Draft GPUS Platform Amendment Africa Americas Asia-pacific Europe

AFRICA

"Africa" is, to most of the world, the continent bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean, but, to the U.S. Pentagon, it is "Africa" as conceived by AFRICOM, the US. Africa Command. AFRICOM does not include Egypt, a U.S. client state and one of the world's largest recipients of U.S. military aid. Egypt, despite being on the African Continent, is included in CENTCOM, the U.S. Middle East Command, because it neighbors Israel.

The U.S. is the only nation in the world that divides the world into seven "commands," with a general commanding each; William "Kip" Ward, an African American, is the Army General commanding AFRICOM.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created AFRICOM, the most recent of the Pentagon's seven commands, on February 7, 2007. Rumsfeld's successor, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and President and Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama both support AFRICOM.

In December, 2007, 11 months after the creation of AFRICOM, Africa superseded the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.

The U.S. government's foreign policy in Africa is the projection of military force, through AFRICOM, despite diplomatic amenities and foreign aid distributed to the Pentagon's military allies in Africa, including most notably, Uganda and Rwanda, whose soldiers serve as U.S. proxies on the continent and beyond.

Though it may at times engage in humanitarian relief, AFRICOM exists, by its own claim, "to fight terrorism," but, in reality, to secure Africa's oil and other natural resources, which include food and mineral inputs demanded by industrial sectors in the U.S. and its Western, Anglophone allies. Those industrial sectors include its unparalleled military industrial sector, which relies particularly on the mineral resources of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of what the UN calls the most lethal conflict since WWI, with estimates of over six million dead since 1996 and the world's largest internal refugee population. (IDPs = internally displaced persons.)

AFRICOM secures African resources not in the interest of U.S. and Allied Western citizens, but in that of a multinational, Western, corporate elite.

GREEN SOLUTIONS

1. End the Pentagon's projection of military force in Africa.

2. End all covert U.S. operations in Africa, which continue to rob African people of their lives and natural resource wealth.

3. Support fair trade, local economies, local food and power production, and mass transit, in the United States, not only for the sanity and survival of U.S. citizens, but also to weaken the multinational corporate motives behind the scramble for Africa’s resources, now secured by covert operations and proxy war.

4. Stop training, arming, advising, and propping up African dictators like Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.

AMERICAS

ASIA-PACIFIC

EUROPE