By Sheriff Ghali Ibrahim, Abuja
It is pertinent to trace the ideals of democratic values, collective security for the international system especially under the auspices of the United Nations Organization, whose headquarters is located in New York City, the United States. The U.S. should, by all standards have been the custodian of democratic principles and values all over the world, as it has opposed dictatorship and anything out ordinary democratic institutionalism. Vladimir Lenin was absolutely right when he once asserted that “there are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.” This portends that the United States could transcends the boundaries of democratic values as there is no religion in politics.
Political immorality is not only to be thematically attached to terrorism financing, but may involve an act of state terrorism and any form of support to aggression against humanity. In an exemplification of the above, is what an Aljazeera Columnist, Belén Fernández, accounted for. That forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs. Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States. This also took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads. This, can be equated to what the IDF did in Gaza or other State’s immoral engagement with the world.
There are uncountable scenarios in which the United States has showcased political immorality in its engagement with the world. Some of such may include the following: the United States offensive, taking possession of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea through the Spanish-American War, and occupying Cuba; the United States occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 to collect debts contracted by Dominican governments, to mention but a few. This is also in line with the concurrent bid by the Trump administration to own Gaza, Canada, the strait of Panama and Gulf of Mexico. These actions are inimical to democratic values, but democratic tyranny and dictatorship.
On terrorism financing, it could be recalled that Hillary Clinton once publicly declared that the U.S. founded Alqaeda to serve American interest especially in places where it so wished. It is obviously not surprising for an American Senator to argue that such terrorist groups are being financed by the United States through its USAID programs including Boko Haram. Senator Perry is not from the opposition party (Democrat), but belongs to President Trumps party and came up with this revelation. He revealed this during the inaugural hearing of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency. Albeit the U.S. Embassy has denied such claim, but it remains relevant as it was not brought about by the Chinese, Africans or the Russians, but from an American Senator who is not from the Democrats but same political party with President Trump. In his words, Perry posited that: “Who gets some of that money? Does that name ring a bell to anybody in the room? Because your money, your money, $697 million annually, plus the shipments of cash funds in Madrasas, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS Khorasan, terrorist training camps. That’s what it’s funding,”
Boko Haram as a group has inflicted Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon a colossal loss of lives and property. It has resulted in the killing of over 300,000 children and displaced over 2.3 million, which caused refugee crisis, migration and food crisis.
In Illusions of Control: Dilemmas Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Erica Gaston, an adjunct professor at Columbia SIPA and head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, draws on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders. She unpacks the problems of attempting to control proxy forces, and demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces, which portrays political immorality and utterly derailed from democratic principles and values.
Gaston believes that many of the militias, rebels, and tribal or community forces the U.S. has supported come with past histories of grave human rights abuses, war crimes, and atrocities. Many may be part of extended criminal networks or linked to warlords, and thus represent more of a source of instability and conflict than a cure for it. Some had ongoing links with terrorist or insurgent groups. If the U.S. provided weapons, equipment, or other support to these groups, they might pass that support on to terrorist organizations, generating new security concerns and also legal liability under strict American laws about not providing “material support” to terrorists.
Funding terrorist groups is quite different from the Chinese initiative of global security which was launched in April 2022 by President Xi Jinping. The initiative is meant to contribute Chinese wisdom in training law enforcement agencies around the world in maintaining world peace and security. It entails peaceful settlement of conflicts and disputes and ensuring the security of the international system. This is obtainable by gathering strength and storm in sustaining the global security landscape. It is ideally embracing against funding terror groups which is the collective responsibility of the big powers and the entire sovereign states under the United Nations Organization.
Prof Sheriff Ghali Ibrahim is the Director, Center for Contemporary China-Africa Research in Nigeria and Head of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Abuja.
