Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

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Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – African countries will suffer significant economic loss after 2050 if global warming is not limited to below 2°C, a new study by the Center for Global Development has found.

Environment and energy economist Philip Kofi Adom is the author of the report. He synchronised many years of research by climate change scientists and researchers and found that west and east Africa will fare worst. We asked him about his findings.

You found climate change will reduce Africa’s crop earnings by 30%. How will this affect people?

If climate change continues on its current trend, crop production in Africa will decline by 2.9% in 2030 and by 18% by 2050. About 200 million people risk suffering from extreme hunger by 2050. The crop revenue loss of approximately 30% will cause a rise in poverty of between 20% and 30% compared to a no-climate-change scenario.

How this will happen is that climate change will drive agricultural production down, so crop sales will suffer although scarcity will raise prices.

In Africa, 42.5% of the working class is employed in the agricultural sector. The incomes of those, mostly rural, workers will decline. Already, a higher share of people living in rural areas are poor and most impoverished people in Africa are concentrated in the rural areas. The decline of the agricultural sector is likely to push more people into severe poverty.

We will also face food security issues and those who work in the agricultural sector will face the risk of losing jobs. Rural farmers who rely only on rain and have no irrigation systems to grow their crops will suffer the most.

You project a long term Africa-wide gross domestic product (GDP) decline of 7.12%. What impact will this have?

When we speak of the long term, we are looking at 2050 and beyond. GDP tells us the wealth status of economies at any point in time. Through wealth creation, businesses emerge and jobs are created. Taxes collected pay for infrastructural investment, investment in social services and provision of social support like health insurance and unemployment insurance. With a 7.12% decline in GDP, these wealth creating potentials in the economy are going to be severely affected should climate change continue at the current pace.

“In East Africa climate change and increased food prices lead to extreme hunger” | Oxfam GB Video

Country-level projections have suggested much greater economic losses in GDP, ranging from 11.2% to 26.6% in the long term, in the most affected regions of Africa. When economies shrink in size, businesses could close down, certain jobs will be destroyed and new jobs will not be created.

For the people of Africa, this is very significant because it is predicted that in the coming years, the continent’s population will reach over 2 billion. The African population is the world’s most youthful. So if African economies shrink, where would those young people find their source of livelihood? That is a great concern.

50 million Africans are likely to be pushed into into water distress. What does this mean?

It means severe water shortages in homes and industries. For example, if you used to have access to water all day, you are going to have a much lower supply – a quantity so low that it does not meet your needs. This is a demand and supply issue. There will be higher demand for water resources but because of the short supply, water prices will shoot up. Going into the future, if nothing is done, water across Africa will be very expensive.

Can adaptation and mitigation help us avoid this disaster?

When we talk about climate change it is community or collective action. Obviously, governments are the big players. The government has to foster the change efforts that are required by supporting private initiatives in climate adaptation and mitigation – either directly or through incentive designs.

No attempts at adaptation and mitigation are too small. If these small efforts are coordinated, we can expect to see results. Individual households and individual businesses can do a lot. For example, people can cut down on the amount of meat and dairy eaten or change how transport is used – resorting to cycling, walking or public transport when possible. At home, energy saving practices can be adopted. And green spaces must be respected and protected.

People who use banks should ensure they conduct responsible investment. It is always important to know what kind of investment the bank is using money for. If it is not something that is climate friendly, customers and clients can speak about that.

Whatever the side effects will be, everyone will be at the receiving end. Everyone has a voice and it is important to use it on climate related issues.

What should African leaders be doing?

Climate change is an ongoing and impending environmental crisis. Luckily there is the chance to do something about it before the unthinkable happens. I urge African leaders to be very proactive in their climate change and mitigation efforts. The agricultural sector is the economic mainstay for most economies in Africa and climate change poses a grave danger to it. Climate change may create a state of perpetual economic distress if we fail to act now.

Philip Kofi Adom, Associate Professor, School of Economics and Finance, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Human Rights Watch ) – (New York, March 15, 2024) – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to alert the Security Council in the coming days that Sudan has entered a downward spiral of extreme conflict-induced hunger, Human Rights Watch said today. The council should immediately take action, including by adopting targeted sanctions against individuals responsible for obstructing aid access in Darfur.

“The Security Council will be formally put on notice that the conflict in Sudan risks spurring the world’s largest hunger crisis,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The Council just broke months of silence by adopting a resolution on Sudan last week, and should build on that momentum by imposing consequences on those responsible for preventing aid from getting to people who need it.”

The alert will be sent to the Council as a so called “white note,” drafted by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in accordance with its mandate under Security Council resolution 2417 to ring the alarm about “the risk of conflict-induced famine and wide-spread food insecurity.” OCHA’s alert follows warnings by international aid experts, Sudanese civil society leaders, and Sudanese emergency responders that people across Sudan are dying of hunger. It also comes on the heels of Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) brazenly escalating its efforts to restrict the movement of humanitarian aid.

Sudan war may spark world’s largest hunger crisis, says aid organisation | BBC News Video added by IC

In a 2023 presidential statement, the Security Council reiterated its “strong intention to give its full attention” to information provided by the secretary-general when it is alerted to situations involving conflict induced food insecurity. The council should honor that commitment and convene an open meeting to discuss OCHA’s findings. That could pave the way for decisive action, including sanctions on individuals responsible for obstructing aid delivery, Human Rights Watch said.

Since conflict broke out between Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, both warring parties have restricted aid delivery, access, and distribution. Ninety percent of people in Sudan facing emergency levels of hunger are in areas that are “largely inaccessible” to the World Food Programme. “Communities (in Sudan) are on the brink of famine because we are prevented from reaching many of the children, women and families in need,” according to UNICEF executive director, Catherine Russell.

In February, Sudan’s military leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said the authorities would no longer allow aid to reach areas under RSF control. Aid organizations have repeatedly said that the SAF is obstructing their delivery of aid to RSF-controlled areas. Aid groups face a maze of bureaucratic impediments, including delays, arbitrary restrictions on movement, harassment, and outright bans on some supplies.

On March 4, Sudan’s foreign affairs minister added to the restrictions, announcing that the government opposed cross-border aid delivery from Chad to areas under RSF control. On March 6, Sudanese authorities informed the UN that they would allow limited cross-border movement exclusively through specific crossings under the control of forces allied to the military. Sudanese authorities have also blocked cross-line aid movement to RSF-controlled territory, which has put Khartoum under a de facto aid blockade since November 2023 at least, aid groups told Human Rights Watch.

The UN welcomed the Sudanese authorities’ announcement identifying aid crossings. The medical charity, Doctors Without Borders, however, raised concerns that this would leave “vast areas in Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum and Jazeera states still inaccessible.”  

Aid operations have also been choked by limited funding. As of the end of February, the UN’s appeal was 5 percent funded. That gap is exacerbated by widespread looting of warehouses, including a December 2023 incident in which Rapid Support Forces fighters looted stocks in a World Food Programme warehouse in Wad Madani that would have been used to feed 1.5 million hungry people and attacked an MSF compound, forcing the organization to evacuate its team. There have been widespread attacks on aid workers, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, including killings, injuries and detentions.

The Security Council’s latest resolution 2724 on Sudan calls “on all parties to ensure the removal of any obstructions to the delivery of aid and to enable full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access, including cross-border and cross-line, and to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that “the apparently deliberate denial of safe and unimpeded access for humanitarian agencies within Sudan itself constitutes a serious violation of international law, and may amount to a war crime.”

The Security Council’s Sudan Sanctions Committee met in February, announcing that it “wishes to remind the parties that those who commit violations of international humanitarian law and other atrocities may be subject to targeted sanctions measures in accordance with paragraph 3 (c) of resolution 1591 (2005).”

The World Food Programme and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization found in a recent report that food security in Sudan had significantly deteriorated even faster than anticipated, and that there is a risk of “catastrophic conditions” hitting the states of West and Central Darfur “during the lean season in early 2024,” roughly from April to July.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a US government-funded group that monitors food insecurity, said in February that the “worst-affected populations … in Omdurman (in Khartoum state) and El Geneina (in West Darfur state)” were expected to soon see “Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5) outcomes.” Under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, a globally recognized scale used to classify food insecurity and malnutrition, catastrophic conditions are the fifth and worst phase. The program determines that famine is occurring when over 20 percent of an area’s population are facing extreme food gaps, and children’s acute malnutrition and mortality exceed emergency rates.

According to new figures released by the Nutrition Cluster in Sudan, nearly 230,000 children, pregnant women, and new mothers could die in the coming months due to hunger.

In Darfur, civil society and local leaders have repeatedly sounded the alarm about hunger among displaced people living in camps in areas under RSF control. Leaders shared that their communities have resorted to eating ants, tree bark, and animal feed. People currently in West Darfur include survivors of waves of attacks by the RSF and their allied militias, which Human Rights Watch has described as “having all the hallmarks of an organized campaign of atrocities against Massalit civilians.” A local government official reported in early March that 22 children had died of hunger in Murnei, a town in West Darfur that was the site of horrific RSF attacks in June 2023.

In January, Doctors Without Borders raised the alarm on malnutrition in Zamzam camp in North Darfur, warning that “an estimated one child is dying every two hours.” A camp leader from Kalma camp in Nyala (South Darfur) told Human Rights Watch that 500 to 600 children and at least 80 older people have died in the camp since the start of the conflict because of what he believed was the result of lack of food and medical supplies. “People [are] dying every day,” he said. He said that the RSF has also been limiting the amount of food supplies entering the camp since it took control of the city in October.

In Khartoum, a communications blackout has forced hundreds of communal kitchens run by Sudanese emergency response rooms, a grassroots mutual aid network, to pause operations, leaving many people without food, and reports of people dying alone in their homes of hunger. “The shutdown has a significant impact on food access and distribution,” a member of one of the emergency response rooms in Khartoum told Human Rights Watch in mid-February, “it is happening while we are facing growing food insecurity and risk of famine in the capital.”

This is the first time Sudan has been spotlighted in this kind of an alert from the secretary-general to the Security Council. Guyana, Switzerland, the US, and other Security Council members have pledged to make combating food insecurity a priority for the UN’s most powerful body. 

“Council members should show leadership by holding open discussions to develop a plan that averts the risk of mass starvation in Sudan and imposing targeted sanctions on the individuals responsible for obstructing aid,” Kumar said. “The people of Sudan need more than words. They need food.”

Via Human Rights Watch

She said at a pro-Palestinian gathering in Pretoria attended by a number of officials from the ruling African National Congress, “I have already issued a statement alerting those who are South African and are fighting alongside or in the Israeli Defense Forces: We are ready. When you come home, we are going to arrest you.”

Minister Pandor also called on people to create posters saying “Stop Genocide” and to demonstrate in front of the embassies of the “five primary supporters” of the Israeli campaign against Gaza. She did not name them but they certainly include the US and Britain.

There are about 70,000 Jews in South Africa, a country of about 60 million. It wasn’t reported how many of them are dual nationals or are serving in the Israeli army.

The South African government took Israel to the International Court of Justice with a charge that Tel Aviv is committing genocide in Gaza. On January 26, the ICJ issued the equivalent of a preliminary injunction against Israel on this charge, admitting its plausibility.

Hindustan Times Video: “South Africa Vows To ‘Punish’ Own Citizens Serving As Soldiers In Israel Army; ‘Will Strip Your…'”

Minister Pandor maintains that she has been the victim of an intimidation campaign, receiving online hate mail with threats of violence against her and her family that required here to request security from the government. She blames, in part, Israeli intelligence for this campaign.

Her ministry, charmingly called “International Relations and Cooperation,” just last week made a further appeal to the International Court of Justice to intervene to halt the starvation of the people of Gaza. It requested the Court to issue instructions to the effect that:

“All Parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide must, forthwith, refrain from any action, and in particular any armed action or support thereof, which might prejudice the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts, or any other rights in respect of whatever judgment the Court may render in the case, or which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve.

The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, by:

(a) immediately suspending its military operations in Gaza

(b) lifting its blockade of Gaza

(c) rescinding all other existing measures and practices that directly or indirectly have the effect of obstructing the access of Palestinians in Gaza to humanitarian assistance and basic services; and

(d) ensuring the provision of adequate and sufficient food, water, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, alongside medical assistance, including medical supplies and support.

The United Nations has warned that a fourth of the people in Gaza are at imminent risk of starvation.

South Africa’s attempt to rally the signatories of the Convention against Genocide of 1948 against Israeli actions, and its raising of the possibility of jail time for soldiers fighting the total war against Gaza, distinguishes it from most other international actors, who have done no more than express regret the for the over 31,000 Palestinian deaths in the war so far, if they have done that much.

Pandor’s comments raise the question of whether dual nationals serving in the Israeli army could be found guilty of being complicit in genocide if they return to their home countries from Israel after the war. While this outcome is difficult to imagine in the case of US returnees, the question remains open in Europe, which has strong human rights laws and European courts bound by international humanitarian law.

The IOL says that President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed Tuesday that South Africa has inquired with the ICJ whether it needs to issue another preliminary judgment to stop Israel’s planned offensive against Rafah. The Court is permitted to issue provisional orders at any time without having to convene to decide the case finally.

Lizeka Tandwa at the Mail & Guardian reports that the further submission to the court pointed out that “Rafah is the last refuge for the surviving people in Gaza.”

Vincent Magwenya, the spokesman for South African’s president, posted this statement to the presidency web site:

The South African Government has made an urgent request to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to consider whether the decision announced by Israel to extend its military operations in Rafah, which is the last refuge for surviving people in Gaza, requires that the court uses its power to prevent further imminent breach of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza.

Under Article 75(1) of the Rules of Court, “The Court may at any time decide to examine proprio motu whether the circumstances of the case require the indication of provisional measures which ought to be taken or complied with by any or all of the parties.”

In a request submitted to the court yesterday (12 February 2024), the South African government said it was gravely concerned that the unprecedented military offensive against Rafah, as announced by the State of Israel, has already led to and will result in further large scale killing, harm and destruction. This would be in serious and irreparable breach both of the Genocide Convention and of the Court’s Order of 26 January 2024.

South Africa trusts this matter will receive the necessary urgency in light of the daily death toll in Gaza.

IOL reports that Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, said that South Africa would not remain silent as Israel carried out atrocities in Gaza.

Zane Dangor, Director-General of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, said that Israel is already in violation of of the measures ordered by the Court on January 26, according to TimesLive.

Al Jazeera English: “South Africa makes urgent request to ICJ on Israel’s Rafah offensive”

On January 26, the International Court of Justice instructed Israel to cease actions in Gaza that meet the definition of genocide in international law:

The Court considers that, with regard to the situation described above, Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

The Court recalls that these acts fall within the scope of Article II of the Convention when they are committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group as such . . . The Court further considers that Israel must ensure with immediate effect that its military forces do not commit any of the above-described acts.

Not only has the Israeli government thumbed its nose at the court’s preliminary injunction, continuing to kill dozens of non-combatants daily and continuing to bomb dense population centers, including refugee camps, but now is planning an operation that human rights organizations are warning would be catastrophic.

The International Court of Justice was established to settle disputes among United Nations member states. The court has found that South Africa has standing to bring this action, which complains that Israel is violating the 1948 Genocide Convention to which both it and South Africa are signatories. Although it may take a long time for the court to rule on whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, the court has already issued the equivalent of a preliminary injunction, recognizing the plausibility of the South African allegations.

This imbalance in who is visible on television, in the press, and even often in academia is one of the things that makes the South African genocide case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice so riveting.

Narratives of European history are consumed by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet menace, and are remarkably inward-looking. From Europe Israel appears as the nation that can do no wrong because it was formed and populated by Holocaust survivors, and it would be churlish for countries like Germany, which committed the Holocaust, and France, Italy and Poland, which were implicated in it, to criticize the state into which they chased those of Europe’s Jews whom they did not simply murder.

Germany thus ranged itself against South Africa, declaring a position in support of Israel and denying that Tel Aviv is committing genocide, despite the daily video available to anyone who wants to see it of the mind-boggling daily Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Germany might seem distant from South Africa, but in fact it was once a neighbor, as I will explain. And its lack of sympathy with the mass murder of non-Europeans is embarrassing it because of its brutal colonial past.

The small southwest African country of Namibia (population 2.3 million) responded sharply to this German claim. You see, the Germans had genocided Namibians, so they are sore about this issue, and seeing Berlin whitewashing the killing of tens of thousands of brown people a little over a century later.

Windhoek’s Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in German last week,

“The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, was extremely angry at the weekend about Germany, which had sided with Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa’s complaint aimed at stopping Israel’s ongoing warfare in the Gaza Strip and also at broaching the question of whether President Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership should be held responsible for a genocide.

Numerous politicians in Namibia reacted angrily and the otherwise reserved First Lady, Monica Geingos, wrote on X: ‘The build up to the Herero-Nama genocide in Namibia, perpetrated by Germany started on 12 January 1904. The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the “political instrumentalisation of the charge” is not lost on us.’

Geingob had warned in his New Year’s message: ‘No peace-loving person can ignore the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza.’

The Windhoek Observer reported, “Leader of the official opposition party Popular Democratic Movement, McHenry Venaani, echoed the President’s sentiments. Venaani emphasized the inconsistency in Germany’s moral stance, criticising the nation for expressing commitment to the United Nations Genocide Convention while simultaneously supporting what he called the ‘equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.’ . . . ‘We agree with the president’s statement and Germany is misbehaving. They want to turn a blind eye. Israel cannot do a global punishment because they have lost a thousand people, yes we agree and are not disputing that but what they are is against the law. So what Germany is doing is psychological guilt,’ said Venaani.”

Ironically, Belgium, which committed an earlier genocide in the Congo, has taken the side of South Africa in this dispute.

Aljazeera English Video: “Why is Namibia furious at Germany’s ICJ intervention supporting Israel? | Inside Story”

By 1800, Europe had conquered 35% of the world. Despite the fairy tales they told themselves about their benevolence and their spreading of progress, these conquests were brutal. Philip Hoffman has argued that they depended heavily on advancements in gunpowder technology, which tells you everything you need to know about the character of European advances. By 1914 the Europeans ruled 80% of the world. Gunpowder did not become less important, i.e. the pile of dead bodies only got bigger. Of course colonialism was a complicated system that also required getting buy-ins of various sorts from the colonized, but ultimately it involved keeping guns aimed at the locals and being willing to use them.

The Dutch war on Aceh in what is now Indonesia, 1873–1904, involved killing 60,000 locals by military force or exposure and disease. The US in the Philippines killed at least 20,000 directly and some 200,000 – 400,000 died from exposure and disease.

The historians of the colonial powers have written the history, so that the colonial era is often depicted as a civilizational triumph. It is British railways in India or French road building in Senegal that is celebrated. The pile of dead bodies is mentioned in passing, surrounded by embarrassed silence, when it isn’t suppressed entirely. The history of enslavement and forced labor has often been downplayed. In the second half of the twentieth century, sometimes historians of the metropoles have dropped the colonial dimension entirely from the national narrative, obscuring it. François Furet at one point wrote that he would omit mention of Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt since the episode occurred beyond French soil. (I fixed that.) Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism that a lot of Victorian literature is incomprehensible today unless we remember that Britain was an empire at the time and not a small nation-state. Since people in the North Atlantic world don’t much read historians based in the global South, these histories have become invisible.

In 1904, the Herero people rebelled against German colonialism in southwest Africa, and the German government responded in 1904-1908 by committing the twentieth century’s first genocide against them. So writes Hamilton Wende.

Germany was awarded Namibia at the 1884 Berlin conference as part of what historians have characterized as the “scramble for Africa.” Since the Africans were just going about their lives, the “scramble” was by predatory Europeans. Some 5,000 Germans flooded into Namibia and lorded it over a quarter million local Bantus. To this day, whites, including persons of German descent, own 70% of the land there.

After a Herero attack on colonists that killed over 100 in early 1904, the German Schutztruppe or colonial military replied with Maxim machine guns and artillery (Professor Hoffman might note the prominence of gunpowder). Military commander Lothar von Trotha called for the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. As many as 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were mowed down just at the beginning of the punitive German campaign.

Germany grudgingly recognized the genocide in 2021, with the foreign minister saying “If you want to call it a genocide, you can.” Germany’s position is that it took place before the 1948 Genocide Convention, however, and so cannot be the basis for any lawsuit or formal reparations. Berlin did pledge $1.4 billion in aid for Namibia, to be paid over 30 years, but without admitting legal liability. At the same time, German officials have often reprimanded Namibians, saying that they cannot compare their experience to the Holocaust, as though extermination of Europeans is forever more significant than the extermination of Africans, millions of whom were killed by Europeans in the 19th century.

Namibians have complained that the sum offered in aid is not enough to compensate for the damage done or for the ancestral lands lost, which people want restored to them. President Geingob says that Namibia is not done with Berlin, and plans a further lawsuit.

So, for a traumatized Namibian population, to have Germany now engage in genocide denial when it comes to Palestinians just brings back the nightmare all over again.

And at the International Court of Justice, Namibia has a voice, even though it still won’t have access to CNN’s air waves or receive much attention in the North Atlantic newspapers of record.

Biden is hiding inside the White House protected by a fence, military police, and snipers on the roof while the children in besieged Gaza are left unprotected from Israel’s genocidal bombing that kills five children every hour.

That’s around 117 children murdered daily. pic.twitter.com/YLf5T4bQGD

— Melissa Garriga 💕 (@MelissaAGarriga) January 13, 2024

The crowds demanded a ceasefire and insisted that Mr. Biden force Israel into one. They also called for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

Middle East Eye: “Thousands rally in Washington DC demanding Gaza ceasefire and end to US aid to Israel

American Near East Refugee Aid said Saturday, “The death toll in Gaza is immense and difficult to estimate due to telecommunications cuts. UNOCHA reports that, as of January 11, at least 23,469 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 59,604 injured. And some 1.9 million people, nearly 85% of Gaza’s population, are internally displaced.

Among the organizers, the Council on American Islamic Relation (CAIR), said “We thank every person who attended this historic event to call for an end to the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and an end to our government’s support for their atrocities. The Biden administration can no longer ignore the millions of Americans who are saying ‘enough is enough.’ It is time for the administration to listen to the people and demand an immediate ceasefire, end its support for the Israeli apartheid government, and hold Israeli officials to account for their crimes against humanity.”

Before the event began, six Palestinian-Americans from Gaza shared the catastrophes that have befallen their families. CAIR writes that, e.g., “Dr. Alaa Hussein Ali (MI) shares the story of the more than 100 members of his family who were killed in November in Israeli attacks, including the murder of his brother by sniper as he attempted to fetch water, and all of his in-laws after fleeing for safety to the south of Gaza.”

Also speaking were presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein, Rep. Andre Carson, Code Pink Director Medea Benjamin, and prominent Muslim-American leaders, including Ilyasa Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X. Gaza-based Aljazeera journalist Wael Dahdouh, many of whose close family members have been killed by Israel, spoke by video.

President Biden had left the White House for Camp David.

One of the more poignant world-wide rallies was staged at the US Consulate in Johannesburg, South Africa, as the International Court of Justice at the Hague deliberates on the charge of genocide brought against Israel by Pretoria. There was also a big protest in Capetown. The organizers had a statement read out at the latter, according to Matthew Hirsch at Ground Up: “We are here today to be part of the global day of action that will see demonstrations planned in more than 66 cities and at least 36 countries. Today’s rally will be part of a united front of global voices, calling unconditionally for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.”

Imtiaz Sooliman of the aid group “Gift of the Givers,” which has had teams in Gaza and the West Bank, said according to Hirsch, “People like us and people all over the world will make sure that the ceasefire comes. The power of the people is more powerful than any government and any weapon in the world.” Of the case brought by South Africa at the Hague, he said, “I feel great to be South African. When we sent our people to the ICJ we brought back the Mandela magic.”

South African attorneys are saying that if the ICJ issues a ruling in South Africa’s favor they will bring civil suits in the U.S. and U.K. on that basis, because of the collaboration of those two governments in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

SABC News: “Activists gather outside US Consulate”

Hundreds of thousands also demonstrated in London, and similarly large crowds came out in numerous other cities around the world.

Middle East Eye: “Hundreds of thousands gather in London for Palestinian solidarity and Gaza ceasefire”

South Africa says that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and has asked the International Court of Justice to intervene and stop Israeli military action in Gaza.

Israel issued its initial defense to South Africa’s charges on Jan. 12, 2024, at the International Court of Justice – the United Nations’ highest human rights court – based in The Hague, Netherlands. Israel argues that its military is trying to minimize civilian harm and that South Africa is trying to both weaponize the term genocide and interfere with Israel’s right of self-defense against Hamas.

But can the International Court of Justice enforce any decision it makes in the case? “The question of the International Court of Justice’s actual powers of enforcement is a key issue on many people’s minds,” said Victor Peskin, a scholar of international relations and human rights.

We spoke with Peskin to better understand the potential impacts of South Africa’s genocide complaint against Israel and the scope of the court’s power.

What is the significance of South Africa bringing these charges?

South Africa is a former apartheid state that underwent a largely peaceful transition to democracy in the mid-1990s. Symbolically, the fact that South Africa is bringing the case may have particular resonance.

However, South Africa has itself been accused of thwarting the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. This happened after it hosted and failed to arrest Sudan’s then-President Omar al-Bashir in 2015. Al-Bashir was charged by the International Criminal Court with committing war crimes and genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan in the 2000s.

South Africa’s case against Israel is the fourth genocide-related case at the International Court of Justice. The others pertained to the conflicts in Bosnia, Myanmar and Ukraine.

Israel Genocide Case: What Will The ICJ Likely Rule? – w/ Dr. Alonso Gurmendi

What precedent did the Gambia-Myanmar case set for the court?

There is some precedence for countries to bring a case regarding a conflict it is not directly involved in to the International Court of Justice. In 2019, Gambia filed a complaint at the court against Myanmar, regarding its alleged genocide of the Rohingya people, an ethnic minority living in Myanmar.

The Genocide Convention obligates all ratifying states to comply with the treaty. So, countries without a direct connection to an alleged case of genocide can legally bring a genocide complaint forward.

What are provisional measures and why are they important?

The International Court of Justice judges are still reviewing and adjudicating the merits of Gambia’s genocide complaint. There isn’t a final decision on that yet. The court did, within a relatively short period of time after it held a hearing in the case, issue written orders called provisional measures, directing Myanmar to prevent genocide and to preserve evidence related to the case.

If the judges were convinced that the Israeli military’s attacks on Gaza were excessive, they could quickly call for a halt in Israel’s attacks and a cessation of hostilities.

In theory, this could put public pressure on Israel to curtail or halt its military campaign. But even if the International Court of Justice calls for this, it would not necessarily indicate that the court will eventually rule that genocide has occurred.

The International Court of Justice lacks enforcement power. So, is this case more than political theater?

The International Court of Justice does not prosecute individuals, but rather focuses on resolving legal disputes between countries. The Hague-based International Criminal Court, which has the legal authority to investigate and prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, has opened up a separate investigation into Israeli forces’ and Hamas militants’ alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

It’s always an open question – will an International Court of Justice ruling even be enforced and have any tangible effect?

While the International Court of Justice moved at a glacial pace in reaching a final decision in the Bosnia-Serbia case, it has shown that it can move more quickly when addressing mass violence. The judges did issue provisional measures calling for the prevention of violence in the Myanmar and Russia cases.

However, there is little indication that the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures eased Myanmar’s crackdown on the Rohingya. Similarly, the ICJ’s provisional measures calling on Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine has had no apparent effect.

This International Court of Justice could call for the Israeli military to end or curtail its conduct in Gaza, or to ease the flow of much-needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians, for example. This could put considerable international pressure on Israel. It could also push Israel’s strongest allies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, to put more pressure on Israel.

What does the ICJ’s track record on genocide tell us about this current case?

In the first case of this kind, in 1993, Bosnia instituted proceedings against Serbia, which was then part of the former republic of Yugoslavia, for alleged genocide.

The International Court of Justice’s eventual ruling in 2007 in the Serbia case was controversial. The court ruled that genocide was committed in the Bosnian war but that the government of Serbia was not directly responsible for it. Instead, the court ruled that the Serbian government failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica.

Srebenica was the eastern, Muslim enclave in Bosnia that Bosnian-Serb military forces overran in 1995, murdering around 8,000 Muslim boys and men.

The court also found the Serbian government violated the Genocide Convention by failing to arrest former Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, then wanted for genocide by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal in the former Yugoslavia.

That judgment by the International Court of Justice was a big blow and disappointment to many Bosnian Muslims and global human rights activists.

How long could it take the ICJ to determine whether Israel committed genocide?

It could take a number of years. The Bosnia-Serbia case took 14 years. It is unclear if the South Africa-Israel case would have to wait for a final judgment to first be rendered in the Gambia-Myanmar and Ukraine-Russia cases, which have not concluded.

Victor Peskin, Associate professor of politics and global studies, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In fact, if Israel’s extreme far right government can get away with massacring 23,000 people, almost all of them innocent noncombatants and over 8,000 children, then International Humanitarian Law is a dead letter. This development, ironically enough, helps Vladimir Putin in his Ukraine campaign and so undermines the most important foreign policy objective of the Biden administration. Worse, it undermines any objection to war crimes or genocide, anywhere, ever, since it can plausibly be asserted that the US only cares about such matters when it can use these charges against a rival. We are being transported back to 1943, when the Axis could murder millions with impunity, and the Nuremberg trials are being branded a mistake.

Australia’s progressive site, The New Matilda, helpfully provided a written transcript of South Africa’s opening argument on January 11, alleging Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The full proceedings are presented by the SABC network:

SABC News: “South Africa presents its case against Israel at the ICJ”

The opening address was given by Adila Hassim. She is a distinguished attorney with a raft of degrees, who has been practicing since 2003. She co-edited a book on one of her interests, the laws regarding health in South Africa: Health and Democracy: A guide to human rights, health law and policy in post-apartheid South Africa, by Adila Hassim, Mark Heywood and Jonathan Berger (eds)· Siberlnk (2007). She gained renown for her defense of mental health patients who were dumped out of a state facility into conditions of squalor in which some of them died.

Her name shows that she is from South Africa’s Muslim community. South Africa has a population of 59 million, and its Muslims total about 1.5%. Many of them are originally from South India and were converted by Sufi mystics in South Africa. Others have a Malay background. Muslims were denied the vote and discriminated against by whites. Some Muslims played a significant role in the anti-Apartheid movement, which I wrote about here.

Adila Hassim SC, a human rights lawyer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ms. Hassim’s argument is made on the basis of the Genocide Convention of 1948, which came into effect in 1951.

Article II of the Convention says,

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”

Ms. Hassim began by saying,

“Opening Address – South Africa

South Africa contends that Israel has transgressed article 2 of the convention by committing actions that fall within the definition of genocide. The actions show a systematic pattern of conduct from which genocide can be inferred.

Gaza is one of the two constituent territories of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967. It is a narrow strip of approximately 365 sqkm…. Israel continues to exercise control over the space, territorial waters, land crossings, water, electricity, electromagnetic sphere, and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, as well as over key governmental functions….

Entry and exit by air and sea to Gaza is prohibited, with Israel operating the only two crossing points.

Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places in the world, is home to approximately 2.3 million Palestinians, almost half of them children.”

She says all this to underline that Israel is in fact the occupying power in Gaza, as the United Nations insists.

She continues,

“For the past 96 days Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare.

Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry from air, land and sea.

They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease, as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall.

This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.”

These are the sorts of actions prohibited by Article II, obviously. But Hassim isn’t asking for a summary judgment. Her legal strategy is to ask for what we in the US might call a preliminary injunction.

She says,

“At this provisional measures stage… it is not necessary for the court to come to a final view on the question of whether Israel’s conduct constitutes genocide. It is necessary to establish only whether at least some of the acts alleged are capable of falling within the provision of the convention.

On analysing the specific and ongoing genocidal acts complained of, it is clear that at least some if not all of these acts fall within the Convention’s provisions. These acts are documented in detail in South Africa’s application, and confirmed by reliable… UN sources . . .”

I quoted some of the relevant passages of the complaint at Informed Comment. She now says that she will make a brief oral summary, and will show some video to support her points.

She moves to specific charges, the first of which is, in layman’s terms, mass slaughter:

“Israel’s first genocidal act

The first Genocidal act committed by Israel is the mas killing of Palestinians in Gaza, in violation of article 2a of the Genocide Convention.

As the UN Secretary General explained five weeks ago, the level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza. As I stand before you today, 23,210 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces during the sustained attacks over the last three months, at least 70 percent of whom are believed to be women and children. Some 7,000 Palestinians are still missing, presumed dead under the rubble.

Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing where-ever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches, and as they try to find food and water for their families.

They have been killed if they failed to evacuate in the places to which they have fled, and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli-declared safe routes.

The level of killing is so extensive that those bodies found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified.



In the first three weeks alone following 7 October Israel deployed 6,000 bombs per week. At least 200 times, it has deployed 2,000 pound bombs in southern areas of Palestine designated as safe. These bombs have also decimated the north, including refugee camps . . .”

So, certainly a lot of killing, in contravention of II.a.

She concludes,

“The scale of Palestinian child killings in Gaza is such that UN chiefs have described it as a graveyard for children.

The devastation, we submit, is intended to, and has laid waste to, Gaza beyond any acceptable, legal, let alone, humane justification.”

Since the intent to wipe out a people in whole or part is key to the crime of genocide, Ms. Hassim is here attempting to show intent on the part of Israeli officials and generals.

Her second charge is based on Article II.b, “infliction of serious bodily or mental harm”.

“Israel’s second genocidal act

The second genocidal act identified in South Africa’s application is Israel’s infliction of serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza in violation of Article 2b of the Genocide Convention.

Israel’s attacks have left close to 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed. Again, the majority of them, women and children. This in circumstances where the healthcare system has all but collapsed. I‘ll return to this later in my speech.

Large numbers of Palestinians civilians, including children, are arrested, blind-folded, forced to undress, and loaded onto trucks taken to unknown locations. The suffering of the Palestinian people, physical and mental, is undeniable.”

South Africa addresses the International Court of Justice

Israel will reply on Friday for three hours. There will be no rebuttal, just the two presentations. Israel will almost certainly focus on the horrors of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack (and rightly so), and argue that the 23,000 dead are regrettable collateral damage from the necessary campaign to destroy Hamas. This argument, however, fails on the international legal grounds of proportionate response and the responsibility to avoid reckless endangerment of civilian lives. Still, 9 of the 15 justices of the International Criminal Court are from countries aligned with the US, and this case is the most consequential in the court’s history. If the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle.