This new breakaway bloc has deepening ties to Russia, which maintains paramilitary forces in the AES countries under the rubric of the Wagner Group or Africa Corps. These forces are increasingly accused of atrocities, with Malian refugees in Mauritania reporting rapes, beheadings and mutilation of civilians at the hands of Russian mercenaries. The Africa Report online publication recently said it had “infiltrated” the Wagner-linked Telegram channel, finding 322 videos and 647 photographs of atrocities, including severed heads and gouged-out eyes, and posts “laced with racism.” (AfricaNews, BBC News, LAT, The Telegraph)

Alarmingly, these atrocity reports come just as the AES has collectively withdrawn from the International Criminal Court.

Photo: Présidence de la République du Mali

From The New Humanitarian, March 6. Internal links added.

Map of Azawad, the claimed Tuareg homeland, via Twitter

Photo: MINURSO via Yabiladi

Macron called the summit amid a rise of anti-French sentiment in the Sahel. Anger against the former colonial power has been building in recent months as France’s 4,500-strong counter-terrorism operation struggles to contain the rapid expansion of al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked militant groups. French flags have been burned in protests, and wild rumors of French troops delivering motorbikes to terrorists have spread on social media. Going into the summit, Macron had threatened to withdraw French military support to the region, but all seemed forgiven as the five leaders issued a joint statement backing France’s continued military engagement, even urging a greater “international presence” in the region.

From The New Humanitarian, Jan. 17.

Photo: Wikipedia

No group has yet to claim the raids, but Malian authorities have blamed the Burkinabe jihadist group Ansaroul Islam, said to be an offshoot of the Qaeda-linked Group for Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM, or JNIM by its Arabic acronym). (LWJ, UN News, BBC News)

Photo:  UN News

In a 2013 piece for HuffPo on the unseemly contradictions of the UN Human Rights Council (its vice-presidency had just been assumed by slavery-practicing Mauritania), journalist Tom Gross wrote:

It also, last December, appointed Alfred De Zayas as one of its leading advisors, despite the fact that his books on World War II portray Germans as victims and the Allies as perpetrators of “genocide.” De Zayas, while not denying the Holocaust himself, has nonetheless become a hero to many Holocaust deniers, and his sayings are featured on many of their websites. He has called for Israel to be expelled from the UN, while he has defended the ruthless Iranian regime.

De Zayas is also called out as the “Hero of Holocaust Deniers” by the UN Watch website, which provides some context on his appointment as the HRC’s “Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.” This is characterized as “an anti-Western mandate created by Cuba’s Communist regime.” Now, we have no problem with challenging US hegemony, and we may not share the apparently pro-Western politics of UN Watch. But the assembled quotes from de Zayas do point up how an unprincipled anti-Americanism can lead to extremely problematic territory. To wit:

• The Old Testament is characterized by “cruelty” and “profound unreligiousity,” its patriarchs “equipped with divine legitimacy and justification to take our promised Lebensraum by force.” (Original source now deleted by Zayas — see instead Alternative Source.)

• Churchill and Roosevelt connived at “a form of genocide” against the Germans.

• The World War II Allies who fought Nazi Germany should have been prosecuted for “barbarous” and “gruesome” crimes; the Nuremberg Court that judged Nazi war criminals had “hardly any legitimacy.”

• “Nuremberg was an exercise in hypocrisy. A continuation of hate and war… a corruption of legal norms and procedures, a pollution of philosophy, a truly Pharisee tribunal.” Original source now deleted by Zayas Alternative Source

• “Israel emerged out of terrorism against the indigenous population” and its representatives should be denied U.N. accreditation. Source

• America bears “responsibility for the destabilization of… countries in the Middle East.”

• “George W. Bush and Tony Blair too are Pharisees.” Original source now deleted by Zayas Alternative Source

• “Moses had such a rough time bringing the Jewish people across the Red Sea because half of them were busy picking up pretty shells.” Source

OK… whatever valid points there may be about Allied atrocities in World War II, the entire question has been hijacked by neo-Nazis in Germany in recent years, and de Zayas reveals his hand as their fellow traveller first by engaging in implicit Holocaust-relativization with his “genocide against Germans” talk, and (if that didn’t make things clear enough) with his barely coded anti-Semitism (“Pharisees,” seashell-grubbing). This similarly taints whatever points he may have about the origins of Israel (although it is hardly the only state to have “emerged out of terrorism against the indigenous population,” and a double standard on this question is a sure sign of bad faith). One also senses an intentional and odious irony in his use of the Nazi term “Lebensraum” to describe the Old Testament cleansing of the Canaanites.

And indeed, the Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt, an openly historical-revisionist outfit that skirts the edges of outright Holocaust denial so as to remain within the bounds of German law, gave de Zayas an award for his “research” in 2002.

For what it’s worth, UN Watch also calls de Zayas’ 2017 supposed fact-finding mission to Venezuela a “fake investigation” by “the only UN human rights expert to be allowed in by the Maduro regime after 15 years of it rejecting repeated requests by separate monitors on arbitrary detention, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, independence of the judiciary and arbitrary executions.” (The “15 years” presuambly includes the Chávez era.)

All this should cause you to rethink your assumptions about what’s going on in Venezuela. Yeah, the presidential pretender Juan Guaidó is being backed by fascists like Trump and Bolsonaro, while the left throughout the hemisphere is (with rare exceptions) behind Maduro. But is it that simple? Maduro is also being avidly backed by the also fascistic Vladimir Putin. And the “Bolivarian” regime has always been embarassingly cozy with the outright fascist Bashar Assad. Hugo Chávez even hosted the Syrian despot at the presidential palace in Caracas n 2010, and honored him with replica of Simon Bolívar’s sword. This is the same Bashar Assad who is beloved of the neo-fascist right, both in Europe and in America.

So maybe things aren’t that simple, eh? When Chávez died in 2013, we warned that his fondness for dictators ultimately did not bode well for democracy in Venezuela. At the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, he even called the democratic opposition then mounting to Assad a “fascist conspiracy,” oblivious to his own absurd irony. (An example of the alarming phenomenon we have identified as fascist pseudo-anti-fascism.)

Note also that last year, supposedly left-wing political parties across Europe, including Germany’s Die Linke and the Greek Syriza, joined with Alternative für Deutschland and other neo-fascist formations to vote against a Euro-Parliament resolution calling on Russia to free imprisoned Ukrainian and Tatar opponents of the Crimea annexation. And the same Putin who is backing Maduro has been pouring money into the Continent’s anti-European right.

And while we aren’t entirely sure to what degree it is witting, Amy Goodman has certainly been abetting Putin’s global design—especially where Syria is concerned.

Note: The ugly background of Amy Goodman’s latest darling was first brought to light in a tweet by writer Alexander Reid Ross, who has been dogged in exposing the growing popularity of such sinister Red-Brown politics on the contemporary American left.

Image via Democracy Now

Amnesty International issued a protest of the arrests. "These activists are prisoners of conscience who have been falsely accused and are behind bars in order to impede their legitimate work. They have been targeted persistently for their views and must be released immediately and unconditionally," said Kiné Fatim Diop, Amnesty's West Africa campaigner. "The long-time persecution has no legal justification. The authorities must end their rule of fear and repression on anti-slavery activists."

A system of hereditary slavery still exist in Mauritania despite an official ban, with those belonging to "slave castes" forced to work as cattle herders and domestic servants without pay. Those who have escaped the system are often consigned to poverty. (North Africa Post, Aug. 17; Al Jazeera, Aug. 16; AI, Aug. 1)

Aamer's release comes in the midst of government efforts to release its remaining 112 detainees and close the Guantánamo Bay military prison. The DoD earlier this month released Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz from detention and sent him back to his home country of Mauritania. At the beginning of September, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama is considering a "wide array" of options for closing the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. While Earnest said that Congressional consent would be the best means to shut the facility down, he would not rule out executive action as a last resort.

From Jurist, Oct. 30. Used with permission.

Approximately 36 million people in the world live in a form of modern slavery, the Global Slavery Index (GSI) reported in November. For the purposes of the study, GSI defined modern slavery as involving "one person possessing or controlling another person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their [sic] individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal." The report provided an analysis of how governments are working to eliminate acts of modern slavery. GSI found that countries with instability and high levels of prejudice have the highest levels of modern slavery and are the most vulnerable.

From Jurist, Aug. 21. used with permission.