[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Some people don’t understand the great appeal of sports fanship to males in particular. But in the topsy-turvey of modernity in particular, when tribal affinity is disallowed as a barometer and all else seems to be so unfair - a rigged deck that females don’t tend to care about because it is rigged largely in their favor, sports, the historically coherent and statistically objective, verifiable comfort, persists - particularly when your guys, guys that you can identify with as being not very different from you have proven their objective merit despite rigorous competition.
See? We know that the way of life that we produce is fine enough, if not better, though it is sometimes hard to prove our part in an instant or episode - still, we appreciate the capacity for vicarious identity also because we do not normally have the opportunity for the exhilarating display of taking it to them in instantaneous and episodic action. Still, we can even out-manifest them in an instant and episodically, if not vicariously ..it can be proven ..on balance ..sometimes.. on balance…depending on the sport ..and other things.. oops ..its not so reliably objective… can have an anesthetizing, intoxicating effect ..not a comfort conducive to our interests after all.
Never really was. As disingenuously imposed objective criteria, it was counter productive illusion leading to the phenomenon of White fan cuckoldry. Inadvertently, however, Bonds using steroids to shatter Ruth’s slugging marks did a favor by rendering the crowning criteria of sports statistics, for Americans, anyway, the homerun, 60, 714, 755, whatever, so relative, so corrupted as to be unworthy of admiration.
That may seem obvious to the girls out there, but to the young boys who are looking for a reprieve from their shit tests, sports statistics have provided recourse more than vicarious identity, but assertion of heterosexual identity and indication that one is not shirking competitive proofs, even while not actively in the hunt - attending to the serous, manly criteria of purely objective measures nevertheless.
Any sensible boy who looks at baseball stats now should face the facts, that the criteria of measure of who his heterosexual identity is constructed with needs to take into account, or should take into account, his people, including particularly noting difference from the criteria that females may have regarding selection for our fitness or rejection of our non-fitness; and, in turn, rejection of their criteria when it is not adaptive to the fitness of our kind.
Though most of us White boys put a mental asterisk by Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715 (in 1974) and new record setting of 755, to note that he accumulated the number in many more games than Ruth, the record and baseball nevertheless lost much of our identification as blacks started to become emblematic among its leaders.
In different times:
“Say it ain’t so, Joe” was the cry for Joe Jackson to defend himself against unfairly puritanical standards to protect baseball’s criteria.
Country bumpkin, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, was one of the greatest hitters of the early part of last century. He was banned from baseball by the baseball commissioner for allegedly being part of the “Blacksox scandal”, in which the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series in a deal with Jewish Mobster Arnold Rothstein.
Though some of his teammates almost assuredly did throw the series, Jackson’s statistics illustrate that he played hard and well - that he was not a part of throwing the series. But such were the times and such was the concern for the integrity of the game, its statistics and objective criteria - that his merely being associated with players who would cheat was enough to get him unjustly banned from baseball.
Crucially, the game maintained integrity as a White criteria until integration started with Saint Jackie Robinson a little after World War II. The game’s integrity predictably degenerated in a myriad of nasty ways after that. Statistical degeneration culminated with Barry Bonds, who, incensed that “White boy” Mark McGwire had used steroids to hit 70 home runs in a season and shatter Babe Ruth’s one time single season record of 60, went onto a steroids program himself; to not only hit 73 in a season, but to break Babe Ruth‘s single season slugging percentage record and the sine qua non, to become the all time home run king, surpassing Ruth’s legendary mark of 714, for an altogether new, steroid enhanced bar at 762.
Conscientious, talented but troubled Croatian, Roger Maras, compared to Mark McRoids
There was some public shaming; but not so much as an asterisk by the roiders statistical record breaking marks. Its worth mentioning since there was large consternation for Roger Maris - first one to break Babe Ruth’s single season record with 61 in 1961 - meeting resistance for recognition as the record bearer by his generation’s baseball commissioner, who suggested that his new single season record should have an asterisk by it because he did it in 162 games while Ruth did it in 154. That’s how concerned American boys and their fathers were about maintaining the game’s objectivity (and how concerned the commissioner was, who also happened to be Babe Ruth’s biographer).
Now Barry Bonds does steroids, a more destructive example to kids and greater detriment to the game’s objectivity even than gambling against one’s own team, let alone merely being on the same team as others who did it, and Bonds doesn’t get so much as the asterisk that Maris was threatened with, let alone banishment from the game - as he should have been and as Shoeless Joe Jackson should not have been - “Say it ain’t so Joe” was the saying in 1919 when Joe Jackson was accused of participating in throwing the world series. Jackson did maintain his innocence, said it wasn’t so; and his world series statistics in 1919 bear that out.
Babe Ruth taking batting tips from Joe Jackson, the man he modeled his hitting style after because he considered him the best.
So much the standard bearer of the game’s style and grace was Joe Jackson, that Babe Ruth, the all time statistical king and most famous baseball player of all, stated that he modeled his swing after Joe Jackson, because he thought he was the best hitter that he’d ever seen.
I believe that it wasn’t so, Joe, that you should have been banned; but that it is so, Barry, that the way you accomplished your record should have little boys forever look upon baseball statistics, let alone salaries, as sham objective metric of worth, no comfort and no measure worth concern for White men.
Ty Cobb, the all time Batting Average leader at .367, was concerned not only for the integrity of the game and its statistics - lamenting that Ruth had made “the home run king and strategy a deuce” - but for its racial hygiene as well: he referred to Ruth as “that nigger” and “nigger lips” (to say nothing of Ruth’s nose). In truth, he liked Ruth and would let him, his nose and lips slide. However, he did correctly want to maintain the game as a criteria to assess baseball skills relative to Whites and their way of life.
Trump is looking less like the one who is freeing the White Republican base from its Neo Con backing than he is a somewhat lower grade interface - a bit more gritty and streetwise, perhaps, perfect to stay ahead of reactionary trends in the WN curve; having shared interest with the YKW to protect domestic real estate assets - he has neither extricated himself nor the implicit White Republican base from YKW entanglements.
In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs.
Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortune of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.
While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages.”
As Zero Hedge readers are familiar, Trump often critized his main competitor Ted Cruz for his links to the bank because of loans used to finance Cruz’s Senate campaign, and because Heidi Cruz was a one-time employee of Goldman. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate.
He had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him.
In addition to Goldman, Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management, whose founder, George Soros, has funded many left-leaning causes. Where it gets even more bizarre is that Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats, including to Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin is part of a group of businesspeople Trump has excoriated. In August, Trump said hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder” as he touted his proposal to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which gives private equity and hedge fund managers preferential tax treatment.
“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said at the time on CBS’ Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” he said. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them—they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous.”
They apparently are also very good at raising money.
Some more on Mnuchin’s background: starting his career in the early 1980s as a trainee at Salomon Brothers before moving to Goldman Sachs in 1985, Mnuchin was front and center for the advent of instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. He has called securitization “an extremely positive development in terms of being able to finance different parts of the economy and different businesses efficiently.” The pitfalls of the financing method came later, he’s said.
Mnuchin’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was a partner at Goldman Sachs in the 1960s. The second-youngest of five siblings, Steven attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School and then Yale University, where his roommate was Edward Lampert, who would go on to become a hedge-fund manager and owner of Sears.
More recently, in October 2014 Mnuchin became co-chairman of the board of the Hollywood studio Relativity Media due to Dune’s fascination with movies. Dune has provided financing for batches of winning movies, like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar,” Hollywood’s all-time box-office champion.
Relativity Media filed for bankruptcy last summer, just a few months after Mnuchin’s arrival. According to Variety, Dune was intimately involved in the studio’s failure.
The money-man and fellow investors in a Dune Capital fund are said to have lost as much as $80 million — equity that is almost certain to be lost for good, said two sources familiar with the situation. And disgruntled Relativity investors privately are questioning how a bank Mnuchin once headed – OneWest Bank of Pasadena – was allowed by Relativity to drain $50 million from the studio just weeks prior to the July 30 insolvency filing.
Mnuchin had left Relativity just days before the company reached an agreement with OneWest to extend the loan deadline and allow the bank to claim that money.
To be sure, Hillary Clinton, who in turn has been attacked for her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, also has a high-ranking Goldman official in her ranks, former CFTC commissioner Gary Gensler, who is the former secretary of state’s chief financial officer and whom she is grooming for a potential Treasury Secretary. But for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he will fund his own way and is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden proximity to Wall Street comes as a big surprise and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.
The African invasion of Europe across the Mediterranean Sea has been caused by the British and French governments’ wrecking of the Gadhafi regime in Libya—and is now also being aided by Libyan warlords and the Italian mafia.
According to an article in Germany’s Bild newspaper, the “disintegrated” state of Libya following Gadhafi’s fall made it much easier to send boats to Europe and “anyone who wants to, can do trafficking. Militia and Italian mafia are making their share.”
The Garabuli detention center where hundreds of Africans are detained by the Libyan government.
The Bild newspaper gained access to one of the Libyan government’s seaside detention centers being run by the new “anti-illegal immigration” department, and reported on the conditions prevailing among the sub-Saharan African inmates.
The country of Libya is in “disintegration,” the newspaper says.
The European Union-supported government “governs” from ships off the coast—because it is unable to govern from Tripoli, which is under the control of a “moderate Islamist” organization, Fajr Libya.
“And in the east of the country, the terror organization ISIS has conquered an area of 250 kilometers in length,” Bild continues.
This makes it easy for the traffickers to operate. At Garabuli beach, 50 kilometers away from Tripoli, invaders wait in abandoned buildings for the traffickers.
The Bild reporters met “Abdul,” a trafficker in Libya. He comes from Nigeria, just like many of the invaders he smuggles.
Abdul tells the Bild that “Under Gaddafi, it was much harder to send boats to Europe. But now there is no longer a state. Anyone who wants to can do trafficking. The militia and the Italian mafia are earning their share.”
The price for a place in a boat is currently around €1,200 euros. Over 100 people are transported on a single rubber boat. Wooden boats are used for up to 800 people.
“We came, we saw, he died!” ...she laughs.
The removal of Gaddafi is also an expression of the Israeli program, “Operation Clean Break”
* Monsanto Corporation apparently has a role in this as debacle as well.
Barack Obama’s Executive Action on immigration, which provided a free break for nonwhite invaders who entered the US before January 1, 2014, created an “open border” situation with Mexico, the head of the National Border Patrol Council (NPBC) told the US Congress.
NPBC president Brandon Judd told the House Judiciary Committee that Border Patrol agents were instructed to take invaders’ “word for it” that they had been in the US before that date, even though they were dripping wet after just having crossed the Rio Grande River.
Judd said that Border Patrol agents were ordered to “release dripping-wet illegal immigrants at the Rio Grande unless they actually see them climbing out of the river.
“This has created what amounts to an open border with Mexico,” Judd said.
The agents were, he continued, given the orders verbally soon after President Obama laid out plans for limiting immigration enforcement in 2014.
“We have apprehended illegal aliens just north of the border who are still soaking wet from crossing the river. If they claim, as increasingly they are doing, that they have been here since January 1, 2014, we will process and then release them,” Judd said in written testimony following up on questions from a hearing earlier this year.
“They are still wet from the river and miles from any civilization and on their word alone we release them unless we physically saw them cross the river,” he said. “This policy de facto creates an open border with Mexico for any illegal alien who wants to claim that they were here before 2014.”
The January 1, 2014, date was part of Obama’s “enforcement priorities” he laid out in November that year, which were designed to remove the threat of deportation to the vast majority of the illegal invaders in the US.
The Obama plan consists of giving long-time illegal immigrants “lower priority” for deportation in favor of recent border-crossers, and those with gang ties or who have amassed serious criminal records in addition to their immigration violations.
The rule meant that those illegal immigrants already in the pipeline for deportation were told they could have their cases dropped if they met the new cutoff and didn’t have serious criminal records.
Judd said that the invaders had quickly learned to “game the system,” and if apprehended anywhere, simply said that they had arrived before 2014—and Border Patrol agents had been instructed to simply “take their word for it” even if it was patently untrue.
Judd added that under the verbal directions, agents have been told to fingerprint illegal immigrants and process them to see if they have serious criminal records.
But those that claim to have been here since 2013, and who don’t show up with problems in their criminal history, are released into the US rather than held for deportation.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican and Judiciary Committee Chairman, agreed, and said that the order had led to more illegal immigrants trying to make the trip into the US.
“Word has spread around the world about the administration’s lax immigration policies and now we see unlawful immigrants gaming the system and the administration’s so-called ‘enforcement priorities’ to come here,” said Goodlatte, after listening to Judd’s testimony.
Rerevisionist: April 11, 2016 at 6:33 pm - “Obama’s ‘own country’ is not the USA.”
The sort of alliance that Majorityrights advocates between European peoples and Asia(ns) is Happening. We envisage a coordinated effort to protect our peoples, secure our lands, access to vital resources and to maintain our channels of commerce. Allying our peoples and military stations along that line come with the broader purpose of securing our people against Islamic, Arab and African populations, Abrahamic/Judaic and Jewish populations, power and influence.
A home to military bases for the US, France and soon China, Djibouti may be the most important tiny African state you’ve never heard about.
At the close of another hot day on the coast of Djibouti, a tiny country on the Horn of Africa, workers are clambering over huge concrete cubes beneath a red crane. One by one, the 2,500-tonne blocks are being submerged in the water: part of a plan to stun the shoreline into submission and create a vast new port at the heart of global trade.
“We’re going to fill in the sea,” Abdo Mohammed, the logistics manager for the $590m project, tells me with quiet glee.
Thirty per cent of all shipping in the world passes this point on the north-east edge of Africa, where the water narrows to a few kilometres opposite Yemen. A former French colony that became independent only in 1977, Djibouti sits at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal — a waypoint between Africa, India and the Middle East. Over the past 15 years, the country has set about capitalising on its location at the nexus of international trade: once completed, the Doraleh Multi-Purpose Port will be the largest of eight ports that together will handle containers, livestock, oil, phosphates and more.
But the geostrategic ambition of the small, authoritarian state — which at 23,200 sq km (8,950 sq miles) is only slightly larger than Wales — does not stop there. The US, several European countries and Japan have all pinned global military ambitions on Djibouti. Now China is set to do the same.
Construction began on the new port in 2013. “But then [last year] we had to change things around,” says Mohammed. He gestures with his phone in the direction of the arid land behind us. “We had to make a new section over there, beside the mountain, inside the port. That’s where the Chinese military base will be.”
The sun, by now a giant orange disc, slips behind the sea. Mohammed’s nonchalant disclosure marks the culmination of the search that brought me here. China is planning its first overseas military base at Doraleh, within a few kilometres of America’s largest military outpost in Africa. As superpowers jostle for strategic influence, this impoverished state, home to fewer than a million people, is helping to shape a new world order.
Djibouti first came to the attention of France when the French navy commandeered its coastline in 1862 as a stop to refuel and restock coal steamers en route to French Indochina. French Somaliland, as the colony became known soon after, opened up the landlocked African hinterland to international trade; in the 1910s, a new railway from Addis Ababa to Djibouti linked Ethiopia to the sea. Djibouti is a barren land of mountains and desert, and its location has always been its most precious resource. Even now, it is more port city than country: by far the majority of the population lives in the seaside capital of the same name.
A military and trading entrepôt that welcomes all comers, Djibouti today oozes espionage chic. It is home to pirate-hunters, soldiers, spies and Arab traders. Conservative Somali culture mixes with the legacy of flamboyant French Legionnaires.
“Djibouti is really experiencing a boom,” says Ahmed Osman Guelleh, the 56-year-old chief executive of GSK Group, a family logistics company that has forged its fortune through shipping. Yet the baking heat makes it remarkable that anything much gets done at all. One US soldier who served here describes it as “a hot hell box in the armpit of Africa”. Temperatures reach into the mid-40s for nearly half the year. Government offices shut down at 12.30, and an entire nation of men, and many women, take up the national pastime: chewing for hours on khat, a bitter leaf so renowned for its amphetamine-like properties that it is banned in Britain and the US.
The drug gives its wired adherents a daily buzz — and mollifying fuzz — they cannot be without. I watched market traders, government officials and on-duty police officers chew khat. Even the 49-year-old finance minister Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh admitted to me that his family has shares in the largest khat importer.
“If Djiboutians stopped chewing khat for seven days, they would overthrow the government,” says one port worker. He is only half joking. Eccentric and appealing as it is, Djibouti is authoritarian and brittle too. President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, a former head of the secret police who has run the country since 1999, will seek re-election for his fourth term on April 8, having altered the constitution in 2010 to allow him to extend his rule. The opposition complains regularly of illegal security crackdowns and the impossibility of free and fair elections.
Flanked by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, Djibouti is viewed as a haven in the unstable Horn of Africa and hosts armed forces from around the world. “There’s no country with so many military bases. You can throw stones from one end to the other of Djibouti and find military bases all the way, right next to each other,” says one senior official. France pledged to protect its former colony as part of a post-independence deal; after 9/11 it was joined by the US, which chose Djibouti as its base for rooting out emerging Islamist terror networks in the region. Initially, US troops were stationed on a navy ship but in 2003 they set up in Camp Lemonnier, a rundown French Legionnaires’ base beside the airport. The site has since expanded from 88 acres to 500. In 2014 a 10-year lease nearly doubled the annual rent the US pays Djibouti to $63m, with an option to extend for another 10 years.
In the past decade piracy has increased the tiny state’s strategic importance; as Somali pirates took hundreds of crews and vessels captive, costing global trade an estimated $7bn at a 2011 peak, several nations contributed to anti-piracy missions in Djibouti, including Germany, Italy and Japan.
Russia may also be interested in establishing a base. Djibouti’s foreign minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, an articulate 50-year-old with a reputation as the most competent minister in the government, tells me that while Djibouti turned down a request from Iran to host its military here — “because we think that Iran’s policy in the region is not a peaceful one” — it has not declined a similar recent request from Moscow. “Russia is a key player, it is a permanent member of the Security Council,” he tells me in his office. “For Russia we have no problem.”
The country is already so full of military personnel that its small, sandy capital city at times resembles a sprawling garrison. US fighter jets share the same airport runway as commercial airlines at the civil airport. French soldiers in impossibly skimpy, neon-hued shorts jog past brightly veiled women and mosques. The five-star Palace Kempinski hotel, a bubble of exclusivity in the otherwise poor city, serves $5 Cokes and popcorn tossed in truffle butter to crewcuts in uniform. Battle tattoos flash on the biceps and backs of Speedo-wearing soldiers in the infinity pool. Special-forces operatives sip Moscow Mules on the pontoon. International spies and drones operate daily. One western spy told me they enjoyed Djibouti because it is “quirky”.
Despite the multi-force troop presence, when rumours started circulating early last year that China was not only going to build its first overseas military base but that it was going to build it in Djibouti, rival powers were taken by surprise. Western countries and their allies view the prospect of China’s military arrival at a global chokepoint for trade and security with alarm. An anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden in 2008 was the first time China had sent naval ships on a mission outside its territorial waters in more than 600 years.
For two fundamental reasons, I welcome China‘s outreach to African states (and believe any sane person should, though I must admit that sanity is not a commodity in great supply in the US these days). First, Africa needs all the help it can get and the Chinese have lots of stored up capital. Second, when the Chinese try to attach strings to their aid, before or after, the Africans smell it out rather swiftly. So far, the Chinese have been less than stellar in camouflaging such strings.”
Since then, Beijing has gradually shifted its foreign policy to embrace a more assertive military posture, moving to a strategy it calls “active defence”. Its pursuit of a Djibouti base has been cloaked in secrecy, with public statements short on detail. Some diplomats speak darkly of China’s “100-year horizons”. One senior western diplomat, with a more immediate timeframe in mind, says, “The worst-case scenario is that they [China] develop this web of bases to give them a kind of control over strategic waterways all the way into the Med.”
In financial terms, China is already what one official in the region describes as the “major show” in town. Following the model it has employed throughout Africa — offering billions of dollars in financing in exchange for access to resources — China is helping to bankroll a targeted $12.4bn of spending on huge infrastructure projects including the Doraleh port and a new railway to Ethiopia. Amid the boom in construction, Djibouti’s growth rate is likely to surpass 7 per cent this year. But the investments are having “limited trickle-down effects”, according to the International Monetary Fund. Nearly two-thirds of the population lives in poverty, and half the labour force is unemployed. In the absence of many skilled domestic workers, Chinese labourers have been flown in.
Loans from China for a water pipeline and the new railway from Ethiopia — agreed before talk of a military base — come to $814m, half of the country’s annual GDP. In 2013 the IMF suspended discussions with Djibouti because of its concerns over debt vulnerability; last year it warned of “elevated solvency risks”. Finance minister Dawaleh tells me he recently travelled to Beijing, seeking to negotiate easier repayment plans. Djibouti’s public and publicly guaranteed debt burden is likely to reach 81 per cent of GDP next year, mostly as a result of Chinese financing.
“We don’t want the Americans to leave but the Chinese invest billions of dollars in our infrastructure; that’s what the Americans are not doing,” foreign minister Youssouf explains. “So we are trying to keep the balance to see where our interest lies, as a small country with very limited resources.”
In early 2014, Djibouti and China signed an agreement to allow the Chinese navy — which contributes to international anti-piracy operations — to use its port. Beijing made no official comment when President Guelleh said, last May, that Djibouti was in talks with China to establish a military base. In November, China confirmed only a naval “support facility” destined for Djibouti, with a spokesperson saying, “It will help China’s military further carry out its international responsibilities to safeguard global and regional peace and stability.” Even in February this year, announcing the start of work on the project, China referred only to “logistical facilities” for naval rest and resupply. The Chinese embassy in Djibouti turned down my requests for an interview with the ambassador.
But when I speak to Youssouf, he is candid and happy to provide details of the deal he and President Guelleh have struck with China. “The terms of the contract and agreement are very clear and they are the same for each and every country that requested military presence in Djibouti,” he tells me in his office in the capital.
China will, he says, pay $20m a year for a 10-year lease for the military base, with an option to extend for a further 10 years. There will probably be “a few thousand” troops and military staff at the site, along with its own naval berth at the new port. It would use the base to protect its national interest — monitoring its merchant vessels passing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that leads to the Suez Canal, and for its navy to refuel and restock — much as the French did more than 150 years ago. Youssouf also says that China, which is slated to build a second major airport in the country, would have as much right to use drones as the US and French. China’s foreign ministry declined to respond to faxed questions from the FT about the terms of the new base.
“The Americans have enough technology, enough fighter aircraft, enough drones [here] to control each and every piece of this land and even beyond,” says Youssouf. “Why should the Chinese not have the right to also use those materials . . . to preserve and protect their interest in the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. Why?”
Official comments from those potentially affected are clipped: “We follow the situation about the Chinese base very closely,” says Tatsuo Arai, Japan’s ambassador to Djibouti. Youssouf admits that both Japan and the US have “expressed their worries” to both him and President Guelleh about the arrival of a Chinese military presence so close to their own, and its potential capabilities.
“Those preoccupations and worries expressed by the Americans and others are groundless, for us at least,” Youssouf tells me, deriding the west’s “hypocritical vision of our common interest”.
“We can host Chinese bases as we can host American bases . . . They might have conflicting interests elsewhere but here they cannot have conflicting interests, because the strait of Bab el-Mandeb is vital for each and everyone in the world,” he says. “There is no conflict of interest when it comes to global peace. China has no interest in doing anything [bad]. Everybody knows that nobody can take any action that could jeopardise the maritime traffic . . . This is a vital lifeline for the whole of international trade.
“We tried to reassure [the Americans and Japanese ], saying don’t worry, the same agreement we signed with them is the one we signed with you. So there is no reason to worry.”
That sense of equivalence may be precisely what is worrying the US. America, after all, is undertaking in Djibouti what Ambassador Tom Kelly tells me is “the biggest active military construction project in the entire world . . . It’s number one of everything we’re doing.” In his office at the US embassy, a monolith in sand-blown Haramous (what counts as the city’s upmarket district), the 54-year-old Kelly is unambiguous about the country’s vital role, describing Djibouti as “at the forefront of our national security policy right now”.
Geography is important (most who use the term ‘geopolitical’ don’t even know what they are implying by it). From Djibouti, Aden is just across, as is its state, Yemen, where al-Qaeda abounds. The narrowest part of the Red Sea route, south, is there. Jeddah is just up the opposite coast and Mogadishu, another haven for al-Qaeda, is the other way across the landmass. Moreover, the government of Djibouti, unlike most other African states, seems to be either sufficiently worried about its own security or lusting for hard currency, or both, to be one of the few African states willing to host a US troop presence.”
“The greatest threat to the US is terrorism, and we’re right on the front lines here,” he says. “It is an extremely important counterterrorism platform for the United States; within striking distance of two active affiliates — AQIP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and al-Shabaab in Somalia.”
The US runs special ops across the continent as well as drones from Djibouti, protects 16 embassies in the region and fights al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia, Yemen and further afield. The country is also a key point for monitoring and securing trade routes. At Obock, a sleepy fishing port at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb Straits, the US has installed a surveillance centre.
From here, Djibouti can monitor southern access to the Suez, track seafaring traffic, patrol coastal waters and protect maritime borders. The US built a naval pier here in 2009 and conducts counterterrorism training and houses radar equipment in the nearby Ras Bir lighthouse.
The US presence is growing; $1bn is being spent on expanding its base, bulking up its presence for the long term. While the drone site has been moved to Chabelley, 10km south-west of the capital, the main US base in the city still has what operatives call a “secret side”, with a covert compound dedicated to special operations, targeting not only AQIP and al-Shabaab but also the main branch of al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army and Isis. As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Djibouti is now the active centre for what US soldiers at the camp refer to as “g-wot”: the global war on terror.
“Guys who come back can’t believe how much bigger it’s got,” one of the 4,500 troops and contractors living inside the base tells me. Unlike the French, they are allowed to leave the base only rarely during their downtime. Camp conditions approximate to, in the words of one resident, “adultday caree”. US forces eat at Combat Café, watch films at the Oasis Movie Theatre, play ping pong, poker and Xbox 360 in the gaming room, go to the gym and crack gags instructing each other to “have a Djiboutiful day”.
Japanese troops, whose anti-piracy mission numbers several hundred, sometimes visit for a game of soccer or touch rugby to alleviate what one Japanese soldier described to me as a dismal time coping with heat and boredom. Japan’s base also finds ways to remind cooped-up soldiers of home: I was treated to a tour that included a room filled with manga comics, traditional Japanese communal hot baths and the rare prospect of sushi.
The confines of the camp are in contrast to the freer life downtown. My own interest was piqued when a Somali friend described Djibouti as “Mogadishu meets Las Vegas”. The country, which a diplomat calls “one of the sentinels of moderate Muslim societies”, goes more or less by the secular French penal code, a leftover from colonial days. Compared with neighbouring Somalia’s practice of sharia, it is relatively liberal. Women rarely wear the full niqab, some shirk a headscarf completely. They meet for late-night sheeshas, guava juice and gossip beside the quay in the hot night air. Many have boyfriends, even if they shield it from their families.
“You can have your private life in Djibouti. That’s why we’re not like Somalia,” an impassioned 30-year-old woman tells me, saying it was down not to French influence but to “the Djiboutian mentality”. “We are much more open, more free. We don’t talk about sex ever but it goes on out of marriage. As long as you don’t bring shame on your family, your private life is free.”
Djibouti’s nightclubs stay open until 4am, with police carefully shepherding revellers to avoid clashing with the call of the muezzin as worshippers attend morning prayers. I watch a group of five Frenchmen — all swagger, sleeves rolled up, hands in pockets — rolling out of l’Historil, a bar-restaurant, heading for the bright lights of the disco zone. Another group of French soldiers passes through the metal detectors to enter Shams, a nightclub rammed with revellers lit by disco balls. The outlines of the Statue of Liberty and a bare-breasted woman hang on the walls; 13 waitresses stand elbow to elbow serving drinks at the red-lit bar.
While parts of the city and many Muslims are dry, drinking is common. “Everyone here drinks and if they don’t, they drink in private,” one Djiboutian jokes to me over his whisky. Alcohol is sold in bars and the state licenses a clutch of tightly controlled booze importers.
Larry Modi is among them. The Christian son of an enterprising Indian runaway and an Ethiopian woman, the 67-year-old has run a supermarket in Djibouti City for many years. Warm and avuncular, with soft features, big round eyes and greying hair, he greets me at 11.30am with an offer of “champagne?”, pouring glasses for us both. His shop features floor-to-ceiling shelves of beer, gin, vodka and more. He is beloved by generations of soldiers and his office has the military memorabilia — gifts from soldiers serving out their time in this peculiar way station — to prove it; the French made him an honorary Legionnaire.
The cultural quirks of a country that appears to welcome all belie Djibouti’s repressive political climate. A London judge last month, ruling on a corruption case brought by Djibouti, painted a picture of President Guelleh’s regime as “capricious”, “cavalier” and on occasions “reprehensible”. Diplomats whose troops rely on the president’s welcome describe him as the crafty, powerful and impressive leader of a centralised autocracy, one stop short of dictatorship.
Human-rights activists decry a series of abuses. The government routinely suppresses the opposition, “harassing, abusing and detaining government critics”, says the latest report from the US state department, published last year, which also censures Djibouti for conducting torture, arbitrary arrest and detention of demonstrators, opposition members and journalists.
In 2011, the state put down a series of protests that hinted at the beginnings of Arab Spring-like uprisings. In December last year, police clashed with the opposition, killing at least seven and wounding dozens. Today the opposition protests against vote-rigging and harassment.
“There’s a lack of freedom, people are desperate, poor — it creates a lot of discontent. People are patient but there’s a limit,” Daher Ahmed Farah, spokesman for the opposition coalition group Union for the National Salvation, tells me.
Opposition figures such as Farah, a 54-year-old who goes by his initials “Daf”, have been followed, arrested and tortured. They meet and speak with the furtive glances and low voices borne of well-informed paranoia. Daf himself has been arrested more than 25 times since 2013, he says.
When I meet him one afternoon, we go to an empty café until a lone man comes and sits right next to us and, Daf feels, listens in. We lower our voices, move tables, and finally we leave.
That evening, I receive a call from reception to my hotel room. “There are some visitors here to see you.” I was not expecting any. I go downstairs to see a man wrapped in a skirt, wired on khat, and his adjunct dressed in a camel flannel uniform. “Come with us,” says the man in the skirt.
“Hello. Greetings. How can I help?” I ask, attempting a smile. “Police. Come with us.” I say I do not think it wise for us to have this conversation — or perhaps it is an arrest — at night, in the dark, in an unknown location, and could we pursue this tomorrow. They insist.
I manage to alert my back-up contacts before the police take me to what turns out to be the city’s central commissariat. Along with two other men, a colonel questions me at length, asking why I met with the opposition, what Daf said and who introduced us. I demur.
He directs the same questions to me again and again, especially the last, in a bad comedy of repetition, peppering his inquisition with the admission that it is perfectly legal for me, an accredited journalist with the right visa, to meet the perfectly legal opposition. The whole thing lasts four hours.
Back in my hotel room, I do not sleep for what is left of the night. I relate the tale the next day to a diplomat. “It’s intimidation,” he tells me.
In May 2014, Djibouti’s assumption that it was a well-protected island of peace in a troubled region was shaken when al-Shabaab launched a double suicide attack on a downtown restaurant popular with locals and westerners. One person was killed and dozens wounded.
Being targeted not only for sending troops to fight al-Shabaab in Somalia but also for hosting foreign bases — the attack took place in the same month that Djibouti signed its extension agreement with the US — was a shock to a country that had until then considered itself off-limits.
“Djibouti is calm, peaceful — a Djiboutian can never do that, they like peace too much — but, if someone is prepared to die, you can’t stop them,” says a member of the government’s antiterrorism group, which comprises 160 security officers and 600 civilians linked into a reporting network. “It was a wake-up call,” says the agent. “We have totally reorganised policing and protection along the border. Now we pick up communications — we see the value in talking to people and we’re much more alert.”
Djibouti’s belief that it stands to benefit from being the linchpin for an international coalition against terrorism clearly brings its own risks. But foreign minister Youssouf insists that the country has not wavered “from our belief that globalisation means everything”. Djibouti’s security role also helps establish a modicum of leverage distinct from populous, landlocked Ethiopia, on which it has always been seen as dependent. “Everyone said Djibouti would be swallowed by Somalia or Ethiopia but in the end we are the umbilical cord for Ethiopia, and now they and the Chinese see us as that,” says Youssouf, concerned to dispel the notion that Djibouti exists solely to service the Ethiopian economy.
The US has tried to enlist China as friend not foe in the military field in Africa, suggesting integrated operations in areas such as landmine clearance and peacekeeping training. China turned down a request for a joint demining programme but it participates in international anti-piracy missions and some naval exercises. The US hopes to encourage greater co-operation. Djibouti could, if it goes well, become a catalyst for what one observer calls “a joint globalised security architecture”. But the flipside augurs ill: well-armed superpowers jostling in a city of closely guarded secrets, raising the stakes on the militarisation of trade routes and security chokepoints. Managing the existence of both a US and a Chinese military base in the same country “will be a challenge for all involved”, says ambassador Kelly.
For Djibouti, the answer is clear. “For many years Japanese, Italians, Germans, French and Americans are just coexisting in this very small land,” says Youssouf. “So why should it be different in the future?”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 06 April 2016 22:52.
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Steve Mnuchin, derived fortune at Goldman Sachs
