Day: September 15, 2022

OUAGADOUGOU— The director of a mine in Burkina Faso has been found guilty of manslaughter, following a flooding disaster in April that killed eight miners.

Hein Frey, of Canadian company Trevali, was fined $3,000 (£2,600) and given a suspended 24-month prison sentence.

The incident caused outrage in the country at the time.

The verdict has been met with shock, with some in Burkina Faso seeing the sentence as lenient, given the number of victims.

A second executive, Daryl Christensen, an Australian national working with for Trevali’s contractor Byrnecut, was handed a 12-month suspended sentence and fined $1,500.

The trial began on Aug 24 following a complaint by the families of the miners from Burkina Faso.

The eight miners were working at a depth of more than 500m when they became trapped by torrential rain in April.

In less than an hour, 125mm of rain fell – five times the average monthly amount.

Despite frantic rescue efforts, it took until late May for the first bodies of the miners to be recovered from the Perkoa zinc mine, which lies about 100km (60 miles) west of the capital, Ouagadougou.

In June, the last body was recovered, following some 66 days of searching.

There was controversy at the time of the incident, with rescue operations only getting under way following protests and a sit-in at a government building at a nearby town five days after the floods.

It took rescue teams 31 days to reach the first rescue chamber at the mine in which the missing miners might have sought refuge.

But when the chamber was opened, none of the men – one Tanzanian, one Zambian and six from Burkina Faso – were there.

The zinc mine had two rescue chambers stocked with food, water and oxygen, and loved ones had desperately hoped the miners could have made it to one of those safely.

Millions of litres of water were pumped out and specialised equipment was brought in from Ghana and South Africa to help at the mine, that has a depth of 710m.

Trevali said that during the rescue efforts, a road ramp into the mine was rebuilt and 5,000m of new pipes installed, along with more than 24 electric and diesel pumps.

But after a day-and-night search lasting more than a month, on May 25 rescue teams found the the first four bodies of the miners.

At the time, the boss of the Canadian-owned mine expressed his sadness at the deaths.

“Our deepest condolences are with our colleagues’ families during this difficult time, and all of us at Trevali grieve their loss,” said its head, Ricus Grimbeek.

Following the disaster, Trevali and the government in Burkina Faso launched their own investigations.

Source: Nam News Network (NNN)

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House Friday, with trade, energy, and security all on the agenda. What’s not officially on the program, but will likely be discussed, analysts say, are the two democracies’ differences over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ramaphosa’s first visit to the White House comes as the Biden administration seeks to re-engage with Africa in the wake of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to the continent, during which he launched Washington’s new Africa strategy.

During the trip in August, Blinken stressed that the U.S. sees Africa as an equal partner.

However, at their meeting in Pretoria, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor accused Western nations of “bullying” Africa in trying to get countries to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

Bob Wekesa, director of the African Center for the Study of the United States at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said the differences between the two countries were evident at the two top diplomats’ talks.

“At that meeting it was very clear that South Africa and the U.S. were on different paths and trajectories as regards many issues,” he said.

Wekesa said Ukraine will likely come up again when Biden and Ramaphosa meet Friday and predicted the two leaders will have a “difficult” discussion on the issue.

“The U.S., having taken a very clear position on supporting Ukraine, to kind of eject Russian forces from Ukraine, will be lobbying South Africa quite hard to kind of change [its] tune,” he said.

South Africa abstained from a U.N. vote earlier this year to condemn Russia’s invasion. Afterward, Biden phoned Ramaphosa. A White House statement after the call said Biden had “emphasized the need for a clear, unified international response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Program at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said Ramaphosa and Biden will discuss other issues as well, but added that the Ukraine topic cannot be avoided.

“On the agenda will be trade and investment, issues like climate change and food security, energy, peace and security in Africa, and of course what’s not officially on the agenda but will certainly be talked about is the war in Ukraine and the differing positions of South Africa and the U.S. on that particular conflict,” he said.

Gruzd said he thought the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and is now being considered by the Senate, would also come up in the two leaders’ conversation.

African countries see the act, which would sanction nations that trade with Russia, as an attempt to punish them for not voting with the U.S. on Ukraine.

In December, Biden is set to host the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington.

Source: Voice of America

Despite lingering doubts about the usefulness of so-called decapitation strikes, U.S. operations to kill senior terrorist leaders are paying dividends, according to one of Washington’s top counterterrorism officials.

Both the Islamic State terror group and al-Qaida have been forced to stay in “survival mode” following the deaths of their leaders as a result of U.S. actions this year, National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid said Thursday.

Islamic State, in particular, she said, has been forced to refocus following the death of former emir Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, also known as Hajji Abdallah, following a U.S. special forces raid in northwestern Syria in February.

At the time, senior U.S. military officials described Abu Ibrahim’s death as a “significant blow,” an assessment that has been borne out in the way IS has carried out operations in recent months.

“What’s important about it is it’s not just him,” Abizaid told an intelligence and security conference outside Washington, responding to a question submitted by VOA.

“It’s that he is the last in a long line of leaders who are no longer trying to attack the United States and trying to rout Syria and regain territorial control in a way that, I think, has really reflected a major talent loss in ISIS senior leadership,” Abizaid said, using another acronym for the terror group. “[It] has caused them to focus on kind of branch expansion that has diffused the threat and, again, made the focus on the United States less acute than we had seen in prior years.”

The U.S. airstrike that killed longtime al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at the end of July has, likewise, resulted in a cascading effect on the terror organization.

“I think about now how important it was not just for the threat that he posed, but for the tie that he created across the al-Qaida network,” Abizaid said. “That tie is weaker today because he’s not on the battlefield.

“And the weaker and the more diffuse that al-Qaida network is, I think, the better for U.S. national security,” she added.

Abizaid’s assessment seems to reflect a shift in U.S. thinking, especially when it comes to Islamic State.

For years, even in the aftermath of the collapse of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, U.S. and Western military and counterterrorism officials warned that IS and its key affiliates had structured themselves in such a way that for every key leader who was killed, there was an understudy ready to take his place.

And a recently declassified intelligence assessment written in May 2020 predicted IS was “organizing for a prolonged insurgency while rebuilding many key capabilities that are likely to expand its global reach and the threat it poses to U.S. and Western interests.”

But recent intelligence estimates suggest IS’s hold among its followers in Iraq and Syria may be waning.

While there are still areas that serve as key communication and financial hubs, like the al-Hol displaced persons camp in northeast Syria, the terror group’s fighters have been dispersed across remote areas. And its cadre of fighters, numbering as many as 16,000 last year is now estimated to be fewer than 10,000.

The U.S. and its allies have also pointed to a series of operations following the raid on Abu Ibrahim that have whittled away at IS’s core leadership, including U.S. drone strikes and the arrests of senior IS leaders in Syria and Turkey.

A recent report by the United Nations, based on member state intelligence, went as far as to caution that al-Qaida was poised to surpass IS as the world’s preeminent jihadist terrorist organization, due in part to “a rapid succession of [IS] leadership losses since October 2019, with an as yet unknown impact on its operational health.”

Meanwhile, there are growing questions about the ability of the al-Qaida core to remain relevant and influential with al-Zawahiri gone.

“This is challenging for al-Qaida,” a former Western counterterrorism official told VOA following al-Zawahiri’s death, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss recent intelligence assessments.

Those assessments from the U.S., as well as those from several other countries that were shared with the United Nations, caution there are perhaps only a handful of al-Qaida core officials still in Afghanistan, long the group’s base of operations.

Al-Zawahiri’s likely successor, Saif al-Adel, meanwhile, is believed to be in Iran along with the next most senior al-Qaida official, and there are questions as to whether Tehran will let them leave.

Al-Qaida’s other top leaders are based in Africa, and intelligence officials say they may be more interested in the fortunes of their particular affiliates than in the broader concerns of the terror group.

Source: Voice of America