Imperialism and the Crisis in Niger

The Morning Star editorialises:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warns Niger’s new junta not to trust Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group: “Every single place that this Wagner group has gone, death, destruction and exploitation have followed.”

Maybe so, but the pot is calling the kettle black. As Niger stands at the heart of a tense regional confrontation, the words of Malian government spokesman Abdoulaye Maiga remind us who has brought the most death, destruction, and exploitation to the region in recent years: “Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socio-economic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of Nato’s hazardous adventure in Libya.”

The Niger crisis has multiple aspects. Popular resentment of the country’s economic domination by France is palpable.

Hardly surprising. Niger is resource-rich, but its people do not benefit from that. Its huge uranium resources are mined by an umbrella “partnership” dominated by the French state and French capital.

French economic control goes deeper, as with a range of other countries using the West or Central African franc, currencies that require their users to deposit half of foreign exchange reserves with the French treasury. Pro-coup crowds in the capital Niamey chanting “we’re sick of the French” make sense in their own terms: they do not need “whipping up” by Russia or anyone else.

France also has a strong military footprint in Niger. Western broadsheets explain this as part of its regional mission against Islamist terror groups.

Few point out that the explosion of Islamist terror in west Africa flowed directly from the Nato war — in which France, like Britain, played a leading role — that destroyed Libya and flooded that country and its neighbours with weapons. Libya has not been at peace since.

Suspicions are strong that the real reason for France’s military presence is to secure its economic interests — something true too of the United States, which also has military bases in Niger.

Blinken was in Niger in March, with an analyst telling the Democracy Now site at the time the country was “one of the last strongholds of US security partnerships in the region.”

The State Department has been open about its view that Africa is a geopolitical battleground in which the US is in competition with its global “peer competitor,” China.

This is about alliances, but also resources: the department has also complained that Western corporations were pushed out of the mining sectors in Mali and Burkina Faso after military takeovers, while industry specialists worry about a “wave of resource nationalism” that has seen countries seek to assert strategic control of their own resources.

All this points to the complexities of growing anti-Western sentiment in west Africa, and the inadequacy of dismissing coups as opportunistic military takeovers when they are at the very least mobilising anti-colonial sentiment behind them and challenging Western corporate control of their economies.

If Mali called in the Wagner Group and some Nigerien protesters wave Russian flags, this is probably an attempt to secure a counterweight to the huge US and French military presence in the area rather than evidence of any hidden Russian hand behind developments.

Such alliances of convenience will feature as global South countries assert their independence from a US-led “rules-based international order” that rests on thousands of unequal treaties like those that hold Niger in bondage to France.

Niger should open eyes to the reality of that brutish, unjust and exploitative world order, the defence of which — not any concern about defending “democracy” from authoritarian states — is the real motivation for the new cold war against China.

Our priority must be to oppose any military intervention that could spark a bloody regional war. But we should also recognise the roots of the crisis — and take up, with the crowds in Niamey, the demand that all Western forces be withdrawn and Niger’s right to economic self-determination be respected.