Afrique

Looking For Cocaine Terrorists: The 2009 US Drugs Sting in Mali.

This story originally appeared in Maghreb Politics Review on December 21, 2009, as “US Arrests Malians in Terror Drugs ‘Link'”. The claim that Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the FARC are part of a worldwide drugs for terror conspiracy remains active in American press and government, and remains a fantasy that meets the internal needs of the US, while ignoring real issues, like those that precipitated the unexpected collapse of the Malian state in 2012.

On Western analysts and the Mali Conflict, April 2012

An excerpt from a letter written in 2012. “Two histories are now being written, each a litany of crimes and humiliations suffered, neither accepted as even having occurred by the other. …if privileged western analysts — however innocently — repeat propaganda of one side as ‘the background’ to this conflict, they help determine the outcome.”

Death and Career in the “Dark” Sahara: The Sad Fate of Jeremy Keenan

Lonely at the top

People who don’t know much about northern Mali would be very poorly served by reading Keenan’s increasingly odd writing. Keenan used to be a scholar of some note. But his increasingly unhinged supposition that their hidden hands are behind all that is bad in the west-central Saharan region is simply unsupportable. Why it remains unchallenged is the mystery.

Leaking a President out of Power

CIV_2010_result

The Cote d’Ivoire presidential elections drama, after decades of civil war and chicanery, has proven in its final act to be, well, dramatic. Even wire reports are saying that the vote totals are confirmed, with Alassane Ouattara (representing both the…