Day: July 15, 2022

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Europe Warns of Russian Pressure From Africa

Across Europe, there is a growing uneasiness that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is serving to overshadow another critical, even existential threat that could do severe damage to the West while serving the Kremlin’s interests.

Instability and the rise of terrorism across Africa, according to multiple European and NATO officials, cannot be overlooked no matter how deeply Russian President Vladimir Putin pushes into Ukraine.

And nowhere are concerns growing as fast as they are in the Sahel, the semiarid stretch of land spanning northern and western Africa from Senegal to Sudan.

“By sending a couple of thousand Wagner paramilitaries, the Russians are taking over there,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren told an audience in Washington Thursday. “We cannot accept that.”

Ollongren is not alone in voicing concerns about the Russian threat from Ukraine, in the east, overshadowing the threat from Africa.

“One of the worst effects this will have on the Western side in my view is that it focused attention of the European member states on the eastern front, lowering the already low level of attention on the south,” Lieutenant General Giovanni Manione, the deputy director general of the European Union Military Staff, warned a forum in Washington last month.

“It is a tragic effect. It is a huge mistake,” Manione added. “We are keeping resources [in Europe] just in case something happens, forgetting completely that actions should be taken now in another theater.”

Manione went even further, suggesting that Putin, as much as he may want to conquer Ukraine, is also adroitly using the fight there as a distraction.

“I’m not sure this is the main target of the Russians,” Manione said of Ukraine. “The main target of the Russians could be having people focused on there [Ukraine], forgetting their actions elsewhere.”

Russian paramilitary groups in Africa

Other European countries are also sounding alarms.

An Austrian Federal Intelligence Service report issued late last month warned of a “belt of instability” reaching across Africa, from the Sahara Desert and the Sahel region all the way to Somalia and the Arabian Sea.

“This instability is exacerbated by the rise of a grass-roots anti-West movement in the Sahel region and the withdrawal of European armed forces from Mali,” the report said. “Ostensibly private actors on the ground, such as the Russian Wagner Group, also play an important role here.”

Many Western officials view Wagner, a paramilitary company run by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, as a proxy force for Putin, helping Moscow secure access to natural resources with no regard for human rights.

So far, U.S. military officials have reported the presence of Wagner mercenaries in more than a dozen African countries over the past several years. With recent deployments to Mali sparking renewed concerns, especially after Wagner forces were tied to the slaughter of 300 civilians this past March.

Wagner has also been tied to January’s coup in Burkina Faso, though U.S. officials have not confirmed the allegations.

Like their European counterparts, U.S. officials agree Russia’s involvement in Africa, and in the Sahel in particular, is worrisome, warning the payoff for countries turning to Russia, and to Wagner, often fails to deliver on Moscow’s promises.

“We’ve seen the impact and destabilizing effect that Wagner brings to Africa and elsewhere, and I think countries that have experienced Wagner Group deployments within their borders found themselves to be a little bit poorer, a little bit weaker, a little bit less secure,” U.S. Deputy Commanding General for Africa Major General Andrew Rohling told reporters last month.

But U.S. military and intelligence officials, while concerned, question whether Russian forces are capable of threatening Europe from the south.

“There’s not necessarily a concrete and cohesive plan,” one U.S. official told VOA, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence.

“They’re not a very effective organization, except for extorting money and resources,” the official added, comparing Russia’s strategy in Africa to “placing a bunch of bets on a roulette table.”

Indirect threat

NATO, in its recently adopted, updated strategic concept, also sees the threat from Russia in Africa as indirect.

“NATO’s southern neighborhood, particularly the Middle East, North Africa and Sahel regions, faces interconnected security, demographic, economic and political challenges,” the alliance document said, adding it “enables destabilizing and coercive interference by strategic competitors.”

Some experts warn it would a mistake, however, to view Russia’s actions as incoherent.

“Russia is pursuing several strategic objectives on the continent,” Joseph Siegle, director of research at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told U.S. lawmakers Thursday.

While much of Moscow’s effort is designed to “displace and discredit Western influence,” Siegle said that is just the start.

“Russia is trying to gain control over strategic territory in North Africa, most vividly seen in Libya. This would provide Moscow with an enduring security presence on NATO’s southern border,” he said.

“Combined with port access that Moscow’s trying to gain on the Red Sea, this would put Russia in a position where it could disrupt maritime traffic through the chokeholds of the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandab [Strait] through which some 30% of global container traffic passes every year,” he warned.

Source: Voice of America

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Historic Tea Payment Made to South African Tribes

Two tribes in South Africa, the Khoi and the San, have received their first payment for the sale of the indigenous rooibos plant, grown mainly for tea. The Rooibos Tea Council, representing businesses, paid the tribes more than $700,000 as part of a benefit-sharing agreement.

The director of the San Council, Leana Snyders, said it took nine years of negotiations before the Rooibos Traditional Knowledge Benefit-Sharing Agreement was signed in November 2019.

She said the Indigenous tribes still use rooibos when babies have teething problems. It is also used for skin conditions like eczema and to alleviate stomach cramps.

Snyders said paying for traditional knowledge should be applied globally.

“If, for instance, I am a company based on the people that lived in the area’s knowledge, then I made a product or I used the plant and I sell it and I make a profit as a company, so I would definitely recommend this type of collaborations with industry,” she said.

She also said Indigenous people must be taught about the legal process.

“You must stand up for your rights because, in our case, if we did not stand up nine years ago, going to the government and saying, ‘But we want our knowledge to be recognized,’ if we did not make the first step as the San people, we would not be here, where we are today,” Snyders said.

This first annual payment of $700,000 comes from a 1.5% levy on the sale of all rooibos that has been cut and dried. The money has been paid into two trust accounts for the San and the Khoi.

Snyders said the money will be reinvested in the people.

“We going to make sure that it is for upliftment of the San people. And upliftment comes through livelihood upliftment, and the main thing is education. For us it is education, education, education,” she said.

A director of the South African Rooibos Council, Dawie de Villiers, said he can’t give an accurate estimate of how much the industry is worth. However, he said, the caffeine-free product is exported to over 50 countries, and that number grows every year.

“In fact, it has some good medical studies that identify it as being a good product to use in stress alleviation, and we’re seeing it more and more being used in a wide range of applications,” de Villiers said. “Not only in herbal teas but also in nutritional supplement formulations, so it is certainly a product for today’s times.”

Officials say this period is being regarded as the pilot phase of the agreement, and further negotiations will take place to develop a nonmonetary benefit-sharing model.

Source: Voice of America

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Africa sees 63% rise in diseases spread from animals to humans in decade: WHO

BRAZZAVILLE— Africa faces a growing threat from zoonotic diseases such as monkeypox, the WHO said, with the continent recording a 63-percent rise in such outbreaks over the past decade.

A World Health Organization (WHO) analysis found 1,843 “public health events”, such as disease outbreaks, in Africa between 2001 and 2022.

Thirty percent of those events were outbreaks of diseases spread to humans by animals, which are known as zoonotic diseases.

Ebola is included among these diseases, for example, as well as dengue fever, anthrax, plague and monkeypox.

Africa has seen a 63-percent rise in zoonotic disease outbreaks over the past decade in comparison to the 2001-2011 period, the WHO said in a statement.

WHO’s Africa director Matshidiso Moeti was quoted in the statement as saying that poor transport infrastructure had once limited mass zoonotic infections on the continent.

But Africa could become a “hotspot for emerging infectious diseases,” she warned, as improved transport links raise the threat of zoonotic pathogens travelling to cities.

Moeti urged researchers with different specialities to collaborate closely to stem zoonotic diseases. “Only when we break down the walls between disciplines can we tackle all aspects of the response,” she said.

Scientists have frequently sounded the alarm about the risk from animal-born diseases, especially as growing human populations come into closer contact with wild species through hunting or habitat loss.

The period covered by the analysis included the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus emerged in China from a suspected animal source before becoming classified as a human disease as it spread.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

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Optimism of a More Open Ethiopia Fades, Expelled Journalist Says

Drawn by its natural beauty and cultural heritage, British journalist Tom Gardner covered Ethiopia for more than five and half years.

When he first arrived, Gardner said, there was “the feeling that it was on the brink of peaceful, epochal transformation.”

“There were obviously huge tensions [and protests], but in 2015/2016 it still seemed as though Ethiopia was progressing, and was the vanguard of east Asian-style industrialization in Africa,” he told VOA via email, before adding, “I’m much less optimistic now.”

Gardner covered infrastructure, housing projects and politics for British paper The Economist. And when violence erupted in the northern Tigray region in 2020, Gardner covered that too. In doing so, he said, he became an enemy in the eyes of the state.

The journalist was the subject of a campaign of online harassment denouncing his reporting. Then came a letter from the Ethiopia’s Media Authority on May 13, 2022, revoking his press accreditation and giving him just 48 hours to leave.

Gardner is not alone. Hostility toward media seen as biased or overly sympathetic to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, the group the government is fighting, has increased since November 2020.

Foreign journalists like Gardner are subjected to online harassment and receive warnings over their reporting from the media regulator. In some cases, they are expelled. Gardner’s expulsion comes a year after Simon Marks, a freelance journalist who reported for The New York Times and Voice of America, was ordered to leave.

Foreign and local journalists reported on atrocities later corroborated by the United Nations, human rights groups and other international bodies, who concluded that war crimes and atrocities were carried out by all warring parties.

But Ethiopia’s federal government and its supporters have pushed back against criticism, denouncing it as false news.

Neither Ethiopia’s prime minister’s office nor the state media authority responded to VOA’s requests for comment.

In a speech to parliament in June, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said lines between activists, journalists and politicians are blurred, adding, “Let’s not designate individuals engaged in destroying national institutions as ‘activists’ and ‘journalists.’”

Protesters in support of the government have gathered in Washington and elsewhere in the world, carrying banners that read “fake news” along with names of news organizations to condemn what they perceive as interference in the country’s internal affairs or disregard for their sovereignty.

Media chill

The war marked a turning point for how journalists are viewed in Ethiopia.

“Certainly after the war began, it became far, far more difficult than it had been before. I was stopped from going to Tigray last year,” Gardner said. “There was always problems with police, local security forces.”

While on assignment in the Amhara region in July 2021, police stopped Gardner and his colleague, an Ethiopian journalist working as a translator. For security reasons, VOA has withheld the colleague’s name.

Officers forced the journalists into the back of their open top vehicle and drove them to a police station. On the way, Gardner said, police hit him with a rifle butt, but his Ethiopian colleague had it worse.

In an account written shortly after the attack, Gardner recalled seeing his friend’s mouth fill with blood from the beating while bystanders jeered.

Separately, Gardner was subjected to online harassment and attempts to discredit his reporting. He also received warnings from the media authority over coverage.

Finally, on May 13, Gardner received a letter from the media authority, revoking his license. He believes the social media campaign against him may have played a part.

“The government was incredibly vague in the letter they gave me revoking my license,” Gardner said. “They referred to sort of unspecified unprofessional behavior, a breach of ethics, mistaken approach to reporting.”

The media regulator letter said that The Economist was “welcome to assign an unbiased and independent journalist in [Gardner’s] place.”

In response, The Economist released a statement dismissing Ethiopia’s assessment of its correspondent, calling Gardner “an outstanding reporter.”

“His reporting from Ethiopia, including on the conflict in the northern region of Tigray, has been professional, unbiased and often courageous,” the statement read.

Foreign correspondents like Gardner, and Marks, who was expelled under similar circumstances in 2021, say the war changed how the journalists are viewed.

They and international media rights organizations say that local journalists are under greater pressure.

Marks said that Ethiopian journalists called him after he was expelled, telling him they fear for their safety if they continue reporting.

“The spillover effects from something like this, which are going to hurt in the end: the public’s right to know and [the ability to] hold their leaders accountable,” he told VOA shortly after he left.

Advocacy groups agree that such actions spread fear.

When Marks was expelled, Muthoki Mumo, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ sub-Saharan Africa representative, said such actions against established media not only restricts the flow of information, but put journalists on alert.

“What does that mean for the journalists operating already in Ethiopia, whether they be local or international? They must ask themselves the question if this can happen to him, what could potentially happen to me?” she said.

Marks believes the pressure and the climate of fear impacts local reporters.

“I think reporters, whether Tigray reporters or not, really fear the eye of the government on them,” he said. Ethiopia’s state media authority and its current leadership “haven’t hesitated to give warnings, [to] call reporters and tell them not to report on certain issues,” Marks told VOA.

For Ethiopian journalists, the risk of detention is high. The state-funded human rights organization put the number of media workers imprisoned or detained at 54 between July 2021 and May 2022.

Source: Voice of America

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WHO to reconvene monkeypox emergency panel on July 21

GENEVA— The World Health Organization said it would reconvene its expert monkeypox committee on July 21 to decide whether the outbreak constitutes a global health emergency.

A second meeting of the WHO’s emergency committee on monkeypox will be held, with the UN health agency now aware of 9,200 cases in 63 countries at the last update issued Tuesday.

A surge in monkeypox infections has been reported since early May outside the West and Central African countries where the disease has long been endemic.

On June 23, the WHO convened an emergency committee of experts to decide if monkeypox constitutes a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) — the highest alarm that the WHO can sound.

But a majority advised the WHO’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that the situation, at that point, had not met that threshold.

Now a second meeting will be held, with case numbers rising.

“The emergency committee will provide its views to the WHO director general on whether the event constitutes a PHEIC,” the UN health agency said in a statement.

“If so, it will propose temporary recommendations on how to better prevent and reduce the spread of the disease and manage the global public health response.”

A statement will be issued in the days following the meeting.

The committee will look at trends, how effective the counter-measures are and make recommendations for what countries and communities should do to tackle the outbreak, Tedros told a press conference on Tuesday.

He said the WHO was working closely with civil society and the LGBTQ community, “especially to tackle the stigma around the virus” and spread information to help people stay safe.

“WHO continues to work with countries and vaccine manufacturers to coordinate the sharing of vaccines, which are currently scarce,” he added.

The Geneva-based organisation is also working with countries and experts to drive forward research and development.

“We must work to stop onward transmission and advise governments to implement contact tracing to help track and stem the virus as well as to assist people in isolation,” Tedros said.

A week ago, the WHO issued its first situation report on the spread of monkeypox, detailing the typical profile of those affected by the outbreak so far.

According to available statistics, almost all patients affected thus far are male, with a median age of 37, with three-fifths identifying as men who have sex with men, the WHO said.

The normal initial symptoms of monkeypox include a high fever, swollen lymph nodes and a blistery chickenpox-like rash.

But the report said that in this outbreak, many cases were not presenting with the classically-described clinical picture.

Among the cases who reported at least one symptom, 81 percent presented with a widespread rash on the body, 50 percent presented with fever and 41 percent presented with genital rash.

The WHO’s 16-member emergency committee on monkeypox is chaired by Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is a former director of the WHO’s Vaccines and Immunisation Department.

There have been six PHEIC declarations since 2009, the last being for Covid-19 in 2020 — though the sluggish global response to the alarm bell still rankles at the WHO’s headquarters.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK