[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.
Poland, Warsaw – The Polish POLSA space agency recently signed an agreement with the China National Space Administration (CNSA). The two agencies should jointly cooperate on research, monitoring and development of new telecommunication solutions. Polish President Andrzej Duda and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed an agreement together during his last official visit to Warsaw last June.
Professor Marek Banaszkiewicz, president of POLSA confided to SpaceNews that “the cooperation between the Polish Space Agency and the Chinese National Space Administration will be segmented into three areas: space research, exchange and use of satellite data to develop scientific understanding of the Earth, including the observation and monitoring of climate change and the environment, and development of space technology, including telecommunications”. The purpose of business is to stimulate the development of small businesses in Poland space sector through the creation of a national space company thanks to the Sino-Polish cooperation.
“Polish entrepreneurs will be more interested in the field related to the development of technologies and telecommunications,” said Banaszkiewicz following the signing of the latest agreement between Warsaw and Beijing. Asked about the possibility of new partnerships between space companies from Poland and China, the president of the agency said that “China is a very active player in the space industry. She has many contacts, launches many actions and builds strong business relationships.”
POLSA was created in 2014 with the aim of coordinating the company’s efforts in Poland and the scientific community to increase the spatial sector presence in the country. In addition, POLSA is to assist in the acquisition of the European Space Agency funds, promotion of satellite technology, and strengthen the Polish defense capabilities.
The article casts evergreen light on the nefarious power structure and imminions* of the British political class well beyond doubts as to how the Cox murder would impact the Brexit vote, now that the vote has transpired.
Some pearls from the article and comments:
“Hers was the typical smooth career path of the modern political cog.”
Her political way was paved by becoming a water carrier for wives of the liberal political class. She imbibed and voiced its concerns - i.e., for the plight of anybody** but White native British. To the point where she ignored the rape of British girls that was going on under her nose - crimes being prosecuted, in fact, the day she died. Despite the obvious contradiction of Islam and her liberal politics, she would not say “boo” to Islam because her lucrative political career depended upon support of Muslims in her constituency.
Her husband was in complete alignment with her liberal political madness. He openly discussed ways to pander to those young people, at least those who have not yet been disabused of the PC kool-aid, as a group to counteract growing “national populist anti-immigration sentiment.”
He was such a political apparatchik that on the day that his wife was murdered, he was preoccupied with lambasting the leave campaign as opposed to attending to normal protocols of family bereavement.
Just the kind of tag-team that would flush ordinary White men down the toilet. She the gate keeper to make sure that their voice and concerns were blocked and never to be addressed; only letting through and empowering liberal “alpha males” like Brandon, who would complete the act of flushing normal White men down the toilet.
Both were lavishly rewarded for betraying normal British people.
Now that we have a bead on the patterns underpinning Jo and Brandon Cox’s insane liberalism, it begs the question of who Tommy Mair was in response to theirs and their society’s insanity? Should we dismiss him as merely crazy? Should we shy away from the fact that he had political and native nationalist motivations because his manifestation was of dubious tact?
Or is it occasion to look at silenced voices behind the reaction?
* It was too tempting to not go with what started out as a typo to the word “minion” here.
** Excepting, perhaps, if they interfered with Jewish interests..
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 08 June 2016 05:02.
This one hits close to home. It wasn’t that long ago that I found out that my maternal line Mt haplogroup is U5b1e1 - mutating in Finland some 6,600 years ago. It is particularly concentrated in Sweden and Finland - places like Turku.
It is a rare and ancient genome - mutating through the first people in Europe, the hunter-gatherers who arrived prior to the agrarians.
Now this genome is under a concerted attack by the (((YKW))) - even where those they’d imposed upon the native human ecologies of Finland would like to go back to their own native countries.
Many migrants to Finland could not find opportunity for work, even if they wanted it; and more fundamentally, they found the unfamiliar surroundings and climbs of Finland inhospitable. They wanted to return to their native countries.
Finland had no jobs, many wanted to leave, so jobs were (((created))) for them in order to encourage them to stay. A tech-training program was offered (it is not offered to natives of Finland).
5 of 700 applicants taken; (((they’ll))) use those 5 as an excuse to keep all of them. It augurs exponential assault on the native genome.
The “exemplary” asylum seeker focused-on in this article had gone through several EU countries with asylum laws before arriving in Finland - even though asylum seekers are supposed to stop at the first EU country capable of offering asylum.
Pioneering programme is teaching refugees coding so they can become developers and is helping them integrate in society.
Iraqi Eyas Taha, left, is one of five recent graduates of the developer programme for asylum seekers. Photograph: Jussi Rekiaro
Problem one: Finland’s otherwise flourishing startup scene has a chronic shortage of developers.
Problem two: the 32,000-plus asylum seekers who arrived in the Nordic country last year – many young, highly educated and computer literate – face waiting for years before they land a job.
“Essentially, we just thought: there is a way to at least start addressing these issues,” said Niklas Lahti, the chief executive of Helsinki-based web services company Nord Software. “We can teach refugees coding so they can become software engineers.”
This month the first three graduates of Integrify, the developer programme for asylum seekers that Lahti and his friend Daniel Rahman, boss of recruitment company TalentConnect, launched in April, started internships with leading Finnish tech companies.
The two are working on a second, expanded programme to train up to 200 refugees as developers, and hope to place them with companies across Europe – starting with Sweden, where “finding developers is almost impossible, harder even than Finland”, according to Lahti.
The starting point, he said, was that “integration just takes way too long. You have lots of young, qualified, motivated people sitting doing nothing. The registration process takes for ever; they’re supposed to learn Finnish before they get a job. While in tech at least, all you really need is English.”
Even once their paperwork is in order, many asylum seekers can wait up to five years to find employment, Rahman said – and when they do, “very highly educated professionals can easily find themselves in really low-skilled jobs”.
Life – and the inhospitable Nordic climate – has proved so frustrating for some newly arrived asylum seekers in Finland that officials said this year they expected up to 5,000 to cancel their applications and return home.
Officials in Helsinki said in February that some 4,000 refugees, nearly 80% of them Iraqi, had already asked for help to leave.
Once their project was fleshed out late last year, Rahman and Lahti toured refugee reception centres to present it, choosing about 20 candidates from 700 refugees who expressed an interest.
With the Finnish tech sector struggling to fill about 5,000 vacancies, the pair had no difficulty recruiting 12 software houses and web services companies as potential employers. They rented a large flat in central Helsinki to accommodate the successful students, and hired an experienced engineer to do the teaching.
Eight weeks into the course, three of the first five trainees – from Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Syria – are in internships, with the remaining two waiting to hear back after interviews.
Eyas Taha, 22, is one of the group. He fled his native Iraq after the family home was blown up three times and by early 2015 had found a job with a web-based food delivery startup in Jordan, in customer care and tech support. Then his father was killed in a terror attack, and he realised he could never return to Baghdad.
“I decided to go to Europe on my own,” he said. Taha took a boat from Egypt to Sicily – “three hundred people, eight days at sea” – and made his way through France, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark to Finland, arriving in last August.
“I knew Finland was a good country, humane,” he said. “And great for education. The only downside was the weather: in Baghdad it can be 50C in summer, in Finland in winter it can be -36C. That’s a shock.”
Taha spent six months in one reception centre and two in another before meeting Rahman and Lahti. “Now, instead of doing nothing I am learning programming languages, eight hours a day. I knew nothing, I had no coding background. But it’s an amazing opportunity.”
Taha has had two job interviews and is awaiting recalls. “This course is just a great shortcut, like a two or three-year shortcut to a proper life,” he said. “It takes a year to get a residence permit, maybe two more to learn Finnish and get a cleaning job.”
Mostly, though, “it means for us, people who have left behind our homes, our countries, our jobs, our educations, our lives – people who have nothing – it means we can actually start to make something new. It’s precious.”
Nizar Rahme, 26, another graduate of the scheme, arrived in Finland three months ago after fleeing Damascus with his wife, Lydia, when her parents’ home was destroyed in a bomb attack in December last year.
A qualified architect who was also working as an animator and game developer in Syria, Nizar came via Russia, hoping initially “just to continue studying, hopefully information systems. So this was an amazing opportunity.”
He is now a junior developer at Nord Software, with a path to a full-time – and fully paid – job. “My life has been … transformed,” he said. “Three months ago I was not a part of society. I was at the reception centre, unable to do anything. Depressed. Now I am learning, working … Integrating. Back in the world.”
The project, Rahman said, is “making integration happen. It’s win-win for everyone. For society, because these jobs need doing, and because the faster asylum seekers integrate and contribute, the better for everyone. And for refugees, because they can actually start building the new lives they crossed Europe to make for themselves.”
This piece is part of our Half-full series. If you have suggestions of stories, trends, innovations and people that you’d like to see included in this series please share them in the form below.
German pharmaceutical giant Bayer has announced its intention to offer $62 billion (€55 billion) in cash to takeover agrochemical company Monsanto, as the debate over the use of the pesticide glyphosate continues. EurActiv’s partner Milano Finanza reports.
Bayer AG, whose offer constitutes $122 a share, said that their proposal represented a substantial premium for Monsanto’s shareholders, as it is 37% higher than the American company’s closing share price on 9 May.
The German pharmaceutical and chemical group said that it intends to finance the deal with a mix of debt and equity, mostly through a rights offering. Bayer added that it predicts annual earnings from synergies totalling $1.5 billion within three years if its proposal were to be accepted.
The herbicide glyphosate can enter the body through food or drinking water. A new study has shown that the majority of Germans have been contaminated by the compound. EurActiv Germany reports.
The EU’s decision to postpone the decision on the reauthorisation of the weedkiller glyphosate has been highly controversial, but nowhere is opposition to the chemical stronger than in France. EurActiv France reports.
Trump is making a bad choice in saber rattling against China and the rest of Asia. It is to say the least that his conciliatory stance with regard to Israel is of little help to us beyond perhaps serving to strategically placate them, but neither is siding with The Russian Federation over China the right priority.
China is never going to side with the The Russian Federation. Neither is Japan. We need cooperation with these and other Asian countries, and we do not need the headaches of The Russian Federation.
We need China, Japan and the rest of Asia to assist against Islamic and Middle Eastern imposition, Jews and Africans; we need Asian assistance in regard to our borders and along The Silk Road.
Russia’s tenuous claim, tenuous economic industrial and demographic support for its vast eastward expanse is a burden that we don’t need to share in. We’d all be better off with a Russian state scaled to the size of an ethno-state. The eastern part of the present Russian Federation will be taken over by Asian peoples eventually anyway. We need Asian cooperation to secure our own ethno-states, and its best to deal with these realities.
Israel and The Russian Federation or China, Japan and the rest of Asia in alliance with ethno-nationalism, White and otherwise? Trump is taking the wrong side.
WASHINGTON: In another sign of escalating trade tensions between China and the United States, Beijing told the World Trade Organization on Friday that Washington was failing to implement a WTO ruling against punitive U.S. tariffs on a range of Chinese goods.
China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said it had requested consultations with the United States over the issue, and anti-subsidy duties on products including solar panels, wind towers and steel pipe used in the oil industry.
China’s complaint to the WTO was filed just days after Washington lodged a similar complaint against China, accusing it of unfairly continuing punitive duties on U.S. exports of broiler chicken products in violation of WTO rules.
“By disregarding the WTO rules and rulings, the United States has severely impaired the integrity of WTO rules and the interests of Chinese industries,” MOFCOM said in a statement distributed by the Chinese embassy in Washington.
The case was first brought before the WTO by China in 2012 against U.S. duties on 15 diverse product categories that also include thermal paper, steel sinks and tow-behind lawn grooming equipment.
In December 2014, the WTO’s Appellate Body ruled in favor of Chinese claims that the products subject to duties had not benefited from subsidies from “public bodies” favoring particular manufacturers.
The deadline for implementation of the rulings and recommendations of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, set through binding arbitration, expired on April 1, according to WTO records.
A U.S. Trade Representative spokesman said the United States had been “working diligently to comply with the recommendations” and to fully conform with its WTO obligations.
He added that the U.S. response to China’s request for consultations would come “in due course.”
Trade tensions between the two largest economies have been rising in the past year as China’s economic slowdown floods world markets with manufactured goods. U.S. producers of steel and aluminum have filed a number of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy complaints against imports from China.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Commerce Department is scheduled to announce its final determination in an anti-dumping investigations of imports of cold-rolled flat steel products from both China and Japan. That case was brought by major U.S. producers U.S. Steel Corp , AK Steel Corp Arcelor Mittal USA, Nucor Corp and Steel Dyanmics Inc
Does the presumptive Republican nominee see African Americans and Hispanics as part of the American “we”?
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Celebrating his big win in Indiana—and his elevation to presumptive nominee of the Republican Party—Tuesday night, Donald Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City, where he delivered a promise to heal the deep fractures in his party.
“We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” he said. “We have to bring unity. It’s so much easier if we have it.”
Do Black Votes Matter to Donald Trump?
That will be a tall order. But as a general-election candidate, Trump will need to win over more than just Republicans. In his inimitable way, he pledged to bring together the rest of the nation as well.
“We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again, and this country, which is very, very divided in so many different ways, is going to become one beautiful loving country, and we’re going to love each other, we’re going to cherish each other and take care of each other, and we’re going to have great economic development and we’re not going to let other countries take it away from us, because that’s what’s been happening for far too many years and we’re not going to do it anymore,” he said. (That’s a single sentence, if you’re keeping track at home.)
Trump faces significant obstacles to achieving that unity, particular with blocs that are not white men. Seven in 10 women view him unfavorably. It’s even worse with minorities. A recent Gallup poll found that 77 of Hispanics view Trump unfavorably. A Washington Post poll pegged that number at eight in 10, seven of them “very unfavorable.” An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll found an astonishing 86 percent of African Americans had a negative view of Trump.
One reason for those atrocious ratings is the way Trump speaks to and about minorities, which was on display during his victory speech Tuesday.
“We’re going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what’s going on, they want jobs.”
Part of Trump’s rhetorical power is his supercharged used of “we,” a method that persuades people across the country that they are part of a larger movement, and somehow share with Trump his aura of wealthy and luxury. (It’s the same technique he’s used to sell real estate for years.) In the midst of his spiel about all the ways “we” would make America great again, Trump tossed in this passage about minorities.
His phrasing is telling. First, it suggests that for Trump, blacks and Hispanics aren’t part of “we”—“they” constitute separate groups. Perhaps that’s an accidental, unthinking division, but subconscious racial division is no less dangerous. Second, it shows him assuming that minority concerns can be reduced to economics. That view is perhaps unsurprising for a man who has spent his career trying to accumulate wealth, but it is a two-dimensional view of black and Hispanic Americans.
The fact that his policies simply don’t line up with what most African Americans want in a president is one reason his numbers with black voters are so bad. Another factor is a presidential campaign driven in large parts by divisive appeals to racism and bigotry against Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups. Trump also has a long history of racially charged incidents, from alleged tenant discrimination to his strident reaction to the Central Park Five.
The entertainer has long spoken about minority groups with the outdated formulation involving a definite article: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” he said in 2011, using language that undermined his claim. He’s said similar things about “the Hispanics.”
Changing the way Trump speaks about African Americans and Hispanics won’t solve his problems with those groups, but if he wishes to unify the country, beginning to speak about them as though they are part of the American populace would be a good place to start.
Way to go right-wingers. As usual, the real Republican men are too rational to see race…these men are color blind, love everybody.
This loving domestic unity is going to be good for European EGI, going to be good for the economy - Asia is going to buy its products.
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?”
