Last year's Africa Endeavor included, in addition to U.S. and other NATO nations' military personnel, participants from Algeria, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Southern Sudan (a year before its independence referendum), Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.
Note the absence of Ivory Coast, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
Only 30 months after becoming an independent command, AFRICOM has consolidated military-to-military relations with 50 African nations, including non-African Union member Morocco and the world's newest state, South Sudan. Changes in government in Ivory Coast and Libya would add two more countries to that column.
And as AFRICOM handed command of the current war against Libya to NATO on March 31, so, if recent comments by African Union Commissioner for Peace and Security Ramtane Lamamra are to be given credence, AFRICOM is preparing to share its 50 new African assets with NATO. [1]
Just as the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference divided the African continent into spheres of influence between the major European powers and the U.S., with Ivory Coast belonging to France and Libya later taken by Italy, so now the U.S. and all the major former European colonial masters, who are now fellow NATO member states - France, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey - are again planning to establish dominance over what has become the world's second most populous continent.
1. Africa: Global NATO Seeks To Recruit 50 New Military Partners
Stop NATO, February 20, 2011
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/africa-global-nato-seeks-to-recruit-50-new-military-partners/
