KEPW News reports from Washington, D.C.

Curtis Blankinship: HandsOffUhuru.org is asking for support at the sentencing hearing for the Uhuru 3, Dec. 16. They helped organize the Black People’s March on Nov. 3, before Election Day in Washington, D.C.

At the rally before the march, I spoke with Jacqueline Luqman, vice chair of the coordinating committee for Black Alliance for Peace, about NATO exploitation and the United States Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

[00:00:28] In 2007, the White House announced that Africa Command will ‘strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa. Africa Command will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa.’

[00:00:52] General Carter F. Ham, who served as the second commander of Africa Command, led Operation Odyssey Dawn, the initial United States role in the 2011 military intervention in Libya. He said in a 2012 address at Brown University that U.S. strategy for sub-Saharan Africa is to strengthen democratic institutions and boost broad-based economic growth. In 2012, AFRICOM Headquarters’ fiscal budget was $276 million.

[00:01:19] We have a sign that says ‘U.S. and NATO out of Africa.’ Countries are required to give money to NATO and that money basically goes to weapons. Why are you against NATO?

[00:01:32] Jacqueline Luqman: Because NATO was founded as a means to, at first, keep Russia in check but then to destroy Russia after WWII, even though it was the Soviet Red Army that actually defeated the Nazi empire. But NATO under the direction of the United States really just wanted to destroy what became Russia but at first was the Soviet Union.

And NATO exists to be the international bullies, the international thugs for the U.S. NATO deploys troops wherever the U .S. tells them to deploy troops. That’s why NATO troops and weapons are all along the border of Russia in former Warsaw Pact countries to threaten them.

So this is what NATO does. This is what the U.S. government does with NATO. NATO is not a peacekeeping force. NATO is the international gang of thugs for the United States.

[00:02:34] Curtis Blankinship: Right, and so we were at peace with Russia in the 90s after glasnost.

[00:02:40] Jacqueline Luqman: Peace. I mean, you know it wasn’t actually a genuine peace. It was a facade of peace that still was a thin cover of aggression toward Russia. Because while U.S. presidents like Bill Clinton was telling a Russian president Gorbachev that, ‘Look, we’re at peace with you,’ NATO was still putting weapons and troops in Warsaw and former Warsaw Pact countries on the borders of Russia.

[00:03:13] Even after U.S. presidents and advisors told many Russian presidents, ‘NATO will not expand further east,’ it was all a lie. They kept expanding NATO further east, further toward the borders of Russia, even as they were telling Russian presidents they weren’t going to do it.

[00:03:33] Curtis Blankinship: But that’s my point. If anything, we should have abolished NATO at that point and made Russia our friends at that point.

[00:03:39] Jacqueline Luqman: Putin came to power because the United States government feared in the elections in Russia in 1996, because the Russians were about to elect a communist as president, and the United States government under Bill Clinton would not let that happen.

[00:03:56] Imagine that. The United States president saying, ‘We’re not going to let the people in another country choose the leader they want.’ This is what the U.S. government has always done for decades.

[00:04:08] So what President Bill Clinton did, because he did not want Boris Yeltsin to lose, even though the Russian people hated Boris Yeltsin, which is why he was about to lose to a communist, Bill Clinton sent a team to Russia to manage the campaign of Boris Yeltsin, and did American style propaganda, a lot of lying, a lot of misdirection, and somehow Boris Yeltsin barely ekes out another win.

[00:04:38] And he was a disaster. So he couldn’t even finish out his full term. He had to step down. And when he stepped down, who did he choose to finish his term? Vladimir Putin.

[00:04:53] So if the United States had not interfered in Russia’s elections in 1996 and helped someone that the Russian people did not want to win the election, then we wouldn’t have or the United States government wouldn’t have Vladimir Putin as a problem.

[00:05:11] They helped create Vladimir Putin. But on the other hand…

[00:05:16] Curtis Blankinship: And the reason we put Yeltsin in there is for resource extraction, isn’t that right? For Russian oil.

[00:05:21] Jacqueline Luqman: It is a violation of the right to self-determination of other people. So whatever reasons the United States government had for doing all these things that they’re always accusing other leaders of socialist countries of doing that they hate. that they also want to destroy, the reasons are illegitimate.

NATO is an illegitimate white supremacist imperialist structure that needs to be destroyed.

[00:05:48] Russia needs to be left alone. So does China, Venezuela, Cuba, and as the sign says, Africa. The United States and its international gang of thugs needs to be abolished so that the rest of the world can live in peace.

[00:06:04] Curtis Blankinship: So the socialism, though, that they’re talking about, what is it?

[00:06:07] Jacqueline Luqman: That is socialism. Human rights are expressed through governments guaranteeing that their citizens have housing, health care, education, a clean environment for people to live and thrive in. These are supposed to be guaranteed by governments because they are human rights. They should not be things that are commodified. They should not be things that people have to qualify for based on their income. They are things that every human being deserves because we’re alive and because we’re human beings.

[00:06:43] So if it is a government’s responsibility to take care of the welfare of its citizens, then guaranteeing those human rights are how governments do that and socialist governments do that. They take the money that they make from selling their resources and they provide housing for the people that the government either pays for completely or subsidizes.

[00:07:05] They provide health care that the government pays for and the people don’t have to worry about that they don’t have enough money to go to the doctor for. Health care is provided by the government. They provide education that is either paid for from K-12 completely and equitably everywhere in the country or some socialist countries pay for a higher education also.

[00:07:30] And they invite people from other countries to come to their countries and go to college for free. Cuba is an excellent example of that. They have the ELAM Medical School where they train their world-famous doctors. And anyone from around the world can attend the ELAM Medical School and learn how to be a doctor in the human rights tradition and go around the world spreading humanity like Cuba has always done.

[00:07:58] This is what human rights and the guarantee of human rights and the perspective of government power means. And the fact that the United States government, a capitalist imperialist country that doesn’t guarantee anybody’s human rights in this country. If you have health care it’s because you just happen to make enough money to afford it. And if you don’t make enough money to afford it, then you just get sick and stay sick and in pain until you eventually die. That’s the American way.

[00:08:27] In education, public schools are not equitably funded. Poor neighborhoods, excuse me, poor neighborhoods don’t have the same resources as wealthier neighborhoods because public schools are funded by property tax revenue. What about people who live in apartment buildings in big cities. They don’t generate property tax revenue.

So this is why public schools in poor inner city neighborhoods and in poor rural neighborhoods are under resourced, under staff, don’t have the same kind of accessories and amenities and even programs that schools in wealthy neighborhoods have because of the property tax revenue.

[00:09:10] In socialist countries where education is a human right, they don’t have this problem. Everybody gets a quality education, regardless of where, how much money their parents make. We should have this here in the richest country that the planet has probably ever seen, but we have to continually fight for basic, like access to the, unrestricted access to the polls.

[00:09:37] Why is it we’re in 2024 and people are still fighting for the right to vote? And then these people are sitting there talking about we’re defending democracy. What democracy if everybody doesn’t have the right to vote? How do we have a democracy if something that simple does not exist and we are still fighting for that right in this country? And then we’re fighting for the right to vote for two liars, for two genocidal parties, both sides.

[00:10:00] Yeah, both sides for one of two genocidal policies. There’s no such thing as ‘lesser evil.’ Evil is exactly what it is and why would you choose any? But this is the situation we are faced with in this in this country while we’re also faced with a government that is demonizing countries that actually are taking care of their people. And then convincing us that they’re the enemy instead of this government that is doing all of this to us and to them.

[00:10:32] Curtis Blankinship: What is NATO causing in Africa? I’m not familiar with this.

[00:10:35] Jacqueline Luqman: The United States and NATO are working together. The U.S. has AFRICOM in Africa, which is the U.S. Africa command. It’s one of 12 Department of Defense commands, where the Department of Defense has carved up the entire world and they monitor the entire world and space 24/7. What right does the United States government have to surveil everybody else in the world? None. But they do it. And they do it through these military commands.

[00:11:12] So in Africa, there are hundreds of U.S. military bases full bases, but there are also what they call ‘lily pad’ sites that are not full bases. They don’t have permanent staff there. They just carry out operations from those sites. They’re not specific about what those operations are, so they could be drone operations. They could be anything. We don’t know. They don’t give that information and other kinds of sites that they’re completely secretive about.

[00:11:42] So there are hundreds of U.S. military bases across the continent, almost literally splitting it in half from the west to the east coast. And what those bases do, what the U.S. military is doing through AFRICOM, is the pacifying and controlling of the people to facilitate the resource extraction, the continued resource extraction that Africa has suffered from since the Berlin Conference in 1885, when the European powers, the pre-NATO powers that became NATO powers, got together and decided, ‘Hey, Africa has a lot of resources. Let’s take them. Let’s divide this continent of people up and take their stuff and oppress the people and force them to mine these resources, keep them and will take off all the profit.’

[00:12:30] This is still going on on the continent of Africa where 40% of the resources that the world, the entire world needs, come from the continent of Africa. So instead of entering into mutually beneficial agreements with the governments where the resources are that they need, the U.S. government decided to put military bases on the continent and basically bully the people into, you know, forcing them or pacifying them so they can keep stealing their resources. The U.S. and its western allies, Canada, France, Britain, you know, all of them.

[00:13:08] Curtis Blankinship: Instead of humanitarian aid.

[00:13:10] Jacqueline Luqman: What humanitarian aid? The U.S. government offers humanitarian aid and then they might build a school, they might build a clinic, and then as soon as people start complaining, ‘Okay, thank you, but you can leave now,’ then they take the aid. Then they will take the aid.

[00:13:27] Curtis Blankinship: Yeah, so this is for white people too though. Everyone in white and all races—

[00:13:35] Jacqueline Luqman: Oh no, what’s, listen because in, yes, we are all victims of this, but Africa was the, almost the beginning of the modern era of imperialism, of global imperialism. Because in 1885 the European powers did get together. The imperialist European powers got together and decided we are all going to colonize Africa. And that’s what they did.

[00:13:59] And through the colonization and the underdevelopment of Africa, we saw the repetition of the colonization of other countries. And so the colonization and the underdevelopment of Africa, as Walter Rodney explained in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that was like the blueprint for every colonization, resource-extraction, people-pacifying operation that was carried out by the European powers since then.

[00:14:31] So the liberation of Africa and the destruction of imperialism and neocolonialism in Africa is the foundational linchpin to the destruction of imperialism and colonization around the world.

[00:14:48] Curtis Blankinship: To support Black Alliance for Peace go to BlackAllianceForPeace.com. To support the Uhuru 3 and the Black People’s Movement go to HandsOffUhuru.org. For KEPW News, I’m Curtis Blankinship.

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