Libyan Slave Markets Create Diplomatic Storm In Africa, UN Security Council To Meet

Anti-slavery protests continued across various world capitals this week, especially in countries across Africa, after earlier protests in France got violent when police used tear gas and other riot control tactics on a crowed of more than one thousand outside of the Libyan embassy in Paris. The protests are in response to last week"s widespread reports of slave markets operating in various cities across Libya, and look to continue as according to Reuters a major rally is set to take place in London later this week. 

Meanwhile France on Wednesday called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over the revelations, with President Macron referencing recent footage proving the existence of a slave trade network in Libya as "scandalous" and "unacceptable".

According to a CNN investigation, which included video footage of one slave auction in progress, migrant African workers are being sold for as little as $400 in at least nine different Libyan cities, though it"s believed the network of slave auctions extends more broadly, including to locations under the UN-backed Government of National Accord based in Tripoli. 

A migrant looks out of a barred door at a detention centre in Gharyan, Libya, Oct. 12, 2017. Hundreds more like him are being kept in smuggler-owned Libyan warehouses, where they are sometimes beaten, ransomed or sold into slavery. Image source: Reuters via CBC Radio

Other investigations by international rights groups such as the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) have further found that many migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya are routinely "detained, tortured, and even killed." This also no doubt includes large numbers of internal refugees from Libya"s recent "summer of mass displacement" due to dozens of militias as well as multiple regional governments vying for territory and power. Libya has recently been described by the European Council On Foreign Relations as "one country, three governments."

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), anger is spreading in Africa, with multiple governments demanding action as protests swell. DW reports:

Politicians in Africa have expressed their outrage at the scandal – especially in West Africa where most African migrants originate. President of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou felt particularly revolted by the reports, summoning the Libyan ambassador to Niger and demanding the International Court of Justice investigate Libya for trading slaves.

And the African Union is also likely set to demand concrete action, though the Tripoli government in Libya is nowhere near in control of the entire country (and itself could be complicit), which is largely run by competing militias:

Meanwhile the foreign minister of Burkina Faso, Alpha Barry, told the press that he had also summoned the Libyan ambassador to the capital Ouagadougou for consultations. The issue has since been added to the agenda of next week"s African Union meeting in Ivory Coast, to take place on November 29 and 30.

Migrants swept up in the slave trade before reaching the Mediterranean coast are describing Libya as "hell" and express fear of being caught by roving militias, and it appears that even children may be part of the slave trafficking. DW continues:  

The issue has made waves in the Ivory Coast itself — 155 Ivorian refugees, including 89 women and underage migrants, were returned from Libya to the Ivory Coast earlier this week as part of a reintegration initiative launched by the European Union. Representatives of the Ivorian government, however, said that the health of those migrants returned from Libya was in a "deplorable state."

Current headlines and stories highlighting the continued outrage of Libya"s slave auctions, however, neglect to mention that the country has been a "failed state" since its "liberation" through the US-led NATO campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi. At the end of last summer, the United Nation"s World Food Program (WFP) found that 1.3 million people are in need of emergency aid due to perpetual "conflict, insecurity, political instability and a collapsing economy." 

Meanwhile, the fact that Libya has become a key European migration embarkation point for all of Africa coupled with its being a failed state and enduring war zone, ensures that the the humanitarian crisis will only continue to grow. Though global outrage over the latest revelations of slave markets and xenophobia in Libya continues, media coverage remains myopic in its assessment of the true depth of Libya"s problems and their causes. 

WATCH: Africans being sold like animals in Arab countries. Slavery for blacks is still happening in 2017. #HumanTrafficking pic.twitter.com/DaNw4AR3rx

— Phil Mphela (@PhilMphela) November 15, 2017

Though CNN"s footage and accompanying report which lately sparked renewed public interest in Libya is shocking, such practices have been quietly documented for years, and clear warnings were issued starting in early 2011 that Libya"s black as well as migrant population would be the first to fall victim at the hands of the Islamist Libyan rebels that NATO"s war empowered. From the outset critics of Western intervention in Libya loudly sounded the alarm of a genocide against black Libyans in progress committed by the very rebels the US, UK, France, and Gulf allies were arming - a fact so well-known that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed and warned on the matter.

Protests and diplomatic action is likely to merely take aim at the Western backed Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli, and not at the very authors of the "new" post-Gaddafi Libya who put the Tripoli government into power in the first place (France is among those responsible for creating Libya"s current chaos). And while Obama himself has actually voiced some minimal and too little too late "regret" over his decision to go bomb the Gaddafi government out of existence using the pretext of "humanitarian intervention" - calling it his "worst mistake" - Hillary has consistently defended her role as one of the architects of the war as Obama"s secretary of state. 

But even a 2015 article in The Atlantic placed appropriate blame with the following description:

Using contested intelligence, a powerful adviser urges a president to wage a war of choice against a dictator; makes a bellicose joke when he is killed; declares the operation a success; fails to plan for a power vacuum; and watches Islamists gain power. That describes Dick Cheney and the Iraq War—and Hillary Clinton and the war in Libya.

And yet years later, as such war crimes against both African migrants and black Libyans continue to be exhaustively documented, Hillary still says that she has no regrets. Though her beloved Libyan rebels, legitimized and empowered through broad support from the West, are now among the very militias hosting slave auctions, she"s never so much as hinted that regime change in Libya left the country and much of the region in shambles.  Instead, she simply chose to conclude her role in the tragic story of Libya with her crazed and gleeful declaration of "we came, we saw, he died."

Concerning Obama, despite his general Libya mea culpa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning "humanitarian" minded architect of the 2011 US-NATO intervention (and ultimate author of Libya"s current hell) continues to pen his presidential memoir in the midst of an epic retirement tour of yachts, golf courses, and hidden celebrity islands.

Meanwhile, Libya still burns out of control, and America"s first black president, though surely able to command immense influence even from retirement, remains silent on the resurrection of a barbaric slave trade which didn"t exist in modern Libya prior to his own intervention there.

Libya"s Slave Auctions And African Genocide: What Hillary Knew

A new CNN investigation has uncovered a network of slave markets operating in warehouses in various cities across Libya six years after NATO-led intervention in the country toppled the government of Muammar Gaddafi in support of US and UK backed rebels. And not only did CNN confirm the presence of slave auctions where human beings are being sold for as little as $400 in "liberated" Libya, but CNN"s crew was actually able to film a live auction in progress, while also gathering the testimonies of multiple victims.

Though CNN"s footage and accompanying report is shocking, such practices have been quietly documented for years, and clear warnings were issued starting in early 2011 that Libya"s black as well as migrant population would be the first to fall victim at the hands of the Islamist Libyan rebels that NATO"s war empowered. From the outset critics of Western intervention in Libya loudly sounded the alarm of a genocide against black Libyans in progress committed by the very rebels the US, UK, France, and Gulf allies were arming - a fact so well-known that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed and warned on the matter.

Screenshot of CNN"s investigative video uncovering modern day slave auctions in post-Gaddafi Libya.

The Dangerous Myth of Gaddafi"s "African Mercenaries" 

Among the foremost of these early critics at the time, Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor at Montreal"s Concordia University, published a 2012 book which exhaustively documented racially motivated crimes which came early and often during the armed uprising. His book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO"s War on Libya and Africa, contains essential summary context laying out the role that international media played in 2011 and after, including CNN itself, in fueling the xenophobic campaign to scapegoat Libya"s over one million strong black population as "pro-Gaddafi mercenaries".

According to Professor Forte:

Racial fear and xenophobia were at the very crux of the first public calls for Western military intervention, and were the basis for the first utterance of the need for a "no-fly zone" ... The myth of the "African mercenary" was useful for the Libyan opposition, the NTC [National Transitional Council] and the militias, to insist that this was a war between "Gaddafi and the Libyan people," as if he had no domestic support at all...

 

As Patrick Cockburn explained, the insurgents" "explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money."

Gaddafi"s "pan-Africanist" policies such as aggressive support for the creation of the African Union (in 2002), and a relatively open immigration policy allowing for the influx of sub-Saharan African migrants to work on Gaddafi"s massive building projects, stirred resentment and discontent within broader Arab Libyan society in the decade leading up to the 2011 war. This was the historical background which set the stage for the anti-Gaddafi rebels" extraordinary claim that sub-Saharan "foreign mercenaries" were being used en masse by Gaddafi to target protesters (later proven false).

And these historic ethnic and racial dynamics were well understood by the US government long before official support to Libyan militant groups began - militants which were not only shown to have al-Qaeda links, but which declared "open season" on all black Libyans and migrant workers during the revolution. As the CIA"s own historical analysis of Libya"s internal dynamics spells out:

QADHAFI in 1998 adopted a decade-long pan-African policy that enabled large numbers of sub-Saharan migrants to enter Libya without visas to work in the construction and agricultural industries. Although sub-Saharan Africans provided a cheap labor source, they were poorly treated and were subjected to periodic mass expulsions. By the mid-2000s, domestic animosity toward African migrants...

Similar to later developments in Syria, the media would uncritically echo whatever the "freedom fighting" rebels would feed it, thus this black foreign mercenary trope became an unquestioned reality spread from rebel propagandists to the Western public. Libyan opposition members even began claiming to be victims of wild attacks by roving bands of machete-wielding pro-Gaddafi blacks wearing tell-tale yellow hard hats - a symbol which also falsely began to be associated with "Gaddafi"s savage mercenaries" - resulting in subsequent mass arrests and executions of innocent black migrant construction workers.

CNN Spread the "Black Mercenary" Lie

The end result would of course be the widespread targeting and scapegoating of an entire ethnic population within Libya. This is demonstrated, for example, in the most well-known example of Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and “dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011 after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan brigades.

A widely circulated photo from the Libyan war which shows rebels threatening to shoot a black man.

But it is important to remember that CNN itself at the time regularly promoted the false "black mercenary" narrative which helped fuel and excuse such atrocities, even though it is now much belatedly investigating and decrying Libya"s current migrant slave auctions, while leaving out the essential context which enabled such horrors in the first place. For example, the following February 2011 CNN reporting relied on unnamed opposition sources during the earliest days of the conflict to say:

Residents said hundreds of mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa had been killed or captured while fighting for Gadhafi, but much of the army appears to have gone over to anti-government forces.

And a separate CNN article from the same month - though acknowledging that no CNN journalists were even inside the country - still uncritically reported:

Clashes broke out between a large crowd of demonstrators and people who appeared to be African mercenaries in the center of the city, according to an activist.

Yet another broadcast segment from February 2011 - the clip of which appears to have since been deleted from CNN"s site (but which is available on YouTube), asks the question: in Libya "just who is doing the dirty work?" - while answering that Gaddafi imported Chadian and Sudanese mercenaries to crack down on civilian protesters.

And those few examples are but a tiny sampling of CNN"s consistent spreading the dangerous myth throughout the early stages of the conflict - to say nothing of how ubiquitous the false rebel claims became among mainstream media generally.

US-backed Rebels and Ethnic Genocide

One of the few international correspondents to actually report the truth in real time while writing from inside Libya was The Independent"s (UK) Patrick Cockburn. In an August 2011 story he wrote as if attempting to warn the world about the future war crimes to come at the hands of the US-backed rebels:

The rotting bodies of 30 men, almost all black and many handcuffed, slaughtered as they lay on stretchers and even in an ambulance in central Tripoli, are an ominous foretaste of what might be Libya"s future. The incoming regime makes pious statements about taking no revenge on pro-Gaddafi forces, but this stops short of protecting those who can be labelled mercenaries. Any Libyan with a black skin accused of fighting for the old regime may have a poor chance of survival.

Subsequent stories of widespread torture and executions of black Libyans included a 2012 report in UK media which involved anti-Gaddafi "revolutionaries" filming themselves torturing black prisoners, making them eat the former Libyan national flag.

If reporters like Cockburn and even prominent human rights organizations (see Human Rights Watch, September 2011, Libya: Stop Arbitrary Arrests of Black Africans) understood what was happening months prior to height of NATO"s military campaign in support of the rebels, which ended in the brutal torture and field execution of Gaddafi, then what did one of the prime US architects of the war, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton know and when did she know it?

Then Secretary of State Clinton posing with Libyan rebel commanders.

What Hillary Knew

The answer lies in a March 27, 2011, intelligence brief on Libya published by WikiLeaks. The brief, which was made public in 2015 as part of a large batch of Hillary emails released by the State Department, was sent by long time close adviser to the Clinton family and Hillary’s personal intelligence gatherer, Sidney Blumenthal, and contains clear reference to rebels summarily executing "all foreign mercenaries" - which had already become the common euphemism for black Libyans then being targeted by the US-supported rebels.

Citing a rebel commander source “speaking in strict confidence” Blumenthal reports to Hillary:

Under attack from allied Air and Naval forces, the Libyan Army troops have begun to desert to the rebel side in increasing numbers. The rebels are making an effort to greet these troops as fellow Libyans, in an effort to encourage additional defections.

 

Source Comment: Speaking in strict confidence, one rebel commander stated that his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting…

Hillary Emails show UK, French, Egyptian special forces were secretly in Libya providing arms to "protestors" https://t.co/SyRhaYeLGI

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 25, 2016

And further interesting is that the line immediately following the acknowledgement of war crimes against "foreign mercenaries" indicates that a long time CIA supported Libyan exile was then taking command of the very militants committing those summary executions.

The email continues:

At the same time Colonel Khalifa Haftar has reportedly joined the rebel command structure, in an effort to help organization the rebel forces.

Khalifa Haftar has since 2011 become a mainstay in Libya"s post-Gaddafi chaos, heading up one of the three to four governments (at any given time) claiming authority in the war-torn country. Haftar has been widely acknowledged as the "CIA"s man" during his two decade long exile in the US, as a BBC profile explained: "His proximity to the CIA"s headquarters in Langley hinted at a close relationship with US intelligence services, who gave their backing to several attempts to assassinate Gaddafi."

CIA"s Khalifa Haftar and Mass Executions

Meanwhile, Haftar is currently being eyed by international prosecutors for continuing to commit war crimes in Libya. One month ago The Guardian reported, "Ex-CIA asset Khalifa Haftar, due to meet Italian officials in Rome, ordered soldiers to kill prisoners, according to legal experts." The Guardian cites video evidence which proves he continues to be "complicit in calling for extrajudicial killings."

And yesterday Al Jazeera reported that a formal suit has been filed against Haftar at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for "carrying out mass executions and torture." Another recent Guardian report which details torture and rape being carried out against prisoners held under Haftar"s militia alliance, includes the following eyewitness account of the torture of African migrant detainees: “There was a black man, a migrant. In the evening, they threw him into one of our cells: ‘You rape this guy, otherwise, you’re dead!’”

Then Secretary of State Clinton understood in early 2011 what was happening concerning the rebel genocidal targeting of black Libyans and African migrants, yet pushed to arm the rebels and overthrow Gaddafi anyway. She was given the intelligence brief which gave evidence this was happening on March 27, 2011. But even without such a classified intelligence report personally delivered to her, such war crimes were so well known that a full month prior on February 28, 2011, Al Jazeera could publish the following story entitled, African Migrants Targetted in Libya:

As nations evacuate their citizens from the violence gripping Libya, many African migrant workers are targeted because they are suspected of being mercenaries hired by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader.

 

Dozens of workers from sub-Saharan Africa are feared killed, and hundreds are in hiding, as angry mobs of anti-government protesters hunt down "black African mercenaries," according to witnesses.

"No Regrets"

But even years later, as such race-based war crimes have now been exhaustively documented, Hillary has consistently indicated that she has no regrets. Though her beloved Libyan rebels, legitimized and empowered through broad support from the West, were literally killing people based on the color of their skin, not a single one has ever been convicted in a court of law or punished for their crimes.

Moreover, Hillary has never so much as hinted at the problem, though her public stature would allow her a world-wide platform to speak against atrocities at any time, possibly preventing further crimes. Instead, she has simply chosen to conclude her role in the tragic story of Libya with her crazed and gleeful declaration of "we came, we saw, he died."

West Eyes Recolonization Of Africa With Endless War; Removing Gaddafi Was First Step

Authored by Dan Glazebrook via RT.com,

Exactly six years ago, on October 20th, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was murdered, joining a long list of African revolutionaries martyred by the West for daring to dream of continental independence.

Earlier that day, Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte had been occupied by Western-backed militias, following a month-long battle during which NATO and its ‘rebel’ allies pounded the city’s hospitals and homes with artillery, cut off its water and electricity, and publicly proclaimed their desire to ‘starve [the city] into submission’. The last defenders of the city, including Gaddafi, fled Sirte that morning, but their convoy was tracked and strafed by NATO jets, killing 95 people. Gaddafi escaped the wreckage but was captured shortly afterward. I will spare you the gruesome details, which the Western media gloatingly broadcast across the world as a triumphant snuff movie, suffice to say that he was tortured and eventually shot dead.

We now know, if testimony from NATO’s key Libyan ally Mahmoud Jibril is to be believed, it was a foreign agent, likely French, who delivered the fatal bullet. His death was the culmination of not only seven months of NATO aggression, but of a campaign against Gaddafi and his movement, the West had been waging for over three decades.

Yet it was also the opening salvo in a new war - a war for the militarily recolonization of Africa.

The year 2009, two years before Gaddafi’s murder, was a pivotal one for US-African relations. First, because China overtook the US as the continent’s largest trading partner; and second because Gaddafi was elected president of the African Union.

The significance of both for the decline of US influence on the continent could not be clearer. While Gaddafi was spearheading attempts to unite Africa politically, committing serious amounts of Libyan oil wealth to make this dream a reality, China was quietly smashing the West’s monopoly over export markets and investment finance. Africa no longer had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for loans, agreeing to whatever self-defeating terms were on offer, but could turn to China - or indeed Libya - for investment. And if the US threatened to cut them off from their markets, China would happily buy up whatever was on offer. Western economic domination of Africa was under threat as never before.

The response from the West, of course, was a military one. Economic dependence on the West - rapidly being shattered by Libya and China - would be replaced by a new military dependence. If African countries would no longer come begging for Western loans, export markets, and investment finance, they would have to be put in a position where they would come begging for Western military aid.

To this end, AFRICOM - the US army’s new ‘African command’ - had been launched the previous year, but humiliatingly for George W. Bush, not a single African country would agree to host its HQ; instead, it was forced to open shop in Stuttgart, Germany. Gaddafi had led African opposition to AFRICOM, as exasperated US diplomatic memos later revealed by WikiLeaks made clear. And US pleas to African leaders to embrace AFRICOM in the ‘fight against terrorism’ fell on deaf ears.

After all, as Mutassim Gaddafi, head of Libyan security, had explained to Hillary Clinton in 2009, North Africa already had an effective security system in place, through the African Union’s ‘standby forces," on the one hand, and CEN-SAD on the other. CEN-SAD was a regional security organization of Sahel and Saharan states, with a well-functioning security system, with Libya as the lynchpin. The sophisticated Libyan-led counter-terror structure meant there was simply no need for a US military presence. The job of Western planners, then, was to create such a need.

NATO’s destruction of Libya simultaneously achieved three strategic goals for the West’s plans for military expansion in Africa. Most obviously, it removed the biggest obstacle and opponent of such expansion, Gaddafi himself. With Gaddafi gone, and with a quiescent pro-NATO puppet government in charge of Libya, there was no longer any chance that Libya would act as a powerful force against Western militarism. Quite the contrary - Libya’s new government was utterly dependent on such militarism and knew it.
Secondly, NATO’s aggression served to bring about a total collapse of the delicate but effective North African security system, which had been underpinned by Libya. And finally, NATO’s annihilation of the Libyan state effectively turned the country over to the region’s death squads and terror groups. These groups were then able to loot Libya’s military arsenals and set up training camps at their leisure, using these to expand operations right across the region.

It is no coincidence that almost all of the recent terror attacks in North Africa - not to mention Manchester - have been either prepared in Libya or perpetrated by fighters trained in Libya. Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, ISIS, Mali’s Ansar Dine, and literally dozens of others, have all greatly benefited from the destruction of Libya.

By ensuring the spread of terror groups across the region, the Western powers had magically created a demand for their military assistance which hitherto did not exist. They had literally created a protection racket for Africa.

In an excellent piece of research published last year, Nick Turse wrote how the increase in AFRICOM operations across the continent has correlated precisely with the rise in terror threats. Its growth, he said, has been accompanied by “increasing numbers of lethal terror attacks across the continent including those in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tunisia.

In fact, data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland shows that attacks have spiked over the last decade, roughly coinciding with AFRICOM’s establishment. In 2007, just before it became an independent command, there were fewer than 400 such incidents annually in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, the number reached nearly 2,000. By AFRICOM’s own official standards, of course, this is a demonstration of a massive failure. Viewed from the perspective of the protection racket, however, it is a resounding success, with US military power smoothly reproducing the conditions for its own expansion.

This is the Africa policy Trump has now inherited. But because this policy has rarely been understood as the protection racket it really is, many commentators have, as with so many of Trump’s policies, mistakenly believed he is somehow ‘ignoring’ or ‘reversing’ the approach of his predecessors. In fact, far from abandoning this approach, Trump is escalating it with relish.

What the Trump administration is doing, as it is doing in pretty much every policy area, is stripping the previous policy of its ‘soft power’ niceties to reveal and extend the iron fist which has in fact been in the driving seat all along. Trump, with his open disdain for Africa, has effectively ended US development aid for Africa - slashing overall African aid levels by one third, and transferring responsibility for much of the rest from the Agency for International Development to the Pentagon - while openly tying aid to the advancement of “US national security objectives.”

In other words, the US has made a strategic decision to drop the carrot in favor of the stick. Given the overwhelming superiority of Chinese development assistance, this is unsurprising. The US has decided to stop trying to compete in this area, and instead to ruthlessly and unambiguously pursue the military approach which the Bush and Obama administrations had already mapped out.

To this end, Trump has stepped up drone attacks, removing the (limited) restrictions that had been in place during the Obama era. The result has been a ramping up of civilian casualties, and consequently of the resentment and hatred which fuels militant recruitment. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, for example, that the al Shabaab truck bombing that killed over 300 people in Mogadishu last weekend was carried out by a man from a town in which had suffered a major drone attack on civilians, including women and children, in August.

Indeed, a detailed study by the United Nations recently concluded that in “a majority of cases, state action appears to be the primary factor finally pushing individuals into violent extremism in Africa.” Of more than 500 former members of militant organizations interviewed for the report, 71 percent pointed to “government action,” including “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend” as the incident that prompted them to join a group. And so the cycle continues: drone attacks breed recruitment, which produces further terror attacks, which leaves the states involved more dependent on US military support. Thus does the West create the demand for its own ‘products."

It does so in another way as well. Alexander Cockburn, in his book ‘Kill Chain," explains how the policy of ‘targeted killings’ - another Obama policy ramped up under Trump - also increases the militancy of insurgent groups. Cockburn, reporting on a discussion with US soldiers about the efficacy of targeted killings, wrote that:

“When the topic of conversation came round to ways of defeating the [roadside] bombs, everyone was in agreement. They would have charts up on the wall showing the insurgent cells they were facing, often with the names and pictures of the guys running them," Rivolo remembers. "When we asked about going after the high-value individuals and what effect it was having, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we killed that guy last month, and we’re getting more IEDs than ever.’ They all said the same thing, point blank: ‘[O]nce you knock them off, a day later you have a new guy who’s smarter, younger, more aggressive and is out for revenge.”’

Alex de Waal has written how this is certainly true in Somalia, where, he says, “each dead leader is followed by a more radical deputy. After a failed attempt in January 2007, the US killed Al Shabaab’s commander, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, in a May 2008 air strike. Ayro’s successor, Ahmed Abdi Godane (alias Mukhtar Abu Zubair), was worse, affiliating the organization with Al-Qaeda. The US succeeded in assassinating Godane in September 2014. In turn, Godane was succeeded by an even more determined extremist, Ahmad Omar (Abu Ubaidah). It was presumably Omar who ordered the recent attack in Mogadishu, the worst in the country’s recent history. If targeted killing remains a central strategy of the War on Terror”, De Waal wrote, “it is set to be an endless war.”

But endless war is the whole point. For not only does it force African countries, finally freeing themselves from dependence on the IMF, into dependence on AFRICOM; it also undermines China’s blossoming relationship with Africa.

Chinese trade and investment in Africa continues to grow apace. According to the China-Africa Research Initiative at John Hopkins University, Chinese FDI stocks in Africa had risen from just two percent of the value of US stocks in 2003 to 55 percent in 2015, when they totaled $35 billion. This proportion is likely to rapidly increase, given that “Between 2009 and 2012, China’s direct investment in Africa grew at an annual rate of 20.5 percent, while levels of US FDI flows to Africa declined by $8 billion in the wake of the global financial crisis”. Chinese-African trade, meanwhile, topped $200 billion in 2015.

China’s signature ‘One Belt One Road’ policy - to which President Xi Jinping has pledged $124 billion to create global trade routes designed to facilitate $2 trillion worth of annual trade - will also help to improve African links with China. Trump’s policy toward the project was summarised by Steve Bannon, his ideological mentor, and former chief strategist in just eight words: “Let’s go screw up One Belt One Road.”

The West’s deeply destabilizing Africa policy - of simultaneously creating the conditions for armed groups to thrive while offering protection against them - goes some way toward realizing this ambitious goal. Removing Gaddafi was just the first step.

The Last Country America "Liberated" From An "Evil" Dictator Is Now Openly Trading Slaves

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

It is widely known that the U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country.

Despite the destructive consequences of the 2011 invasion, the West is currently taking a similar trajectory with regard to Syria. Just as the Obama administration excoriated Gaddafi in 2011, highlighting his human rights abuses and insisting he must be removed from power to protect the Libyan people, the Trump administration is now pointing to the repressive policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and warning his regime will soon come to an end — all in the name of protecting Syrian civilians.

But as the U.S. and its allies fail to produce legal grounds for their recent air strike - let alone provide concrete evidence to back up their claims Assad was responsible for a deadly chemical attack last week - more hazards of invading foreign countries and removing their heads of state are emerging.

This week, new findings revealed another unintended consequence of “humanitarian intervention”: the growth of the human slave trade.

The Guardian reports that while “violence, extortion and slave labor” have been a reality for people trafficked through Libya in the past, the slave trade has recently expanded. Today, people are selling other human beings out in the open.

“The latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages [in Libya],” said Mohammed Abdiker, head of operation and emergencies for the International Office of Migration, an intergovernmental organization that promotes “humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all,” according to its website. “The situation is dire. The more IOM engages inside Libya, the more we learn that it is a vale of tears for all too many migrants.”

The North African country is commonly used as a point of exit for refugees fleeing other parts of the continent. But since Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, “the vast, sparsely populated country has slid into violent chaos and migrants with little cash and usually no papers are particularly vulnerable,” the Guardian explains.

One survivor from Senegal said he was passing through Libya from Niger with a group of other migrants attempting to flee their home countries. They had paid a smuggler to transport them via bus to the coast, where they would risk taking a boat to Europe. But rather than take them to the coast, the smuggler took them to a dusty lot in Sabha, Libya. According to Livia Manente, an IOM officer who interviews survivors, “their driver suddenly said middlemen had not passed on his fees and put his passengers up for sale.”

“Several other migrants confirmed his story, independently describing kinds of slave markets as well as kinds of private prisons all over in Libya,” she said, adding IOM Italy had confirmed similar stories from migrants landing in southern Italy.

The Senegalese survivor said he was taken to a makeshift prison, which the Guardian notes are common in Libya.

“Those held inside are forced to work without pay, or on meager rations, and their captors regularly call family at home demanding a ransom. His captors asked for 300,000 west African francs (about £380), then sold him on to a larger jail where the demand doubled without explanation.”

When migrants were held too long without having a ransom paid for them, they were taken away and killed. “Some wasted away on meager rations in unsanitary conditions, dying of hunger and disease, but overall numbers never fell,” the Guardian reported.

“If the number of migrants goes down, because of death or someone is ransomed, the kidnappers just go to the market and buy one,” Manente said.

Giuseppe Loprete, IOM Niger’s chief of mission, confirmed these disturbing reports. “It’s very clear they see themselves as being treated as slaves,” he said. He arranged for the repatriation of 1,500 migrants just in the first three months of this year and is concerned more stories and incidents will emerge as more migrants return from Libya.

“And conditions are worsening in Libya so I think we can also expect more in the coming months,” he added.

As the United States government continues to entertain regime change in Syria as a viable solution to the many crises in that country, it is becoming ever-more evident that ousting dictators — however detestable they may be —  is not effective. Toppling Saddam Hussein led not only to the deaths of civilians and radicalization within the population, but also the rise of ISIS.

As Libya, once a beacon of stability in the region, continues to devolve in the fallout from the Western “humanitarian” intervention – and as human beings are dragged into emerging slave trades while rapes and kidnappings plague the population - it is increasingly obvious that further war will only create even further suffering in unforeseen ways.