the rebel Afghan mujahedin to growth and take on a visibility which, until then, was inconvenient to show. The USA bought all the soviet equipment in Israel’s possession and supplied it to the mujahedin, possibly taking care to replace it by armament made in USA; Egypt reequipped its army and, as did Turkey, sent the old material to the Afghans; the UK sent the obsolete Blowpipe missiles and the neutral Switzerland sent the Oerlikon cannons, also outdated. Only China sent modern material, as opposed to the others that used Afghanistan as a recycling area.

There was a firm intention on the USA side to bend its strategic enemy at any cost. Operation Cyclone, a CIA program which came to cost as much as US $630M in 1987, consisted in the utilization of the powerful Pakistani ISI[6] (Inter-Services Intelligence) to channel military and financial means, and logistics, to the Afghan mujahedin. ISI supplied military training to 100.000 men for a decade, with USA financing, including 35.000 fighters[7] coming from other Islamic countries, among them the famous bin Laden who in 1986 was in charge of recruitment. bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, armed and financed by the USA and other contributors, such as the other groups, was characterized by its fighting eagerness, its militant extremism, and constituted the aggregating nucleus of the 4.000 Saudis who fought in Afghanistan. During the last period of the war the USA tried to focus their support on the moderate Massoud but they could not guarantee that either the ISI or the other donors would follow them, notably Saudi Arabia; and so, a few years after the soviet left, power in Afghanistan had fallen into Taliban’s hands.

The soviet had made a huge calculation error by admitting that eliminating the loathed Amin would make the Afghans happy with Karmal leading the Afghan army and with the soviet help. They forgot Afghan’s deeply rooted independence spirit, which the English new well since the XIX century. They forgot the lesson learned by the USA in Indochina, or by the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, that controlling the cities and leaving the rest of the territory to the guerrillas – more so with strong occidental support and on Pakistan – would cause a huge wear and tear to a conventional army, namely in casualties, budget, and troop morale. And they did not imagine that the disintegration of the Afghan army would place the whole war effort on the soviet troops that lacked any reason to be thrilled by that war, in addition when being in the less than likeable position of occupation forces.

One aspect with very evident sequels today is the fact that the soviets were seen as communists and atheists, the fulcrum of a holy war in Islam’s name that reached far beyond Afghanistan. This religious exacerbation – a clash of civilizations – was paid for by the USA with the distribution of radical theological texts, as well as by Saudi Arabia which was eager to spread its Wahhabi righteousness by building mosques and creating madrassas as they would also do, in the following decade, in the ex-soviet republics with Muslim populations.
The absence of a unified structure amongst the mujahedin, a consequence of the great cultural diversity of Afghan people, facilitated the appearance of war lords (Dostum, Uzbek, Hekmatyar abd Massoud, Tadjik, mullah Omar, Pashtun) and preachers of the following of koranic strictness to avoid divine retribution.

Gorbachov, in the beginning of 1988, aware of the soviet economic model weaknesses, started to withdraw troops from Afghanistan – in the same way as he kept back the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia or the Cuban in Angola – in a process that ended on February of the following year. The Geneva agreements considered the USSR and USA pledge of non-interference in Afghanistan’s or Pakistan’s internal politics. Nevertheless, Najibullah’s Afghan government would fall only three years after that, in the middle of the usual barbarities.

Another problem born during the war was the poppy cultivation for opium production, which turned Afghanistan into a big world producer (80% in 2014), a business dominated by Pakistani in partnership with the mujahedin groups; in 2014 the culture was almost triple of the observed before the occidental invasion.


In 1988 Brzezinski, Carter’s secretary of state at the time of the soviet intervention, when questioned whether he regretted his adventurism regarding the creation of al-Qaeda and the jihadist terrorism of 1978/79 was very clear: “Why regret? The idea of a secret operation was excellent. It hastened the Russians into the afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day the soviets crossed the border, as I wrote precisely to president Carter: “We are before the opportunity of offering USSR their Vietnam War.”[8]

3 - New scenarios for jihadist action 

The soviet defeat on the Afghan theater meant an important victory to the USA and its allies. On the strategic level it was a huge contribution to the implosion of the USSR in 1991 which would be taken advantage of to refine the map of political, economic and military influences throughout the world, with particular emphasis on the fragments of that implosion and their surroundings. The alliance of the Occident, essentially on-line with the Pentagon’s strategy, with the Muslim world’s nations closer to them, which in Afghanistan had already evidenced some facets revealing differentiated objectives, would continue to present areas of confluence and others where the agendas would be distinct and, even, in conflict.

After the soviet withdrawal and especially after USSR’s implosion, the USA detached themselves from Afghanistan, from the after-war rebuilding and the bloody conflicts between the several mujahedin factions. This lack of interest resulted in the growing influence of Saudis and Pakistani, which led the relative stabilization of Afghanistan around the Taliban fundamentalists[9] (literally, students) who in 1996 formed a government which lasted until the 2001 invasion and was, in the meantime, recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab emirates.

During the 80s decade, Komeini’s Iran had become adverse to both the USA (the Great Satan) and the USSR (communist), which fought each other on the neighboring Afghanistan, from where hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees came, notably Shia Hazaras. Their intervention capability on the Afghan scene was small because Iran was involved with Iraq in a bloody war which Saddam Hussein had started. He decided to take advantage of the political transformation and relative isolation of Iran to reinstate the old territorial claims to oil rich areas, certain of the USA – who had been humiliated by Iran on the previous decade – collusion and also of the support of the majority of the Arab states (except Syria) eager to weaken Iran’s role as a regional power and, on top of it, non-Arab.

Unable to win the war against Iran, and indebted after eight years of hostilities, Saddam decided to place a new claim: the incorporation of Kuwait, the ancient 27th Iraq province, a land without water but with plenty of oil, an occidental protectorate whose emir had lent Saddam money to fight Iran. On that context he invaded and occupied Kuwait forgetting that one should not bite a finger from the owner’s hand; the owner reacted and the occidental and Arab monarchs (Syria also participated this time) intervention starts on January 1991, in order to rescue Kuwait and call Saddam back to order. In the end, Saddam’s sovereignty was restricted to the Sunni area in the country’s center; he was excluded from acting on either the Shiite south or the Kurdish north, in addition to seeing his military power reduced, a situation that, with some nuances,  would last until 2003.

During this conflict Russia stayed afar, not intervening, while the USA created an excellent reason to establish military bases on Kuwait, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia, Oman, whose objective would certainly not be a weakened Iraq but Iran the great Saudi rival in the gulf area, without forgetting the control of the energy supplies from China, Japan, and South Korea. This occupation situation, even if friendly, did not please many Arabs and some would not forgive the Saudi king, as the guardian of Islam sacred places, the persistence of infidels presence.

On the other hand, the frequent occidental incursions and bombardments of Iraq and the harsh economic blockade[10] punished the population in general and did not weaken Saddam internally; oil, however, continued to gush in exchange for imports of essential goods, medicines... In Iraq, which until then was laic and free of conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, a deep antipathy towards the occidentals started to form, and it would grow after the invasion in 2003, based on the dramatic and ludicrous lie of the “weapons of mass destruction”. We shall return to Iraq later on.

3.1 – The European debut – Bosnia

The implosion of the USSR created new opportunities for USA’s strategy or, in another, more precise, way, for the CIA and the Pentagon, whose influence and autonomy versus the presidents is being proven as growing. One of those opportunities, in Europe, was the dismemberment of Yugoslavia with a focus, considering this text’s objectives, on Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Once the East-West equilibrium in Europe was broken and with the extinction, in 1991, of both the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia emerged as vulnerable. That same year, on July 25, and following internal conflicts based on the dominant ethnic groups and regions, Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed their independence, immediately recognized by Germany and the Vatican, where reigned the fanatic John Paul II, Reagan’s intimate ally for the placement of the East European countries in the CEE and NATO economic and military interests’ influence spheres[11],[12],[13] or in the opposition to progressists in Latin America. Soon after, in September, Macedonia proclaims its independence with the presence of USA soldiers on the Servia border, under the UN flag, although no conflict ever took place. The main problem appeared in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a real mosaic made up of Serbs (of orthodox tradition), Croatians (catholic), and others whom, for want of an ethnical description, started to be known as Muslims, and they all got involved in a war marked by barbarities. Bosnian Serbs set up a Srpska Republic and attracted NATO military power in September of 1995, despite the country not belonging to any of the organization’s member countries, nor did it constitute a menace to NATO countries, thus rendering inapplicable the famous 5th article of NATO’s instituting treaty.

Economic and political interests have also shown themselves to be agile in dividing people using ethnic or religious reasons, as if those were real distinctions amongst human beings. Placement of the conflict on a religious fight level on a country with strong laic tradition, such as Yugoslavia, started in 1992 when foreign Muslim volunteers (the “Mujahedin Battalion”)[14] arrived in Bosnia to help the local people of Islamic tradition, since in Afghanistan… they were no longer needed. Along the same tradition, today, there are Bosnians who move to Levant to reinforce the jihadi groups such as Daesh and al-Nusra. 

According to Aimen Dean, one of al-Qaeda’as founders who became a British spy, “Bosnia gave to the modern jihadist movement the narrative that a war between Occident and Islam exists. It is the cradle”[15]. According to the same source, the Battalion expelled the non-Muslims from Travnik, fought against UN British troops in Guca Gora and exhibited in its Bosnian curriculum a beheading (which went to trial), sequesters and prisoners’ executions, inserted on a global context, it should be emphasized, of crimes perpetrated by all parties to the conflict. Bosnian recruitment multiplied the Battalion’s number of troops that in 1995 already counted with 1500 men, and the Bosnian leadership turned a blind eye to the atrocities in order to please the Arab donors. After the Dayton agreements the Battalion’s members set course to Chechnya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, looking for martyrdom.

3.2 – A hatchery of crime – Kosovo

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 1991, without it receiving any recognition, until the conflict was exasperated when in 1998/99 the UÇK – Kosovo Liberation Army – accused the Serbs of ethnic cleansing, which was never proved. After the failure of the Rambouillet negotiations, in February of 1999, NATO starts, on March 24, to bombard Yugoslavia (then composed of Serbia and Montenegro) which would last until June 3rd, with the conflict being closed on the 10th without Serbia, to this day, recognizing it, which also occurs with many countries such as Russia, China, India, Brazil, and from the EU (Spain, Slovakia, Romania, and Greece). Since then Kosovo has been administered by the UN with KFOR being the protection force for the Serbian minority living on the north of the territory.
After the EU and NATO forced the separation of Serbia, the Kosovar territory remains with a feeble economic structure, marked by smuggling, corruption, and organized crime involving ex-UÇK fighters and even officials from international institutions[16]. Kosovo has been working as a UE protectorate and as the free ground for the huge North-American Bondsteel[17] base.

Financing by rich Arab countries, with emphasis for Saudi Arabia, always engaged on expanding its Wahhabi ideology, has been displeasing the government, shown by declarations, on the arresting of 60 people connected to jihadism or fighter recruitment, and by closing NGO’s that financed jihadi groups, in October of 2014. This is mandated by the insertion into NATO’s strategic military apparatus and the EU periphery.   

In proportion to its population size, Kosovo is one of the European countries with more fighters in Levant (150 in Iraq and Syria). Although mainly Islamic, Kosovars are not kin practitioners and religious differences were not greatly evidenced during the Serbian conflict of 1998/99, contrasting with ethnic and linguistic differences or Serbian hegemony. The number of Kosovars that were killed in Syria or in Iraq as part of Daesh or al-Nusra is thought to be between 15 and 40.

3.3 Chechnya  – Russia’s soft belly?

Chechnya is one of Russia’s federation republics, located at the foot and northern slopes of the Caucasus mountain chain. Its territory was the center, on the XVIII century, of quarrels between the Russians and the Ottoman, with the latter aspiring to establish corridors to access and take care of the Christian populations on the mountain chain’s southern slopes, in Georgia and in the Armenia. Islamism was the way Chechens affirm their distance from the Russian occupants, since they appeared in the region several centuries before.

The oil pipeline that connects Baku to Novorossisk goes around Chechnya but its strategic importance was reduced with the construction of the Baku-Supsa (Georgia) connections, in 1999, and the well-known BTC – Baku-Tbilissi-Ceyhan, in 2006, with the objective of disconnecting European access to Azeri oil from a mandatory passage through Russian territory. The same does not occur with the rail road that crosses the Caucasus and has a true line junction inside the republic.

This scenario had all the ingredients for geo-strategic conflicts. A Muslim population and power that isn’t make for appetizing nourishment for jihadism, which were joined by USA’s aptitude to weaken the already debilitated Russia, digging, not its exterior periphery such as Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, but already into its own internal periphery.  The getting together of these ingredients continues to supply bloody fruits, even if the objective becomes wider and transforms into the siege of Russia and China, or the control of the maritime transport routes by the Pentagon and its European followers. A Chechnya which is independent, in the USA and NATO orbit, would be an open wedge in the Russian oil routes between the Caspian and the Black Sea, an intolerable situation for Russia. And that is why, in 2008, also in the Caucasus, Russia demonstrated its resolve in Georgia by creating stop-gap republics in South Ossetia and Abcasia in Georgian soil; George W. Bush understood it and bit his tongue. As a curiosity, Georgia had supported the Chechen rebels against Russia.

Chechen separatist activities go back to the middle XIX century and in the end of WW II Stalin, in 1944, deported the Chechen and other peoples from the Caucasus, accused of collaboration with the German, the said deportation ending only after the death of the Georgian.

During the beginning of USSR’s disintegration, conflicts between power and separatist groups started. In 1991 general Dudaiev proclaimed Chechnya’s independence and Ieltsin invaded the region in 1994, with high costs to the Russian troops and the Chechen population, until an agreement was reached in 1996 which recognized the Chechen sovereignty within the Russian Federation.

War returned to Chechnya in 1999 by the hand of the Wahhabi Chamil Bassaev, following the proclamation of a “Caucasus Emirate” encompassing the Dagestan, Chechnya, and North Ossetia. The participation of the USA, and of its private security agencies, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, in supporting the Chechen jihadists is revealed by Yossef Bodansky, director of the “US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare[18].
This return of the war is strongly characterized by the presence of Wahhabi missionaries paid by the Saudi Arabia and the “emirate” had in the Taliban governed Afghanistan the only country recognizing it. The other jihadist groups involved in the war against Russia are the Dagestani Shari’ah Jamaat, the Islambouli Brigades of al-Qa’ida, and the Armed Forces of the Ichkeria Chechen Republic, the Sword of Islam, and the Kata’ib al-Khoul[19]. Putin, who was nominated as prime-minister in 2000, gained some notoriety with the relative pacification of the territory.

Subsequently, on October 23, 2002, 42 Chechen and Arab fighters occupied a theater in Moscow and, until detained, caused the death of 129/200 of the 850 hostages[20]; they were commanded by Bassaev and the Saudi Ibn al-Khattab, both connected to al-Qaeda, with the latter having fought in Afghanistan in 1989/94 where we met bin Laden[21]. On September of 2004, a group commanded by Bassaev occupied a school in North Ossetia, a Russian Federation territory neighboring Chechnya, and made 1.200 hostages; in the aftermath there were 331 dead and over 700 wounded… way beyond the victims caused by the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015. Al-Khattab was killed by the Russians in 2002; Bassaev had the same fate in July of 2006, while the remaining “Afghan Arabs” fled to safety in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Germany, and lands of USA’s Arab allies.

Several hundred of Bassaev fighters allegedly have been trained on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and al-Khattab himself regimented elements in Ingushetia, Dagestan, Ossetia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, to fight in Chechnya. In August of 2005 the UN was reporting a substantial number of “Afghan Arabs” fighting the Russians in Chechnya[22]

After a referendum that took place in 2003 power passed to the hands of the mufti A. Kadryov, an ex-separationist who was murdered in 2005 and succeeded by his son Ramzan Kadryov, considered to be the richest man in the republic and owner of a militia – the kadryovty – little inclined to respect people’s rights but whose existence relieves Moscow from having a military presence in Chechnya.

            (To be continued)

This and other texts can be found at:   

http://grazia-tanta.blogspot.com/                            

http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents



[2]  We find the position of many Africans, Asians, and other peoples, bound in their suits and ties, to be ridiculous, but revealing, intending to play the role of “black skins, white masks” to the occidental suzerainties and self-proclaimed as anointed by the capital, to their fellow citizens.
[3]  Le marchand, le militaire et le missionaire (the merchant, the military, and the missionary, N.T.)
[6] ISI had their own interests to counter the soviets in Afghanistan since they were great supporters of India with which Pakistan had a twitched litigation in Cashmere.
[9] The Taliban were, by their geographic origins, essentially Pashtun, although they also included troops from the ex-soviet republics, Arab countries, and other Muslim regions.
[10] Approved by the UN (Resolutions 661 from 6/8/1990 and 687 from 3/4/1991) they promoted a true humanitarian crime, as an inducer of infant mortality and poverty.
[11]  On the front line of that strategy was the pope Wojtyla (John Paul II) whom, being Polish, had an audience in Poland where Lech Walesa’s popularity was growing in face of the inaptitude of the regime led by Gierek, who would end up being replaced; soon after general Jaruzelsky proclaims an exception regime and will remain in power the dismemberment of the soviet bloc. In 1980 Wojtyla starts his three trips to Poland and also a financing of more than USD $50M to support Solidarity and his most reactionary and church faithful members such as Walesa. Wojtyla would also shine in Nicaragua in 1983, revealing himself well aligned with Reagan on the combat to the liberation theology and the country’s anti-oligarchies government. Wojtyla stood out as a thrilled Reagan’s ally against the “axis of evil”.
[13] This cooperation was intensified under Reagan’s presidency. The then American ambassador to the Holy See, James Nicholson, talks about a “strategic alliance” between Washington and the Vatican against the Soviet Union. According to information gathered by the reporters Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, who wrote a book on Vatican’s secret diplomacy, CIA’s director William Casey and his vice-director Vernon Waters maintained confidential discussions with the pope since the beginning of 1981. The main topic was “CIA’s financial help and logistic support to Solidarity” (ibid). Wojtyla locum tenens (lieutenant) on this anti-Soviet crusade and affirmation of the neoliberal society was the famous Ratzinger, the future pope Benedict XVI.

[15]  Ibid.

[17]  Bondsteel is the largest North-American base outside their national territory. It houses 7.000 troops in 300 buildings, has a perimeter of 14 km and has the objective of covering the Balkans, protecting the Caspian oil, having already functioned as an alternative to the Guantanamo concentration camp. Kosovo can be considered as cunning construction to enable an extensive and strategic presence in the Balkans.





[22]  Ibid.

Sem comentários:

Enviar um comentário