Tag: Ethiopia

Red Terror and the killing in South Africa

I came across this interesting quote from the Mengistu era in Ethiopia yesterday, whose communist-style party, the Derg, said the following in 1976:

“We are ready to unleash red terror on the EPRP fascists. Their blood shall serve as the water with which we (will) put out the fire of counter revolution.” Asked by Amnesty International, the Voice of Masses radio, a mouthpiece for the Derg regime, responded that “if they [human rights groups] say we don’t have to kill people, aren’t they saying that we can quit the Revolution? The cry to stop the killing is a bourgeois cry.”

Unfortunately, South Africa is also living through some kind of Red Terror with Afrikaner farmers being tortured and hacked to death. Yet, because they have been so vilified by the British media and the generally left-wing, quasi-communist universities in South Africa, no-one is paying any attention.

As they say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Aboobaker Ismail, who masterminded the Church Street bomb that killed 19 and injured more than 200 people on 20 May 1983 is fêted as a hero in South Africa and he received a top job at the South African Reserve Bank. Many of his victims are still alive, blinded and maimed for life and they will never receive compensation from the revolutionary South African state either which prefers to squander public money to uphold the lifestyles of its heroic ex-terrorist “cadres”.

US drones used beyond declared combat zones, target Africa

droneafricaUS military drone surveillance is expanding beyond declared combat zones.

The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods.

Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics.

For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains.

As the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen decrease, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on other targets that worry U.S. officials.

In Africa, the U.S. Air Force began flying unarmed drones over the Sahara five months ago and the Pentagon has also set up drone bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Seychelles. Even so, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa told Congress in February that he needed a 15-fold increase in surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering on the continent. – Washington Post