[News] Another U.S.-Trained Soldier Stages a Coup in West Africa
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jan 26 14:56:09 EST 2022
theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-military/>
Another U.S.-Trained Soldier Stages a Coup in West Africa
Nick Turse - January 26, 2022
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Earlier this week,_ the military seized power in Burkina Faso, ousting
the country’s democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.
The coup was announced on state television Monday by a young officer who
said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the
government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as
Burkina Faso’s new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the
commander of one of the country’s three military regions.
Damiba is a highly trained soldier, thanks in no small part to the U.S.
military, which has a long record of training soldiers in Africa who go
on to stage coups. Damiba, it turns out, participated in at least a
half-dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command, or
AFRICOM.
In 2010 and 2020, he participated in an annual special operations
training program known as the Flintlock exercise. In 2013, Damiba was
accepted into an Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance
course, which is a State Department-funded peacekeeping training
program. In 2013 and 2014, Damiba attended the U.S.-sponsored Military
Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa. And in 2018 and 2019, he
participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil
Military Support Element in Burkina Faso.
Damiba is just the latest in a carousel of coup leaders in West Africa
trained by the U.S. military as the U.S. has pumped in more than $1
billion in security assistance to promote “stability
<https://www.africom.mil/what-we-do/security-cooperation>” in the
region. Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine
coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African
countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three
times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.
Since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of
commandos to advise, assist, and accompany local forces, even into
battle; provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft; offered many forms of
training, including Flintlock, which is conducted by Special Operations
Command Africa and focused on enhancing the counterterrorism
capabilities of nations in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Guinea,
Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.
“When the U.S. prioritizes tactical training, we overlook longer-term
goals that could create more stable governments,” said Lauren Woods,
director of the Security Assistance Monitor, which is a program of the
nonprofit Center for International Policy. “We need more transparency
and public debate on the foreign military training that we provide. And
we need to do a much better job thinking about the long-term risks —
including coups and abuses by forces we train.”
AFRICOM emphasizes that its security cooperation and “capacity-building
activities <https://www.africom.mil/what-we-do/security-cooperation>”
foster the “development of professional militaries,” which are
disciplined and committed to the well-being of their citizens. “U.S.
military training regularly includes modules on the law of armed
conflict, subjugation to civilian control, and respect for human
rights,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept.
“Military seizures of power are inconsistent with U.S. military training
and education.”
But coups d’état by U.S.-trained officers have become an increasingly
common occurrence in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in the region.
Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups
(and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries.
Last summer, for example, American Green Berets arrived in Guinea to
train a special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/africa/guinea-coup-americans.html?smid=tw-share>,
a charismatic young officer who had also served in the French Foreign
Legion. In September, members of Doumbouya’s unit took time out from
their ongoing instruction — in small unit tactics
<https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-special-forces-military-assistance-guinea-coup/>,
tactical combat casualty care, and the law of armed conflict — to storm
the presidential palace and depose the country’s 83-year-old president,
Alpha Condé. Doumbouya soon declared himself
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/world/africa/guinea-coup.html> Guinea’s
new leader and the U.S. ended the training.
In 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/mali-coup-leader-was-trained-by-us-special-operations-forces/2020/08/21/33153fbe-e31c-11ea-82d8-5e55d47e90ca_story.html>,
who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating
in Flintlock training exercises and attending a Joint Special Operations
University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, headed the
junta that overthrew Mali’s government.
“The act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with
U.S. military training and education,” Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton T.
Semelroth
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/mali-coup-leader-was-trained-by-us-special-operations-forces/2020/08/21/33153fbe-e31c-11ea-82d8-5e55d47e90ca_story.html>,
a Pentagon spokesperson, said at the time.
After staging the coup, Goïta stepped down and took the job of vice
president in a transitional government tasked with returning Mali to
civilian rule. But nine months later, he seized power again in his
second coup.
<https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/mali-coup-leader-assimi-goita-sworn-transitional-president-2021-06-07/>
Goïta wasn’t even the first U.S.-trained Malian officer to overthrow the
country’s government. In 2011, when a U.S.-backed uprising in Libya
toppled autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, Tuareg fighters in his service looted
the regime’s weapons caches, traveled to their native Mali and began to
take over the northern part of that country. Angered by the ineffective
response of his government, Amadou Sanogo — an officer who learned
English in Texas, received intelligence training in Arizona, and
underwent Army infantry-officer basic training in Georgia — took matters
into his own hands and overthrew his country’s democratically elected
government.
“America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said after the
2012 coup. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice
here.”
In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/coup-leader-in-burkina-faso-received-us-military-training/2014/11/03/3e9acaf8-6392-11e4-836c-83bc4f26eb67_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost>,
seized power in Burkina Faso amid popular protests. Two years earlier,
when he was a major, Zida attended a counterterrorism training course at
MacDill Air Force Base that was sponsored by Joint Special Operations
University and attended a military intelligence course in Botswana that
was financed by the U.S. government.
The next year, another coup in Burkina Faso installed Gen. Gilbert
Diendéré
<https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2015/09/17/amid-gunfire-military-in-burkina/23518247007/>.
Diendéré had not only taken part in a U.S.-led Flintlock
counterterrorism exercise, but he also served as a literal advertisement
for it, appearing in an AFRICOM photo addressing Burkinabe soldiers
before their deployment to Mali in support of the 2010 Flintlock
exercise. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/africom/4573643855/in/photostream/>
4573643855_562778d41e_3k
Then-Col. Maj. Gilbert Diendéré addresses Burkinabe soldiers prior to
their deployment to Mali in support of AFRICOM’s Flintlock 10 exercise
in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on May 1, 2010.
Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, Flintlock 10 Public
Affairs
In 2014, two generations of U.S.-educated officers faced off in the
Gambia as a group of American-trained would-be coup-makers
<https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/05/375141211/u-s-charges-two-americans-over-attempted-coup-in-gambia?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews>
attempted
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/gambia/11322107/Sandhurst-trained-officer-led-Gambian-coup.html> (but
failed) to overthrow another U.S.-trained
<https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/28/world/in-gambia-new-coup-follows-old-pattern.html> coup-maker,
Yahya Jammeh who had seized power back in 1994. The unsuccessful
rebellion claimed the life of Lamin Sanneh, the purported ringleader,
who had earned a master’s degree at National Defense University in
Washington, D.C.
“I can’t shake the feeling that his education in the United States
somehow influenced his actions,” wrote
<https://warontherocks.com/2015/01/the-dilemma-of-an-african-soldier/> Sanneh’s
former NDU mentor Jeffrey Meiser. “I can’t help but wonder if simply
imprinting our foreign students with the ‘American program’ is
counterproductive and unethical.”
In 2008, Stars and Stripes
<https://web.archive.org/web/20210126072334/https:/www.stripes.com/News/aziz-had-role-in-africa-training-1.81818>
reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against
Mauritania’s elected president, “has worked with U.S. forces that train
in the African country.” Arrested and charged with corruption after a
decadelong rule, Aziz was recently released on bail
<https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/mauritania-grants-bail-ailing-ex-president-amid-graft-probe-2022-01-07/>
due to ill health.
U.S.-trained coup-plotters aren’t strictly confined to West Africa.
Before Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi deposed Egypt’s first democratically
elected president, Mohammed Morsi, he underwent basic training
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324425204578597981624524800> at
Fort Benning, Georgia, (in 1981) and advanced instruction at the U.S.
Army War College (in 2006).
A 2018 study by the military’s go-to think tank, the Rand Corporation,
cast doubt on the notion that U.S. military training breeds coup-makers.
“[T]here is little evidence that overall [security sector assistance]
(measured in dollar terms) associates with coup propensity in Africa,”
according to the study, which was written for the Office of the
Secretary of Defense and did note that there was a “marginally
significant
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2400/RR2447/RAND_RR2447z1.appendixes.pdf>”
association in the post-Cold War period.
A year before, however, a study by Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval
War College and Jesse Savage of Trinity College Dublin in the Journal of
Peace Research, analyzing data from 1970 to 2009, found
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022343317713557> “a
robust relationship between U.S. training of foreign militaries and
military-backed coup attempts” despite the authors limiting their
analysis to the International Military Education and Training program —
“which explicitly focuses on promoting norms of civilian control.”
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