African Migrants Report Torture, Slavery In Algeria
Dozens of Africans say they were sold for labour and trapped in slavery in Algeria in what aid agencies fear may be a widening trend of abusing migrants headed for a new life in Europe.
Algerian authorities could not be reached for comment and several experts cast doubt on claims that such abuses are widespread in the north African country.
The tightly governed state has become a popular gateway to the Mediterranean since it became tougher to pass through Libya, where slavery, rape and torture are rife.
Amid a surge in anti-migrant sentiment, Algeria since late last year has sent thousands of migrants back over its southern border into Niger, according to the United Nations Migration Agency (IOM), where many tell stories of exploitation.
The scale of abuse is not known, but an IOM survey of thousands of migrants suggested it could rival Libya.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation heard detailed accounts of forced labour and slavery from an international charity and a local association in Agadez, Niger’s main migrant transit hub, and interviewed two of the victims by telephone.
“The first time they sold me for 100,000 CFA francs ($170),” said Ousmane Bah, a 21-year-old from Guinea who said he was sold twice in Algeria by unknown captors and worked in construction.
“They took our passports. They hit us. We didn’t eat. We didn’t drink,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I was a slave for six months.”
Accounts of abuse are similar, said Abdoulaye Maizoumbou, a project coordinator for global charity Catholic Relief Services. Of about 30 migrants he met who were deported from Algeria, about 20 said they had been enslaved, he said.
In most cases, migrants said they were sold in and around the southern city of Tamanrasset shortly after entering the country, often by smugglers of their own nationality, he said.
Some said they were tortured in order to blackmail their parents into paying the captors, but even when the money arrived they were forced to work for no pay, or sold, said Maizoumbou.
One man told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he slept in a sheep pen and suffered beatings if an animal got sick or dirty.
“They would bring out machetes and I would get on my knees and apologise and they would let it go,” said Ogounidje Tange Mazu, from Togo.
The IOM in Algeria has received three reports this year from friends and relatives of African migrants held hostage and forced to work in the country. “It’s probably just an indication that it is happening. How big it is we don’t know,” said its chief of mission Pascal Reyntjens.
“What happens in Algeria surpasses what happens in Libya,” said Bachir Amma, a Nigerien ex-smuggler who runs a football club and a local association to inform migrants of the risks.
Migrants in Libya are often starved and beaten by armed groups, and there have been reports of “open slave markets” where migrants are put on sale, according to the U.N. human rights office.
Amma said he had spoken with more than 75 migrants back from Algeria, the majority of whom described slave-like conditions.
“NGOs don’t know about this because they’re too interested in Libya,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In 2016, the IOM surveyed about 6,300 migrants in Niger, most of whom had returned from Algeria and Libya. Sixty-five percent of those who had lived in Algeria said they had experienced violence and abuse, compared to 61 percent in Libya. An estimated 75,000 migrants live in Algeria, the IOM said.
Police Use Water Cannon On Migrants In Rome, Reflecting New, Hard-Line Tactics
Italian riot police turned a water cannon on Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in Rome on Thursday, scattering them from a piazza where they had camped for five days after being evicted from a building where they had been squatting for several years.
Migrants threw bottles and gas canisters at the police, but were driven back by the water jet in Piazza Indipendenza, yards from Rome’s central Termini station. Among the migrants bowled over by the water was a woman walking with a crutch.
The clash reflected Italy’s increasingly hard line on migrants. About 400,000 have arrived since 2014, mostly sailing from Libya.
Almost all of the evicted migrants had reportedly received refugee status, or a similar form of protection, prompting protesters and aid groups to claim the eviction and the police operation proved Rome is abandoning migrants it had provided with asylum.
“In Germany and Sweden, refugees get help with housing. Here in Italy, you get evicted,” said Father Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean priest who assists migrants in Italy.
In the lead-up to the clashes, 800 Eritreans and Ethiopians were evicted on Saturday from an empty office building on Piazza Indipendenza that had been occupied by migrants since 2013.
Around 100 set up camp with their suitcases on the grass in the piazza outside the building. Early on Thursday, police arrived and turned their water cannon on the group.
In a statement, Rome police said the operation was “urgent and necessary” after the migrants refused offers of alternative accommodation, but also because of the threat from migrants equipping themselves with gas canisters and inflammable materials.
Zerai said the accommodation offer consisted of 80 places in migrant centers. “That is not going to take care of the 800 people who were evicted,” he said. “And why did they only start thinking of alternatives after evicting all those people?” he said.
After the piazza was cleared, migrants regrouped closer to Termini station before riot police chased them across a parking area in front of frightened tourists. In a video published by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, one person, presumed to be an officer, is heard saying: “If they throw something, break their arm.”
“It is shaming that the lack of alternative housing led to violence,” said charity Doctors Without Borders, which treated 13 of the migrants, mainly women, for injuries after the police operation.
Eritreans frequently qualify for asylum after fleeing their country’s brutal government, which keeps men in military service for decades. Many of the 800 who were living in the occupied building work in Rome and send their children to local schools.
“They are people fleeing war and persecution, already victims of terrible trauma. People who have the right to support to integration in a way to become autonomous,” said Stephane Jaquemet of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“We are refugees, not terrorists,” said Yohannes Haglos, 35, one of the Eritrean refugees camped in the piazza. “Why does Italy hand out asylum permits only to turn its back on you, offering no languages courses, no help at all?”
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” Haile Selassie
While Europeans targeted men in West Africa, the Arab slave trade primarily targeted the women of East Africa to serve as domestic slaves, wet nannies and sex-slaves in the infamous harems.
This trade trickled over millennia is estimated to have taken more than 10 million African via the Swahili coast to India, Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey,
The trans-Saharan slave trade commenced late in the 7th century when Abdallah Ben Said, the King of Islamised Egypt, conquered via Jihad the Sudan – “the land of infidels” – and in 652 imposed on Sudanese King Khalidurat a treaty known as Bakht.
One of the clauses of the treaty was the compulsory annual supply by the Sudanese king of hundreds of African slaves to the Muslim king of Egypt. The European trans-Atlantic slave trade took off 10 centuries later, in 1693.
while the trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted for four centuries (1693-1884), the trans-Saharan slave trade continued for 17 centuries (652-1960).
While there is a lot material of the trafficking of African slaves to Europe and the Americas, there is little to nothing about an earlier trade – the sale of African slaves in the Arab Middle East.
One reason for that is that there are very few descendants of African slaves in Arab Middle East (and most are not influential), so there’s no one to fight to keep their memory alive.
Even leading African scholars like East Africa’s own Prof. Ali Mazrui tend to say little about this sale of Africans to Arab Middle East – in his case, because it raises awkward personal questions.
The question then is, why did African slaves perish in the Arab Middle East? One reason is that while in Europe and the Americas African slaves were taken to work in plantations and industries, in the Middle East they were mostly domestic labor.
There were similarities between the slave trades. Some Arab scholars, such as Ibn Khaldun, justified the trans-Saharan slave trade by interpreting some sections of the Koran that ‘authorized’ the enslavement of African ‘infidels’ by Arab slave merchants, the ‘chosen race’.
The perpetuation of African slaves was fundamentally assured by women slaves who were indiscriminately coupled to men without their consent. Some women stolen from Africa were stolen to serve the infamous Arabian harems (exploited as sex-slaves); their children were born to Arab fathers, and thus would serve to purify the week Arabian genetic makeup, as Arabs mostly interbreed within close family members and relatives.
Partly for that reason, the African slaves were castrated. As eunuchs, they couldn’t have sex with their “masters’ wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, and cousins. Some (not all) of their owners had another vested in turning them into eunuchs – the slaves became rounded like women. So in the night the Arab chiefs would be in the embrace of their wives or mistresses, and in between they would be perched on the backs on the eunuchs.
The even more tragic thing about eunuchs, it that to create one, according to some accounts, you needed 20 men. The other 19 perished after castration, from infections and bleeding to death!
Thirdly, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the one to the Middle East included very few women. Thus even if the African slaves in the Arab world weren’t castrated, they would not have been able to reproduce, because it would have been nearly impossible to find a female companion.
Castration of numbers of male slaves by Arab merchants was a prominent feature of the trans-Saharan slave trade.
The castration exercise resulted to widespread of homosexuality as well. But the Arabs noted that black male slaves lack self-control and steadiness of mind and they are overcome by fickleness, foolishness and ignorance.
Castrated male slaves were purchased by rich Arab kings and princes and employed as security agents to protect harems where their wives and concubines were caged. The castration process described in the book of Senegalese historian and anthropologist, Tidiane N’Diaye, “Le Genocide Viole”, is barbaric and inhumane.
The Conspiracy to Destroy Ethiopia: The Role of Arab States
By Tecola Hagos December 24, 2001
Starting with the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Islamic nations of the Middle East have tried to destroy Ethiopia several times. One such challenge that nearly succeeded in such effort was the Ottoman Turks sponsored Ahmed Gragn’s devastating overthrow of the Christian Ethiopian Kingdom of Libna Dengel. It is not clear whether or not Ahmed Gragn saw himself as subject of the Ottoman Turks. I believe he did. The name Ahmed Gragn was a corruption of his real name “Imam Ahmed bin Ibrahim Al Ghazi,” and might suggest that Ahmed Gragn might have originated from Gaza of a Palestinian extraction; furthermore, he was not left-handed either as his Amharized name indicated. [32] Ahmed Gragn was provided with weapons, military personnel et cetera by the Ottoman Turks.[33]
The Turks had failed repeatedly in the past in their effort to occupy the lowlands of Ethiopia up to that period. In fact, Ethiopia never suffered in her entire existence of thousands of years a devastation on the scale Ahmed Gragn caused in his twelve years of rampage, looting and burning of churches, random killing of tens of thousands of Christian men, women, and children. On the other hand, despite the belligerency of some of the Ethiopian emperors and kings, one can say that Ethiopian soldiers usually were engaged in defense of the nation against attacks by armies of foreigners including armies of Moslem nations, or chasing out marauders such as nomadic Bejas mostly from the Sudan attacking settled Christian villages, Monasteries, Churches et cetera in the Northern part of Ethiopia (Eritrea).
In the recent past, soon after Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in 1952, he concentrated his effort to control the Nile Basin, first he aimed to create some super state made up of Ethiopia (Eritrea), Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda, with Egypt in control.[35] The real target was Ethiopia and the Blue Nile. The Arab governments in North Africa and the Middle East have played a crucial and destructive role in the weakening, sabotaging, and finally in the dismantling of Ethiopia.[36] Egypt has a long standing hostility towards Ethiopia from the time of the Pharaohs.[37] The source of the problem is the water of the Blue Nile or “Tikur Abaye” in Ethiopic/Amharic meaning the “big black father” that is the life blood of Egypt and the Sudan as well. Without water and silt taken from Ethiopia by the Blue Nile, Egypt and the Sudan would not have sustained any significant population. For example, in 1875 an ex-Confederate General in the service of the Egyptian Khedive, Ismail (Pasha), wrote in his memoir that the center of Egypt’s fear and interest was the control of the Blue Nile. “The khedive himself, when taxed with the intention of absorbing or annexing Abyssinia in whole or in part, referred to this, when he said that, as nature already was sending him down the best part of Abyssinia, he had no desire for the residue.”
What is remarkable and often overlooked is the fact that Ethiopia never attempted to divert the waters of the Blue Nile or any other water body that flows into the Nile despite repeated provocation by Egypt. Ethiopia had sought only peaceful coexistence with neighboring countries. If Ethiopia goes to war, it was always for the right reasons: defending itself, and its people from foreign aggression. As we shall observe in the following paragraphs, Egyptian antagonism towards Ethiopia never ceased, nor diminished in its intensity during the last fifty years. If at all, it has become more perverse and open.
In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, the most blatant and open attack against Ethiopia was spearheaded by Egypt starting with Ali Mohammed, followed by Ismail Pasha, then Gamal Abdel Nasser and on to the present leader Mubarak. Buotros Ghali, a nominally Coptic Christian, in the best tradition of his family’s service to Moslem leaders of Egypt, has excelled them all because he succeeded in dismembering Ethiopia, weakening its sovereignty, checkmating its development prospect, and insuring the exclusive use of the great bounty of the Blue Nile for Egypt. Gamal Nasser, a megalomaniacal leader, who came into power through a coupe d’etat, through his government controlled Radio Cairo launched the most perverse attack on Haile Selassie’s government trying to instigate the Moslem population of Ethiopia who were living a far more integrated life within Ethiopia than was the case in Egypt with Egyptian Coptic Christians let alone other Christians living in Egypt. Furthermore, WoldeAb Wolde Mariam, the ex-President of the Eritrean Labour Unions, was given a special radio program as part of Radio Cairo to broadcast into Eritrea his vehemently anti-Ethiopia diatribe. Incidentally, WldeAb is from Axum, Tygrie, with a violent hatred of Shoan Amharas that drove him to extreme views. People who claimed far superior indigenous family root to “Eritrea” finally pushed him out of power in the skirmish within the liberation movement. The family of Boutros Ghali, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, were well known for their anti-Ethiopian activities starting from the time of Fuad I with sustained denigrating pieces in newspaper and pamphlets. In particular the control of Asseb and thus the entire Red Sea was one other great motivating factor for Egypt. For Ethiopia having an outlet is not just a political strategy but defines its very existence.
The activities of those Arab nations were not limited to providing airtime for self-styled broadcasters. For Example, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt provided training, weapons, and money to the nascent Eritrean liberation movement, especially after the office of Eritrean Liberation Front, ELF was opened in Cairo in the 1960s. The Arab world interfered in the internal affairs of Ethiopia despite the fact that the Arab world has not been able to solve both its economic and political problems for years. All of the activities of these Arab nations and Pakistan included violated numerous principles of international law, resolutions, conventions, and treaties of the United Nations. In fact, some of these violations would even be considered as violations of “peremptory norms of international law.” Judge Schwebel summarized the principle and norm of international law that “…it is not lawful for a foreign State or movement to intervene in that struggle with force or to provide arms, supplies and other logistical support in the prosecution of armed rebellion.”
Agreements were entered between Britain and Egypt, Egypt and the Sudan allocating the waters of the Nile – the Blue Nile – without regard to the rights of Ethiopia the only source country whose water is being apportioned by third parties.[42] It is to be recalled that 85 % (during the dry seasons) and over 95% (during the rainy seasons) of the water of the Nile that finally reaches the Mediterranean Sea originates from the highlands of Ethiopia. In addition, millions of tons of rich fertile Ethiopian soil is yearly delivered by the Blue Nile to Egypt and the Sudan. There is no question that this bounty of Ethiopia is the center of the problem of all this posturing, and century old effort on the part of Egypt to destroy Ethiopia. This is a clear case of a dog biting the hand that feeds it. Judge Schucking in his dissenting opinion in the Wimbledon Case stated that a treaty signed by two nations that affects the legitimate rights of third parties is invalid in regard to such third parties. Judge Schuking was simply affirming a norm of international law, and his dissention was on other grounds.
What is tragic in all of this is the fact that a number of Ethiopian and Eritrean Moslems did not fully grasp the great morality, sociability, and tolerance of Christian Ethiopians. By contrast, if you consider the utter bigotry and intolerance of Arab leaders and to a great extent ordinary Arabs have for Christians and non-Arabs in their communities, and in neighboring nations, one is left with great dismay and disgust. For example, no Church is to be found in Saudi Arabia, a country of utterly anachronistic political, social, and cultural system, and often with primitive and barbaric practice of penal law.[44] One must not forget the fact that the Arabs were the major (maybe even the only) slavers in that part of the world who benefited from enslaving Africans in huge numbers bringing in death and destruction to millions of Africans for centuries all the way down to our time. [The irony of all that dehumanization resulted, centuries later, in established aristocratic dynasties made up of descendants of children of African Slaves in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait et cetera.]
Even in Egypt, a country presumed to have a more “enlightened” government and population, Coptic Christians are abused, their daughters kidnapped and raped, their sons subdued, disfranchised, economically controlled, and politically oppressed.[45] No one will find in Egypt a comparable quality and depth of freedom of religion as one finds in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Christians in Egypt or even Egyptian Coptes in Egypt do not have a fraction of the freedom enjoyed by Moslems in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Moslems in Ethiopia build Mosques anywhere they please some times they even build Mosques right next to Churches, unheard of event anywhere in the Arab world–just try to build a church next to a Mosque any where in Cairo or Alexandria, Mecca or Medhina, and see what happens. By contrast, Ethiopian Moslems practice their religion openly anywhere in Ethiopia without restriction either from the Ethiopian government or the community. Such is the bounty of a mother country that has been a target for destruction by these Arab nations. It is not a favor to Christian Ethiopians that Moslem Ethiopians should defend Ethiopia against Arab nations, but it is in their own best interest and national duty to do so in order to maintain such a tolerant, bountiful, and great nation prosper and be self sufficient.
No one molests, abuses, kidnaps, or enslaves any Moslem any where in Ethiopia. Other than abusing their own women, turning them into either some form of subhuman reproductive machine or subservient silent victims, most of these Arab nations practice a modern form of slavery on people from other parts of the world who are lured to work in the Middle East. And all other Arab nations such as, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria et cetera are all closed systems with oppressive systems of governments, and specially obnoxious to non-Moslems. The types of religious oppression and ethnic bigotry that exist in these Arab nations may be the worst in the world. Most human rights declarations, resolutions, covenants, and conventions are routinely discarded and violated in such Arab countries. The reports of international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch et cetera are replete with horror stories of religious persecution, oppression, abuse, and human rights violations. Even governments such as that of the United States could not turn a blind eye to the human rights violations and religious persecution of Christians going on in Arab countries.
Ethiopia is like a precious jewel that one ought to defend and protect. For Ethiopian Moslems there is no better society where they can live with their human dignity intact and share in the political, cultural, and economic life of a nation as an integral and important part thereof. Ethiopian Moslems have always lived with relatively better economic strength compared to Christian Ethiopians. Ethiopian Moslems must not think in terms of religious solidarity with Arabs against their own fellow citizens (Ethiopians), when in reality they will also be treated no better than a “slave” in Arab nations because of their color. One must remember that Arabs in general were the first organized slavers and slave owners of African people in history. Millions of Africans suffered in the hands of Arab slavers outside of Africa. Ethiopians were also victims of Arab slavery to this day.
This is where (The League of Arab States) Issaias Afwerki is trying to take the people of “Eritrea” of whom at least 50% are Orthodox Christians sharing the same religious tradition as their brothers and sisters in the rest of Ethiopia. He already has his foot in the door; Eritrea is listed as “Other Countries of Interest/Importance.” Should not Ethiopia be worried, as it always has done through out its thousands of years of history, about the welfare of its Christian family members of the people of Akale Guzi, Hamassen, Serie and else where in “Eritrea”? Of course, it must. After all both Issaias and Meles are passing mirages, what endures is Ethiopia. One must take into account the fact that Issaias is a “kenisha” meaning a protestant, and Meles is an atheist; neither seem to appreciate the great contribution of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to the national unity, sovereignty, and freedom of the people of Ethiopia.
Haile Selassie, Mengistu, and now Meles failed to promote the enviable record of the religious tolerance that exists in Ethiopia. Leaders of Ethiopia’s successive governments were too timid and did not effectively counter the propaganda war waged against the people of Ethiopia and their nation. Those leaders were more interested in brutalizing and violating the rights of Ethiopian citizens more than facing up to real enemies that were openly undermining Ethiopia and attempting to destabilize its governments. Just in the last few months, the government of Saudi Arabia has cracked down on Christians form different countries including some Ethiopians, who live and work in Saudi Arabia, for worshiping in their own private homes. The action of the Saudi government violated numerous human rights conventions, covenants, and resolutions of the United Nations, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nothing has been done by the government of Meles Zenawi about such intolerable action of the government of Saudi Arabia.
Ethiopia is faced with religious movements or movements based on Islamic religion in the Ogden, Bali, Arisi, Afar, and Eritrea bankrolled by oil money from neighboring Arab nations that have become very destructive. In most instances these movements are inadequate, their vision shallow, and their goals anachronistic. Why would anyone from Ethiopia want to join a group of nations whose human rights record is dismal, and whose government structure is dictatorship of the worst kind, and whose national economic wealth is treated as a private estate? Just recently, the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States at an interview with MSN Reporter in connection with the September 11th, catastrophe, when asked about corruption in the Kingdom, (he) answered bluntly and with his usual I-know-it-all arrogance, “So What? We did not invent corruption.” Such are the leaders of the Arab world. All I wrote about in this section is not due to hate or animosity I harbored against Arabs and Egyptians, but to remind all concerned to be aware of the type of neighbors we have and to be on our guard against our historic enemies and those who wish us ill, and in fact, who have caused us a lot of problems. It is the duty of all responsible governments to inform fully their respective citizens all serious dangers. The government of Meles Zenawi is, in fact, engaged in actively suppressing information on the issue of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Western nations in recent times seem to see Ethiopia as a disposable entity. Ethiopia lost considerable prestige and influence with the military takeover of the 1974. The fact that the military dictatorship forged close relationship with the Soviet Union made the situation even worse. Other than the open lust of Italy to colonize Ethiopia, England, France, even Tsarist Russia, all had entertained some colonial fantasy. So-called “friends” of Ethiopia such as England and the United States are wolves disguised as sheep. In both nations racism is still well and alive; it now manifests itself more vividly in their dealings with far off countries such as Ethiopia. Since the Second World War, both the United States and England consistently have abused the hospitality, good will, hope, and friendship of Ethiopia. And now these two countries in collaboration with Arab nations are trying to destroy an ancient and proud people by forcing on them some unjust and illegal demarcation of boundaries that will bottle up over seventy million people and promote violence and conflict in the region for a long time. What the governments of the two nations are doing is particularly insidious considering the fact that England is an island with thousands of miles of coast, and the United States even has incorporated in one of its national songs the fact that it boasts not one coastal territory but two: “from sea to shining sea.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 31, 2010
The Haig-Kissinger depopulation policy, by Lonnie Wolfe
Special Report EIR (Executive Intelligence Review) March 10, 1981
Investigations by EIR have uncovered a planning apparatus operating outside the control of the White House whose sole purpose is to reduce the world’s population by 2 billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This apparatus, which includes various levels of the government is determining U.S. foreign policy. In every political hotspot — El Salvador, the so-called arc of crisis in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, Southeast Asia and in Africa- the goal of U.S. foreign policy is population reduction. The targeting agency for the operation is the National Security Council’s Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. Its policy-planning group is in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This group drafted the Carter administration’s Global 2000 document, which calls for global population reduction, and the same apparatus is conducting the civil war in El Salvador as a conscious depopulation project.
“There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels,” said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department’s Office of Population Affairs (OPA). “Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it “The professionals,” said Ferguson, “aren’t interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population-or else we will have trouble.
So steps are taken. El Salvador is an example where our failure to lower population by simple means has created the basis for a national security crisis. The government of El Salvador failed to use our programs to lower their population. Now they get a civil war because of it…. There will be dislocation and food shortages. They still have too many people there.”
Civil wars are somewhat drawn-out ways to reduce population, the OPA official added. “The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa or through disease like the Black Death,” all of which might occur in El Salvador. Ferguson’s OPA monitors populations in the Third World and maps strategies to reduce them. Its budget for FY 1980 was $190 million; for FY 198l, it will be $220 million. The Global 2000 report calls for doubling that figure. The sphere of Kissinger In 1975, OPA was brought under a reorganized State Department Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs– a body created by Henry Kissinger.
The agency was assigned to carry out the directives of the NSC Ad Hoc Group. According to an NSC spokesman, Kissinger initiated both groups after discussion with leaders of the Club of Rome during the 1974 population conferences in Bucharest and Rome. The Club of Rome, controlled by Europe’s black nobility, is the primary promotion agency for the genocidal reduction of world population levels. The Ad Hoc Group was given “high priority” by the Carter administration, through the intervention of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie.
According to OPA expert Ferguson, Kissinger initiated a full about-face on U.S. development policy toward the Third World. “For a long time,” Ferguson stated, “people here were timid” They listened to arguments from Third World leaders that said that the best contraceptive was economic reform and development. So we pushed development programs, and we helped create a population time bomb. “We are letting people breed like flies without allowing for natural causes to keep population down. We raised the birth survival rates, extended life-spans by lowering death rates, and did nothing about lowering birth rates.
That policy is finished. We are saying with Global 2000 and in real policy that you must lower population rates. Population reduction and control is now our primary policy objective- then you can have some development.”Accordingly, the Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs has consistently blocked industrialization policies in the Third World, denying developing nations access to nuclear energy technology–the policies that would enable countries to sustain a growing population. According to State Department sources, and Ferguson himself, Alexander Haig is a “firm believer” in population control.
“We will go into a country,” said Ferguson, “and say, here is your goddamn development plan. Throw it out the window. Start looking at the size of your population and figure out what must be done to reduce it.”If you don’t like that, if you don’t want to choose to do it through planning, then you’ll have an El Salvador or an Iran, or worse, a Cambodia.”According to an NSC spokesman, the United States now shares the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the “population crisis” is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than “nuclear annihilation.” “Every hot spot in the world corresponds to a population crisis point,” said Ferguson who would rename Brzezinski’s arc of crisis doctrine the “arc of population crisis.”
This is corroborated by statements in the NSC Ad Hoc Group’s April 1980 report. There is “an increased potential for social unrest, economic and political instability, mass migration and possible international conflicts over control of land and resources,” says the NSC report. It then cites “demographic pressures” as key to understanding “examples of recent warfare in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, El Salvador. Honduras, and Ethiopia, and the growing potential forinstability in such places as Turkey, the Philippines, Central America, Iran, and Pakistan.” Through extraordinary efforts, the Ad Hoc Group and OPA estimate that they may be able to keep a billion people from being born through contraceptive programs.
But as the Ad Hoc Group’s report states, the best efforts of the Shah of Iran to institute “clean programs” of birth control failed to make a significant dent in the country’s birth rate. The promise of jobs, through an ambitious industrialization program, encouraged migration toward “overcrowded cities” like Teheran. Now under Ayatollah Khomeini, the “clean programs” have been dismantled. The government may make progress because it has a program “to induce up to half of Teheran’s 6 million residents to relocate, as well as possible measures to keep rural migrants from moving to the cities.” Behind the back of the President Ferguson and others involved with the OPA and NSC group maintain that the United States will continue a foreign policy based on a genocidal reduction of the world’s population.
“We have a network in place of co-thinkers in the government,” said the OPA case officer. “We keep going, no matter who is in the White House.” But Ferguson reports that the “White House” does not really understand what they are saying and that the President “thinks that population policy means how do we speed up population increase. “As long as no one says differently,” said Ferguson, “we will continue to do our jobs. “
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