Opposing the USAFRICOM base of Maangamizi in Ghana: Globalising Pan-Afrikan Resistance for Reparatory Justice is the way to victory!
“if we do not unite and combine our military resources for common defence, our individual [African] States, out of a sense of insecurity, may be drawn into making defence pacts with foreign powers which may endanger the security of us all”.
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, ‘Africa Must Unite’ (1963)
We in the Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament (GAPP), in partnership with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/ Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC), join the progressive forces of Freedom, Justice and Peace, in the once proudly inspiring Black Star nation-state founded by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, in expressing their outrage and vehement opposition to the shocking endorsement by the Government of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his so-called New Patriotic Party (NPP) majority in Parliament, of the completely unjustifiable Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on defence cooperation between the Republic of Ghana and the United States of America on March 8, 2018. It is unimaginable that, 61 years after the declaration of Ghana’s independence, the very Euro-Amerikkkan imperialist superpower of the West, whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) masterminded the violent February 1966 coup d’état which shattered the Pan-Afrikan Liberation dreams and efforts of Ghana’s first visionary head of state, is now supposed to be the country’s key security ally. For the sake of the serious lessons that must be critically learnt by us all, we must not lose sight of the fact that this current Akuffo-Addo-approved MOU is supposed to be the enhancement of two previous agreements that were signed with the USA without public discussion, scrutiny and parliamentary endorsement in Ghana in 1998 and 2015 by the preceding governments of President Jerry John Rawlings and President John Dramani Mahama respectively.
We therefore urge you to keep up your resistance as you did with the 2008 attempts to establish an AFRICOM military base in Ghana until this manifestation of the Maangamizi (Afrikan Hellacaust of chattel colonial and neo-colonial forms of enslavement) is stopped. For, contrary to assertions that the USA Government is not establishing an American military base, the agreement indicates that the USA Armed Forces will have the use of a designated area in Ghana to set up their own camp inaccessible to anyone else, in other words a ‘base’ by another name. The presence of this enduring base will increase the militarisation of the state and society leading to increased hostilities directed against the people of Ghana for being in cohoots with the US Empire in committing crimes against Humanity.
Just like in 1844 when Fante Chiefs were outmanoeuvred into signing an agreement on behalf of the Gold Coast with the British colonisers, similarly today, we have a Government and its majority in parliament surrendering the sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity of the people of Ghana, undermining their national interests and security. However, as in the past the people of Ghana at no time have ceded their sovereignty, which is what makes this agreement so injurious to the interests of Ghanaians; the implications of such will be felt for generations to come. The agreement had been drafted in a manner which does not state a termination point. Article 6 of the MOU states that: “Buildings constructed by United States forces shall ….be used by United States forces until no longer needed by United States forces”. If read literally, this agreement will in actuality bind all successive governments in Ghana.
Furthermore, regarding the settlement of disputes between the parties, article 18 stipulates that: “Any dispute regarding the application, implementation, or interpretation of this Agreement, or its Implementing Arrangements…shall not be referred to any national or international court, tribunal, or similar body, or to any third party for settlement, unless otherwise mutually agreed”. Rather, the agreement reinforces USA military immunity from international law and imposes Euro-Amerikkkan law on the people and Government of Ghana in the settlement of claims arising out of the operations of the base, including death, destruction of property or injury. It is likely that such arrangements will increase covert military and security operations both in Ghana and across Afrika.
We support you, the progressive forces of Ghana, in seeking to ensure that all your combined efforts to stop this manifestation of the Maangamizi succeed in making such affronts to Ghana’s sovereignty and the Pan-Afrikan dignity of Ghanaians to not occur again. Such resistance must keep us firmly on the path of Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice through first and foremost arresting these continued violations of Ghanaian sovereignty and self-determined nationhood. Given the increasing expansion of neo-colonial tentacles of revanchist coloniality by Euro-Amerikkkan imperialism throughout the Continent of domestically and externally re-colonised Afrika, it is vital to recognise the need to accelerate the building of Maatubuntujamaas – Afrikan Heritage Communities for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSDs) in the Diaspora to connect with their equivalent Sankofahomes on the Continent to achieve Maatubuntuman (Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities). Clearly, the Afrika that currently exists is being sold out by one neo-colonial government after another. It follows that organising to actualize Maatubuntuman, a globally superpowerful participatory democratic anti-imperialist polity of Maat which practices Ubuntu in relation to her people and all of humanity and the cosmos rooted in the indigenous nation-building practices of Afrika and her people, is the only force which can make the global apartheid racist agenda and structures of recolonization by White Supremacy ungovernable.
Unlike in the past when Founding father of the Republic of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, called for unified armed forces (an Afrikan High Command), and a common Afrikan foreign policy, we have a situation where the current Defence Minister Dominic Nitiwul is seeking to hoodwink the people of Ghana into accepting overt military domination; arguing that the USA Government has such defence cooperation agreements “in over 50 countries”. However, what Nitiwul and the misruling so-called New Patriotic Party (NPP) of President Akufo-Addo are refusing to admit to the people of Ghana is that these arrangements are part of what Chalmers Johnson in his 2004 book, ‘The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic’, called an “empire of bases” which advance US geopolitical interests, not those of so-called host countries.
In this regard, we echo the sentiments of the Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases, which held its inaugural event January 12-14, 2018 at the University of Baltimore in Maryland, in the USA where it operates; we reiterate to you what they expressed in their Unity Statement: “U.S. foreign military bases are the principal instruments of imperial global domination and environmental damage through wars of aggression and occupation, and that the closure of U.S. foreign military bases is one of the first necessary steps toward a just, peaceful and sustainable World.” It is indeed alarming that the United States maintains the highest number of military bases outside its territory, estimated at almost 1000 (95% of all foreign military bases in the World).
The ‘No Foreign Military Bases’ Coalition further asserts that: “These bases are centres of aggressive military actions, threats of political and economic expansion, sabotage and espionage, and crimes against local populations. In addition, these military bases are the largest users of fossil fuel in the world, heavily contributing to environmental degradation”. We concur with the coalition’s assertion that US foreign military bases represent the interests of the “dominant financial, political, and military interests of the ruling elite” and agree with their conclusion that: “Whether invited in or not by domestic interests that have agreed to be junior partners, no country, no peoples, no government, can claim to be able to make decisions totally in the interest of their people, with foreign troops on their soil representing interests antagonistic to the national purpose”.
This is the time for the Pan-Afrikan essence of our Reparatory Justice struggles all over the world to take concrete shape by working in cooperation with all Freedomfighting peoples around the World in order to galvanise the Internationalist Solidarity of allies of Afrikan people at home and abroad, to reinvigorate the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and to win the hearts, minds and spirits of Peoples of Conscience for a just World of Peace for all. This is one of the surest ways to ensure that Imperialism in all its forms and guises is exposed, effectively counteracted and completely eradicated throughout the World.
Accordingly, we identify with all the modes of legitimate Resistance being adopted in multifarious opposition to this disgraceful deal of treasonable sell-out to the USA not only by various organisations, networks and campaigns in and outside the homeland of founding father Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, but also by the conscientious chiefs and other true leaders of the indigenous communities that make up the authentic Afrikan polity of Ghana and who are upholding her independent Afrikan Personality in all its sovereignty, dignity and integrity. We support the calls from all the progressive forces of Civil Society, admirably including various youth, student, women and labour groupings, that are being echoed by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) minority in the Ghanaian Parliament, and even some voices of sanity in the NPP, demanding an immediate withdrawal of the agreement, pending the holding of broad consultations and a thorough national discussion involving all relevant stakeholders. May we emphasize the salient point that our GAPP and all others involved in the SMWeCGEC and their affinity organisations, networks and campaigns all over the World see such stakeholders as including those Afrikans abroad who lay claim to Global Pan-Afrikan citizenship and who are, in this United Nations International ‘Decade for People of African Descent’ (UN-IDPAD), asserting their ‘Right to Afrika’.
We are in consultations with Ghanaian progressive forces at home and abroad engaged in planning appropriate Global Actions of Internationalist Solidarity with Ghana Against Foreign Military Occupation. In this connection, we urge all those in Ghana to glocally face up, with enlightening global broad-mindedness, to the seriousness of the very dangerous geopolitical intrigue-weaving, malevolence and War-games which this agreement is drawing them into to descend further into the abyss of the World military-industrial-prison complex of the USA. This MOU will only worsen your Maangamizi plight of Neocolonialism by the Global Apartheid way of White Supremacy racist Recolonization by opening you up to suffer more crimes of Genocide and Ecocide. The narrow-mindedness of parochial obscurantism will not do in successfully rallying to defeat the war-mongering reactionary forces of USAFRICOM that very well master anti-people games of divide and misrule. That is why the necessity cannot be overstated now for United Front-building among all progressive forces unflinchingly committed to defending Sovereignty, eschewing sectarianism, ethnocentrism, egocentrism and similar vices, advancing together in Principled Unity to champion human, peoples’ and Mother Earth rights, while firmly upholding uncompromising Anti-Imperialism, Self-Determination, National Liberation, Social Justice, Participatory Democracy and holistic Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice. That is why, now more than ever before, is the time to seize in globalising Pan-Afrikan Resistance for Reparatory Justice forward ever onward to total victory!
GAPP Leadership Facilitation Team in association with the ‘Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide!’ Campaign (SMWeCGEC) Spearhead Team of the SMWeCGEC International Steering Committee (ISC-SMWCGEC)
05/03/18
Endorse this statement
If you are willing to endorse this statement please contact the Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament (GAPP) by emailing your name, organisation and position (if relevant) to globalappuk@gmail.com. You can also private message us on FB https://www.facebook.com/globalappuk/.
GAPP supports the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March and the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign
The Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament would like to echo the Call to Action to join this show of strength and to bring a message to the white power structures who are historically and currently responsible for inflicting the Maangamizi. We ask you to join us in the march to Downing St to charge the British Government with Genocide and Ecocide!
We encourage you to visit the campaign website and find out more about the aims of the Stop the Maangamizi campaign and petition. The march is a vehicle by which this petition is delivered and it has its own aims:
Supporting Reparations
So join us on Monday 1st Mosiah (August) as we continue to mobilise, educate and move towards the call for a Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice as outlined in the Stop the Maangamizi Petition. And remember, Reparations is more than money and more than going back to Afrika. This crime against Humanity CANNOT be ignored. Justice is our right!
This is not a reaction. There are no alternative agendas. This is a Plan!! The march is funded through contributions from the Afrikan Heritage Community. You can help too:
If not us, then who?
GAPP Solidarity Message to Fossil Free Occupation at UCL
Thank you for extending an invitation to us in GAPP to be part of the (COP)-pupation on the theme of climate migrants.
We had hoped to be there in person to deliver this solidarity message but are not able to make the allocated time so thought we would do the next best thing, which is to pen this message.
It is our GAPP perspective that all these resource wars are displacing people and dispossessing us and our communities in Afrika and other parts of the Global South of our resources causing impoverishment which is exacerbating the migration crisis from these lands. We as Afrikans and other indigenous peoples of Global South are affected the worst by these resource wars and conflicts.
We in GAPP, and the constituencies we advocate with, sees this as genocide against us as people/s and ecocide against Mother Earth. We have as one of our main aims
“To connect Afrikan heritage communities to key campaigns that underpin our right to Afrikan self-determination. Reparations is a priority campaign, including a specific ‘We Charge Genocide/Ecocide’ campaign and petition.” https://globalafrikanpeoplesparliament.org/about/
Maangamizi is a Kiswahili term first popularised by Dr Maulana Karenga which he defined as being the Holocaust of Enslavement.
The Stop the Maangamzi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Petition can be found here:https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-maangamizi-we-charge-genocide-ecocide
It then becomes clear that what we have to focus our attention to is stopping the Maangamizi. How? By us, first and foremost, supporting the freedom-fighting of those in resistance in many of the places from which migrants are coming in the first place.
We must also expose the migrant industrial complexes whereby NGO’s and aid agencies and even dubious pro-migrant organisations are refusing to highlight the priority need to stop the roots causes of the migrant problem which is the various crimes of the Maangamizi being committed by European powers of the Global North to destabilise countries and peoples of the Global South; rob them of their resources through resource wars by proxy and impoverish the people, thereby making life unbearable for them in their homelands.
Refusing to tackle these roots causes of the migration crisis and simply pretending to be welcoming more migrants into a Europe of increasing austerity is not a sustainable solution for the long-term. Whilst in the short-term we should address the needs of migrants who are already in Europe, we must not delude them into thinking that without continuing from Europe to participate in the resistance of their communities at home and abroad they will find the Greener pastures of capitalism that many of them are deluded into seeking. Only for some of them to be recruited to serve as neo-colonial agents of Euro-American imperialism to aid and abet and participate in the crimes of the Maangamizi that have driven them to Europe in the first place.
We urge you as students to spread the message that everything particularly in the interests of the peoples of Our Global South, and ultimately of all Humanity and Mother Earth connects into the number one priority task of stopping the Maangamizi and becoming the reparatory justice change. That is why we would like the Afrikan students amongst you to actively participate in or GAPP RJ work of Stopping the Maangamizi by starting to effect RJ for ourselves in various endeavours including educational repairs and building our AHC-NSD. We urge our genuine allies from all other communities within and beyond educational intuitions to actively support these efforts in various ways and means of true Ubuntu people to peoples’ internationalist solidarity.
We sincerely hope this occupation/protest is not a three day wonder but connects to Reparatory Justice campaigning efforts within and beyond the Afrikan Heritage Community. Accordingly, we encourage you to engage with and support our Afrikan Heritage Community’s Reparatory Justice struggles for a just world and by taking this ‘Occupation’ further.
We recognise your strategic role as students within these Institutions which see themselves as practicing virtue through the production of knowledge/s. It therefore follows that these institutions, as centres of knowledge production should be leading the way in ensuring that academic justification and or lending intellectual support to aiding and abetting the Maangamizi through the development of knowledge and practices that are used to justify and genocide/ecocide. So much is already known about UCL’s role in developing knowledge on the genocidal pseudo-science of Eugenics.
It is our earnest view that well-intentioned and conscientious students should continue and do much more to expose institutions such as UCL in the production of racialized knowledge/s and epistemologies of ignorance by building up support from within to pressurise them to do the right thing.
We are keenly interested in hearing more from you as a campaign (Fossil Free UC) about what your programme from today onwards. We are interested to hear from you: to what extent are you are organising beyond campuses and thinking about unity of action with Afrikan Heritage Community and other community based struggles of peoples from the Global South for societal transformation?
In order for your commendable efforts to be sustainable and have the most impact, a lot will depend on how prepared and successful you are as student-activists to liaise with your communities and those communities most affected by the issues that you are campaigning about and support them in emancipatory community developmental organising and building. There is empirical evidence to support the view and lived experiences of such student-activists that students, disconnected from the wider communities they are part of and seek to advocate for, will not achieve much.
For us in GAPP, one way forward that we are actively engaged in is the very building of an Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination. (AHC-NSD), and other self-repairing community building efforts, is what will make the difference.
As student-activists you have to live and be the change that you seek, the change starts with being within community and developing the alternative society, which is what GAPP is about in terms of building an alternative AHC-NSD.
The AHC-NSD is the Community Self-Repairs effectuating work-in-progress for the holistic regeneration of Afrikan communities; mindful of the fact that such Afrikan communities at present exist in the United Kingdom as a multiplicity of different and sometimes even conflicting nation-state, ethnic, racial, class, gender, age and other socio-cultural configurations brought from all over the World; therefore, this AHC-NSD regeneration of Afrikan communities is being done in such a radical Changemaking way and manner of Intersectionality so as to enable the Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice development, out of their multifariousness, of a one distinct new type of Afrikan Communion of people to serve as a living prototype of the component bodies of the future MAATUBUNTUMAN Pan-Afrikan Union of communities throughout the continent and diaspora of Afrika: a Black self-empowering constellation of Black Star-Communities which shall be manifesting, in full sovereignty, the true People’s Power of totally liberated, unified and self-determining Afrika in her complete emancipatory magnificence, Maatubuntu dignity and superpowerful upstanding for Global Justice throughout the World.
The AHC-NSD is one of the major subject-matters of Experiential Knowledge production and Popular Education on the Action Learning agendas of the GAPP-UK, Pan-Afrikan Community Educational Services (PACES) and the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice.
We close by asking you to join us in resounding louder for all to hear the wise and visionary words of Frantz Fanon from the conclusion to the ‘Wretched of the Earth’:
“So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her.
Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.
If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.
But if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.
If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.
Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened.
For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man [person].”
In Service, Solidarity & Struggle
Esther Stanford-Xosei & Kofi Mawuli Klu on Behalf of the GAPP Leadership Facilitation Team
10/12/15
GAPP in Solidarity at the International Climate March
As members of the Wretched of the Earth Global Frontline Bloc, the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament delivered a strong message of ‘We Charge Genocide and Ecocide’ to the British State and the Internationally state sanctioned/state led criminality that continues to rape and plunder planet earth.
The International #ClimateMarch held on 29th November 2015 in London and over 170 countries worldwide, spoke in one voice against the many faces of corporate and state abetted evils that continue to risk the future of flora, fauna and humanity. The Wretched of the Earth Frontline Bloc took pole position on the march given the impact of climate change impacting most critically on the Black and Brown people of the Global South. Pictured here also is the banner of the Emancipation Day Afrikan Reparation March Committee which demands a stop to our Maangamizi – the Afrikan hellacaust and its current manifestations. Please join them on August 1st for the Annual march for Reparatory Justice from Windrush Sq to Parliament where the Stop the Maangamizi petition will be delivered to Downing St.
Of the #ClimateMarch one participant reflected:
Tillah Willah said: “I went to the Climate March in London -a 50,000 strong triumph – so the organisers say.
It was cold literally and otherwise and I walked through the march and I walked through the march feeling like an outsider until I got to the front where the Wretched of the Earth bloc were marching.
It was good to walk with the Global Pan Afrikan Peoples Parliament, it was good to hear Ken Saro Wiwa‘s name being called, it was good to meet with the young members of Black Dissidents it was good to meet Indigenous people from the South Pacific, Peru, Northern Scandinavia…. she also went on to say….”We are watching you, governments of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who are still convinced that industrialisation is the only way forward, yes you bauxite mining in Jamaica, yes you T&T with your obscene levels of CO2 production per capita, yes you Nigeria with your unchecked oil pollution, yes you India trying to steal land from the Adivasis.To the governments of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who are aiding and abetting corporate colonialism, we are watching you and promise that our communities are finding each other, we are linking our struggles and we are joining voices and forces for justice.” Well said! Tillah Willah! #ClimateMarch
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