People can't "America bad" their way out of this one
The Central African Republic, Burkina Faso & Mali are essentially now fully Russian colonial states
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
It's open season on the continent my question is what is to be done? What do they do?
It’s done, in large part because, for decades, America and it’s European allies killed or overthrew African leaders that could’ve created an independent, autonomous Africa. Moreover, America and its allies materially support African dictators that leech of off the people and their resources.
Soviet spies in Africa: How the KGB expanded Russian influence during the Cold War
Russian influence in Africa has deep historical roots, from supporting an attempted coup in Ghana to spreading fake political news in Algeria and training African fighters in Crimea. FRANCE 24 looks…
www.france24.com
Soviet spies in Africa: How the KGB expanded Russian influence during the Cold War
20/07/2023 - 16:00
Global history
Russian influence in Africa has deep historical roots, from supporting an attempted coup in Ghana to spreading fake political news in Algeria and training African fighters in Crimea. FRANCE 24 looks back on four little-known Soviet operations aimed at furthering Russian interests in Africa during the Cold War
7 min
Guinean independence campaigner Amilcar Cabral (top left) worked with soviet agents. The KGB were also behind attempts spread fake news about the 1961 French generals' putsch in Algiers (top right) and to stage a countercoup to restore Ghanaian Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, to power in 1966.
Guinean independence campaigner Amilcar Cabral (top left) worked with soviet agents. The KGB were also behind attempts spread fake news about the 1961 French generals' putsch in Algiers (top right) and to stage a countercoup to restore Ghanaian Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, to power in 1966. © Studio Graphie Média Monde and AFP
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reignited an old battle for global influence between Russia and the West that has also put Africa in the spotlight.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has sought influence on the continent through “irregular (and frequently extralegal)” means, according to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, including the use of mercenaries, supporting coups, running disinformation campaigns and interfering in elections or trading arms for resources. But such tactics are far from new.
Russian influence in Africa dates back to the Cold War when the Soviet regime aimed to forge ties with African countries based on shared economic ambitions and mutual distrust of the West. Moscow used the Soviet-era KGB to destabilise governments and spread disinformation in its bid for influence on the continent. Many of these incidents are still not widely known, but they illustrate that Cold War-era Russian spies were already weaponising “fake news”.
Read moreFrom Khrushchev’s KGB to Putin: the deep roots of Russian influence in Africa
Part 2:
Operation Alex: Mission impossible in Ghana
As the first African country to gain independence from British colonial rule in 1957, Ghana held an influential position on the continent as the Cold War raged at the end of the 1960s.
The country’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, had close links to the Soviet regime, and it was a blow to Russian influence when he was ousted from power by a coup in 1966 – especially as his successor was a pro-US general, Joseph Arthur Ankrah.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet spies considered their options for trying to reinstall Nkrumah as head of state. One of these attempts – Operation Alex – illustrated how important Africa was to the secret services of Soviet satellite states and the difficulties its agents faced on the ground.
The operation began with eggs. The head of the Czech secret service in Ghana, Karel Hotarek, went to a farm in 1967 run by Czech nationals not far from the capital, Accra. Hotarek arrived under the pretext of buying fresh eggs but in reality he had a meeting with Kofi Batsa, a writer and political activist with close ties to Nkrumah.
Batsa told Hotarek of a plan for a countercoup that would topple General Ankrah and promised support from around 30 powerful members of the armed forces. All that was missing, he said, was financial support from Prague and Moscow.
Hotarek left the meeting excited by the plan and managed to secure the funding from his superiors. Operation Alex was set to go ahead in October 1968; Nkrumah was informed by contacts close to Russia to prepare himself for a return to power.
But over time, Hotarek and Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency became increasingly suspicious of Batsa, even arresting him in August 1968 – two months before Operation Alex was supposed to begin. Spies from the Eastern Bloc feared they had handed over Soviet arms and money to an untrustworthy loudmouth who was incapable of leading a secret operation.
His arrest did not deter Moscow, which planned to go ahead with Operation Alex in league with other co-conspirators.But months passed, and the countercoup never happened.
There is no official explanation as to why, and even key figures in the project were left wondering what had happened. “Why it has not gone up I can’t understand,” Nkrumah wrote in a letter to historian June Milne in December 1968. “I was made to understand that something was going to happen around this time, and nothing has happened.”
Soviet indoctrination: Military training at Crimea’sCentre 165
The unregistered flights would land late at night in Crimea, carrying groups of young men, from 15 to 30 years old, arriving from African countries friendly to the USSR. On the tarmac, busses with their blinds drawn waited to transport the new “students” to Centre 165 in Perevalnoe, a village in Crimea.
The village had been homesince 1965 to the largest Russian training centre for fighters from African liberation movements, holding 500 students at any one time. Some 15,000 fighters were trained there in the 26 years it was open, including from the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the African National Congress party in South Africa and the Liberation Front of Mozambique.
Training was intense and supervised, in part, by the KGB. Students had to get up at 6am each day and do an hour of gymnastics before breakfast followed by five consecutive hours of military exercises. After lunch, students did paperwork or worked on the grounds until dinnertime, then watched screenings of Soviet films. Military training continued after nightfall, when students learned skills such as how to cross minefields in the dark.
Fighters studied the Russian language, Marxism, Leninism and the history of revolutions around the world. As the centre was around 20 kilometres from the beach town of Alushta, the surroundings also provided an idyllic backdrop for witnessing communist values in real life: Once a month students would visit collective farms, shops and schools.
Although the centre was considered a highly effective method for spreading Soviet values and military know-how, it disappeared after the USSR collapsed in 1991 and seems to have left little trace. Students who were trained there and who “sometimes still occupy management positions in their country's military apparatus, for example in Angola, do not admit to having been trained in the Soviet Union", historian Natalia Krylova wrote in her 2017 study on the Perevalnoe training centre.
Operation Alex: Mission impossible in Ghana
As the first African country to gain independence from British colonial rule in 1957, Ghana held an influential position on the continent as the Cold War raged at the end of the 1960s.
The country’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, had close links to the Soviet regime, and it was a blow to Russian influence when he was ousted from power by a coup in 1966 – especially as his successor was a pro-US general, Joseph Arthur Ankrah.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet spies considered their options for trying to reinstall Nkrumah as head of state. One of these attempts – Operation Alex – illustrated how important Africa was to the secret services of Soviet satellite states and the difficulties its agents faced on the ground.
The operation began with eggs. The head of the Czech secret service in Ghana, Karel Hotarek, went to a farm in 1967 run by Czech nationals not far from the capital, Accra. Hotarek arrived under the pretext of buying fresh eggs but in reality he had a meeting with Kofi Batsa, a writer and political activist with close ties to Nkrumah.
Batsa told Hotarek of a plan for a countercoup that would topple General Ankrah and promised support from around 30 powerful members of the armed forces. All that was missing, he said, was financial support from Prague and Moscow.
Hotarek left the meeting excited by the plan and managed to secure the funding from his superiors. Operation Alex was set to go ahead in October 1968; Nkrumah was informed by contacts close to Russia to prepare himself for a return to power.
But over time, Hotarek and Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency became increasingly suspicious of Batsa, even arresting him in August 1968 – two months before Operation Alex was supposed to begin. Spies from the Eastern Bloc feared they had handed over Soviet arms and money to an untrustworthy loudmouth who was incapable of leading a secret operation.
His arrest did not deter Moscow, which planned to go ahead with Operation Alex in league with other co-conspirators.But months passed, and the countercoup never happened.
There is no official explanation as to why, and even key figures in the project were left wondering what had happened. “Why it has not gone up I can’t understand,” Nkrumah wrote in a letter to historian June Milne in December 1968. “I was made to understand that something was going to happen around this time, and nothing has happened.”
Soviet indoctrination: Military training at Crimea’sCentre 165
The unregistered flights would land late at night in Crimea, carrying groups of young men, from 15 to 30 years old, arriving from African countries friendly to the USSR. On the tarmac, busses with their blinds drawn waited to transport the new “students” to Centre 165 in Perevalnoe, a village in Crimea.
The village had been homesince 1965 to the largest Russian training centre for fighters from African liberation movements, holding 500 students at any one time. Some 15,000 fighters were trained there in the 26 years it was open, including from the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the African National Congress party in South Africa and the Liberation Front of Mozambique.
Training was intense and supervised, in part, by the KGB. Students had to get up at 6am each day and do an hour of gymnastics before breakfast followed by five consecutive hours of military exercises. After lunch, students did paperwork or worked on the grounds until dinnertime, then watched screenings of Soviet films. Military training continued after nightfall, when students learned skills such as how to cross minefields in the dark.
Fighters studied the Russian language, Marxism, Leninism and the history of revolutions around the world. As the centre was around 20 kilometres from the beach town of Alushta, the surroundings also provided an idyllic backdrop for witnessing communist values in real life: Once a month students would visit collective farms, shops and schools.
Although the centre was considered a highly effective method for spreading Soviet values and military know-how, it disappeared after the USSR collapsed in 1991 and seems to have left little trace. Students who were trained there and who “sometimes still occupy management positions in their country's military apparatus, for example in Angola, do not admit to having been trained in the Soviet Union", historian Natalia Krylova wrote in her 2017 study on the Perevalnoe training centre.
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Because modern American news is garbage. All of its is political gossip now instead of world events and... News.
Talks between regional bloc and Niger's junta yield little, an official tells The Associated Press
An official present at talks between Niger’s mutinous soldiers and a delegation from West Africa’s regional bloc tells The Associated Press that talks Saturday yielded little and that the soldiers are under pressure from regional sanctions as they refuse to reinstate the country’s president whom the
apnews.com
ignorethis
RIP Fresh RIP Doe RIP Phat
I was smiling like a proud father when I watched the video of Ibrahim announcing the coup.
Africa might finally have actual revolutionary leadership for the first time in decades.
I hope he inspires more African youth to embrace revolutionary thought and we can see more young revolutionaries rise to power.
At the same time I’m skeptical because you still can’t fully trust any African politician until they show and prove.
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Mister Terrific
It’s in the name
The peoples massacre
