Category: Global Politics

The Sahel is a narrow semi-desert region located south of the Sahara Desert. It stretches from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea. The region comprises parts of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. In broad terms, we can think of the region as consisting of authoritarian states, with great difficulties to assert their authority inside their borders – in some cases, they are simply failed states.

Although all these countries suffer in various degrees from terrorism and related problems, our piece will focus on the key geopolitical security threat faced by the  more western countries. We will also explain how and why the USA and some European countries have been involved there.

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Conditions for violence

The entire  region offers the same suitable conditions to the spread of terror. Being one of the poorest in the world, the countries located there are impoverished and underdeveloped;. Furthermore, it is subject to severe food shortages and the effects of climate change, which deepen the problems.

Although these countries are, theoretically, democracies, mistrust in the political classes is widespread, and rightly so. As it is frequent in many African countries, corruption is common and the institutions are generally frail. Governance is poor, agriculture will continue to have problems and security forces and foreign military are as feared as they are welcomed. The states are ill-prepared to meet the challenges their populations face.

All  governments failed to have a meaningful presence there,  as these zones are far away from their capitals. Islam being the dominant faith, Islamist radicals have no difficulties in spreading their violent message coupled with solutions to some basic problems, such as water supply and food administration. The region’s chronic poverty and poor education system helps it gain new recruits. Terrorists and radical groups exploit every local problem and conflict in order to expand their reach. The same logic applies to the expansion of terrorist groups in other zones, like Somalia or Mozambique.

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Examples of terror

The countries in this part of Sahel have been the stage of various forms of violence in the past decades, described as “a “fireball of conflict” that involves multiple armed groups, military campaigns by national armies and international partners as well as local militias”. Conflicts have been constant, arising for many different reasons. The recent peak in violence has drawn the attention of both al-Qaeda and ISIS, among several local groups who fight between themselves as well as against local governments. There are constant news and reports of military operations and attacks, and 2019 was the deadliest year so far, with over 4000 deaths.

We will focus on the most recent events, starting with the most important Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram. It is the strongest and deadliest, but by no means the sole actor in the conflict.

Boko Haram’s roots can be traced back to the early 2000s, but it started gaining attention in 2009, with a series of attacks in Nigeria. At the same time, the Arab Spring in the northern African countries and the violence that ensued further destabilized the area. Later in 2014, the group pledged allegiance to ISIS and proclaimed a caliphate in the region. This led to the intervention of a regional military coalition in 2015, (Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, backed by the US, UK, and France) which regained the Nigerian territory previously controlled by the terrorists.

Following this, Boko Haram’s new core presence was in the Lake Chad region, one of the poorest regions of Africa and an ungoverned territory in the frontiers of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger, where it still operates and was able to extend its reach in other anarchic frontier regions.

Following Boko Haram’s example, jihadists in northern Mali also proclaimed a caliphate in 2014. A quick military intervention led by France, authorized by the United Nations and supported by several non-African countries, regained the territory they controlled. France is the region’s former colonial power, and even though there is a pervasive anti-French sentiment,, it has been long involved.

In 2013, the French government expected to conduct only a short intervention in Mali. Seven years later, it remains there. The United Nations, the African Union and the European Union have also intervened, engaging many countries, with western military operations expected to increase in number and dimension in the next years. This will likely happen even though the Trump administration, that last month nominated a special envoy to the Lakes Region, seems keen to reduce their presence there, in contrast to its European allies.

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European and American involvement

João Gomes Cravinho, the Portuguese Defense Minister, said last January:

“It is absolutely fundamental to be present in Sahel. We cannot let the deterioration of the situation in Sahel continue because the result will have an impact on Europe […] It would be irresponsible to turn our backs.”

The support is indeed needed because the military of these Western African countries lacks resources, material, training, and education. They could not win the conflict only by themselves,  and stability in the region is the main goal for Europe. Endemic violence and no state control will increase the flow of drugs, arms and human trafficking, illegal migrants and refugees and  terrorist threats against the continent. European countries would pay a high price for not intervening.

The western countries have the resources to militarily destroy much of these groups, but as recent interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan proved, strength is insufficient. A full-out war would in the middle run fail to fill the power vacuum in the Sahel, and other Islamist groups would likely arise. There is a political and diplomatic front as well in this war, and the European Union starts to be aware of that, with commissioner Borrell repeatedly asking for a greater diplomatic and military involvement in  Sahel.

There is a broader political mission to face, which constitutes the hardest challenge. It is about stabilizing communities with a basic step that simply has seldom been undertaken: broad, local dialogues among community groups, police forces and officials can prevent radicalization. Local governments and institutions, the civic groups and the foreign actors should all step in this task. At the same time, poverty has to be mitigated and economic development aided.

However, the prospects are not good. In fact, European presence is vital to defend the European countries from security reasons and can mitigate various threats to the continent. Nevertheless, there are no easy ways to counter the underlying challenges that bolster terrorism and violence in Sahel. As The Economist put it: “unless local governance improves, [the military interventions] will not eliminate the jihadist threat”. Poverty and anarchy seem to be there to stay, and where they are, terrorist groups will too.

Sources: ABC news, Al Jazeera, BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Institute for Security Studies, jornal I, New York Times, Observador, Politico, Reuters, The Economist, The Telegraph, United States Institute of Peace, Vox.

Over 100.000 people killed since 2015

Over 2.2 million children malnourished

Over 19.000 airstrikes

Historical Background

In 1990, the Republic of Yemen was formed through the unification of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South) and the Yemen Arab Republic (North), under the joint governance of Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen and Ali Salim al-Beidh of South Yemen. Since then, there has been persistent political and social unrest, predominantly in the northern provinces.

In 1993, al-Beidh left the new government claiming the latter marginalized and ignored the needs of the southern people, leading, in 1994, to the rise of a Civil War. He tried to cease the unification by reinstating the Democratic Republic of Yemen, an attempt that failed within less than two months and led to his expulsion from Yemen. After the Civil War, national unity was maintained under the presidency of Saleh, until a 2011 Arab Spring’s(1) popular revolution led to his resignation a year later, leaving power to Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, the vice-president.

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The 2015 ongoing Civil War

While peace was expected to be restored, President Hadi faced Al-Qaeda attacks, military loyalty to Saleh, corruption, food insecurity and the South separatist movements. After the 2014/15 coup d’état(2), Hadi became an ally of the separatist movement to fight the Houthis, a broad tribal alliance belonging to the Shia minority, which emerged in the 1980s and later developed into a militia. This militia firmly opposed former President Saleh’s rule up to his resignation in 2012, yet joined forces with him and his troops to depose President Hadi.

The Saudis, who supported the presidency of Hadi, found this transfer of power illegitimate and formed a coalition consisting of nine West Asian and African countries (3).  The main objectives of this coalition were to restore the presidency of Hadi, preventing Yemen from fragmenting under factions, and controlling the growing influence of Iran in the region. The Saudi-led intervention consisted in bombing suspected rebel hideouts. The US and UK have assisted the Saudi led coalition via intelligence briefings, military supplies and some drone attacks. Western involvement has the goal of preventing terrorism. The “War on Terror” has been the US’s main diplomatic goal in the Middle East, with Josh Earnest, Obama’s White House Press Secretary, saying back in 2015:

“… the goal of US policy in Yemen is to make sure that Yemen cannot be a safe haven that extremists can use to attack the west and to attack the United States”

UN reports have verified the death of at least 7500 civilians as of September 2019, most of them caused by coalition air strikes. Some estimates indicate a death toll of civilians of approximately 12,000, while 100,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the war. Houthi rebels have also been accused of using banned antipersonnel landmines, recruiting children, killing and wounding civilians by firing artillery indiscriminately at cities such as Taizz and Aden. These numbers, however, do not reflect people who have died as a result of starvation and illness brought on by the on-going humanitarian crisis.

The UN considers Yemen to be the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with 14 million people at risk of starvation, 2.2 million children being acutely malnourished, as well as 462,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. There have been repeated outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera and all sides in this conflict have blocked and impeded access to humanitarian aid. The Saudi-led coalition has delayed and diverted fuel tankers, closed critical ports and stopped goods from entering Houthi-controlled areas. By doing this, fuel needed to power generators and pump water to homes has not reached its destination, worsening the already dire conditions within Yemen. Houthi forces have also been accused of confiscating food and medical supplies destined for the Yemeni population. Burdensome restrictions on aid workers have also interfered with the delivery of foreign aid.

There are also instances of aid workers being arbitrarily detained, kidnapped and killed while performing humanitarian operations throughout Yemen.

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 Saudi Arabia and Iran’s involvement

Western involvement is not of the same kind as previous military interventions in the Middle East. Therefore, the most important presence in the war comes from the two biggest middle-eastern powers: Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been bitter rivals since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. Although they never entered into direct military confrontations, they engaged in various proxy wars.

What is happening in Yemen is similar to what happened in Iraq during the American invasion of 2003. With the power vacuum, the country became a stage for a proxy war between the two regional powers. Yemen is a neighbor and a former satellite of Saudi Arabia. Iran backed the Houthi coup d’état in 2014-2015 and their militias, whereas the Saudis helped the central government.

Saudi Arabia hopes to keep Iran out of the Arabian Peninsula and to stop the increasing influence Iran seems to be gaining all over the Middle East.

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Consequences of a forgotten war

The chaos in Yemen has resulted in two migrant flows into neighboring countries, that has spilled violence and refugees into the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.  Refugee flows coming from Africa have reversed, which in turn has only fragilized even further these countries that are already extremely impoverished and dealing with their own internal political conflicts.

The possibility of a break-up of the country is very likely, as the Iranian backed separatists have managed to achieve a strong enough position to force the remaining powers to accept it.

The war has also increased the hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia, worsening the stability of the regions’ security, which was already extremely fragile.

For peace to be a realistic goal, there needs to be agreements among national and international players involved in the war. This political settlement, can only be created through extensive dialogue, not continued warfare. To resolve Yemen’s multi-sided civil war, players with polarizing and conflicting interest will have to compromise for the greater good of the Yemeni population, which does not seem very likely in a near future.

While no compromise is made, the ones who suffer are the civilians in Yemen, specially the children who have been witnessing the terrors of war their whole lives, plagued by famine, diseases, poverty and the constant fear of being hit by an air strike or artillery shell. These people have lived in a continuous state of warfare for the last 5 years, with no foreseeable end in sight, and must continue with their daily lives, hoping one day they can return to normality.

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(1) The Arab Spring is the name given to a series of protests and revolts spreading through many North African and Middle Eastern countries, starting in 2011, with the goal of establishing democratic regimes. The revolts lead to several regime changes. However, the outcomes were more instability, war and the persistence of repression in the region.

(2) 2014/15 coup d’état: An alliance between the Houthis and forces loyal to former president Saleh took control of the Yemeni capital Sana’a and deposed the interim president Hadi, who was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.

(3) This coalition, also called Arab coalition, includes forces from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia made their military bases, airspace and territorial waters available for the coalition, while the US and UK have provided intelligence and logistical support.

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Sources: BBC, Yemen Data Project, Anadolu Agency, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Reuters, DW, United Nations, Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch.

Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from Central Asia. Most of them live in the autonomous province of Xinjiang, in China, while smaller communities can be found in neighbouring countries. Recently leaked Chinese government documents shed light on serious human rights violations performed on the province’s Uighur population, and on the high-scale brutal repression of minorities in China, notably regarding its “re-education” internment camps.

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Historic overview

In 1933, Uighurs acquired their own nation, the Islamic Republic of East Turkistan, which would then be later taken over by Chinese forces. The province came under Chinese rule in 1949, following the country’s civil war and instauration of the communist regime. Even though it is officially “autonomous”, there is in fact no self-rule by its inhabitants, firmly controlled by Beijing as any regular province. Many see this as a form of “colonization” of the province and its population. Since its annexation, Xinjiang’s history has been marked by recurrent discrimination against its largest ethnic group, the Uighurs. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” singled out both ethnicity and religion as obstacles to communist society. The regime prioritized Xinjiang’s economic development and incentivized  large-scale immigration of Han Chinese, China’s largest ethnic group, to the province. In 1949, the Han represented only 6% of Xinjiang’s population, whereas now it constitutes no less than 40%, according to Chinese official statistics. During the same period, the percentage of Uighurs in the province decreased from 72% to 46%.

The latter have been protesting since the beginning of Chinese rule, becoming more vocal from the 90s onwards. Economic discrimination favouring the Han Chinese as well as religious discrimination measures against Islam were at the root of the protest movements which escalated into violence. The recent wave of unrest begun in July 2009 with the Urumqi riots, the capital of Xinjiang, after the Shao guan incident, where at least two Uighurs were murdered by Han Chinese after the alleged rape of a Han Chinese woman by a Uighur. The riots resulted in 200 deaths reported by the Chinese, although independent sources claim higher numbers. In 2014, various terrorist attacks were blamed on Uighur separatists by the government, serving as a catalyst for the current phase of persecution.

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Never-ending repression

Through excessive repressive policies, the government stripped the Uighur population of basic freedoms and human rights. Between 2012 and 2017, the security budget doubled in China, while it tripled in Xinjiang. The province became a “police-state”, monitored by one of the most restrictive and intrusive high-tech surveillance systems ever deployed by a state against its own people. The Uighur population lives in fear, constantly tracked through their phones or by facial and voice recognition cameras. More than being controlled, it is seeing its religion being crushed. The attack on Islam materializes itself in the ban of religious associated clothing and grooming, such as  headscarves and long beards,  halal food, and even  giving “Islamic-sounding” names to new-borns. Mosques have been closed or demolished. Religious instruction or speaking any language other than Mandarin at school is strictly prohibited. Uighurs are also victims of tight travel restrictions; their passports were taken away for “safe-keeping”. As their most brutal measure, Chinese government officials resorted to the unthinkable in the 21st century:  reallocating at least one million Uighurs into internment camps.

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Inside the camps

China first denied their existence, but new information has come to light, making the truth irrefutable. Labelled by the Chinese government as “re-education centres” to “eliminate extremist thoughts”, these compounds could easily be prisons. Characterized by high-security features such as watchtowers, barbed wire, and guardrooms, they seem far from being simple schools. Masses of Muslims, including children, disappeared into these facilities which started being set up in 2017.

Why are so many being arrested? Most have been convicted of no crime or faced no trial. In fact, the mildest behaviour can lead to landing in a camp – a woman reported being arrested for as little as having WhatsApp on her phone – and performing any type of religious associated conduct, such as praying, risks getting you interned. Once inside, Muslims are forced to sing songs about the Communist Party, recite laws, and spend long hours studying Mandarin. They are reformatted to lose sight of their cultural identity. Living in precarious conditions, they wear uniforms and up to ten people sleep in the same room, not knowing when they will return home. The length of the “re-education courses” is getting longer and being released becoming rarer. Eye-witness reports from former detainees who managed to flee abroad, detail a non-stop routine of exercise, brainwashing, physical and mental abuse, and even torture.

Facilities also hold thousands of children, separating families. They are forced to speak Mandarin and wear the country’s traditional outfits. Although officials deny it, they are in fact aware of how family separation affects the children’s mental stability, as psychological training is offered in the facilities. Two of the things most central to Uighur culture – faith and family – are being systematically crushed. Accounts of family members disappearing without warning are widespread. Leaked documents reveal how the police should handle questions from students returning home. Policemen are advised to tell them they are in a “training school” from which they cannot leave. Students are also to be told their behaviour could either shorten or extend their relatives’ detention.

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What is China’s goal?

The Chinese Communist Party regards any sign of discontent as a threat to both territorial integrity and the regime, claiming the “schools” are a response to decades of sporadic separatist violence from the Uighur population. Moreover, it claims the camps are a “preventive measure” – government officials claim they can predict who is likely to commit a crime, thus making the camps a tool to return the citizens as “law-abiding people”.

However, China’s strong grip on Xinjiang is also largely economically rooted. Home to most Uighurs, the province is not only rich in energy resources such as coal and natural gas, but it also at the centre of one of China’s most ambitious projects to date, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A trillion-dollar spending plan, the BRI aims to strengthen trade, infrastructure, and investment links between China and an estimated 65 countries. Xinjiang sits on one of the main economic corridors of the BRI, so control of this region is crucial to its success, leading China to turn it into a high-tech police state and paint the Uighurs as a separatist and extremist threat.

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International Response

Denying wrong-doing and urging foreign countries to stop interfering in its internal affairs, China has given limited access and insight to journalists and foreign diplomats as to what is happening in Xinjiang. However, international coverage, such as by the New York Times, or more recently by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), has exposed hundreds of Chinese government documents, increasing public awareness around China’s human rights abuse towards minorities. This resulted in an international outcry from the western world.  This past July, 22 countries including the UK, Germany, France, Japan and Australia, condemned the Chinese government’s actions and urged it to stop the repression against Uighurs and other minorities. In that same month, 37 primarily authoritarian countries wrote a letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressing their support for China’s treatment of Uighurs, even defending Beijing’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”. Amongst these countries were many predominantly Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Jordan. This perhaps surprising behaviour may be linked to fears of being left out of the massive infrastructure investments China has been financing across the world as part of its BRI initiative. Even Kazakhstan, the second-highest Uighur populated country, has supported Beijing, all in dread of economic repercussions from China.

The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a Uighur Human Rights Policy Act bill to counter the minority’s repression in China, calling on President Trump to impose sanctions on China over the human rights violations in Xinjiang. Furthermore, the release of the leaked documents led Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to call on China to “immediately release all those who are arbitrarily detained and to end its draconian policies that have terrorized its own citizens in Xinjiang.“

China’s internment camps remain in many ways a mystery to the rest of the world, as a lot of their activities are still unknown. Uncertainty surrounds the future of the Uighur population, and the country’s large economic and political influence limits the efficiency of international action. Now aware of a cultural genocide happening right before our eyes, the western world stands powerless. For now.

Sources: BBC, The Economist, Vox, CNN, Wikipedia, Washington Institute, France 24, CSIS, The Guardian, The New York Times

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