Thomas C. Mountain

Thomas C. Mountain is an historian and educator who lived and reported from Eritrea from 2006 to 2021. He can be reached at thomascmountain at g mail dot com or you can follow him on Twitter at @thomascmountain

Bombing Khartoum; CIA’s Latest Attempted Coup in Africa

Published on
/

As I write the Sudanese Air Force is bombing Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum, an act of desperation really, because the war launched by the CIA backed coup attempt is not going very well for the coupsters. Reliable reports from Sudan say over 75% of the country is under the control of “opposition” fighters of the Rapid Strike Forces (RSF) with the head of Sudans National Intelligence surrendering along with a senior general and with another senior general being captured.

The CIA’s henchman, Sudanese Supreme Commander Gen. Burhan and self styled “Sultan of Sudan” was set on dismantling/crushing his main opposition, Gen. Hemeti, head of the RSF and preventing a civilian government from taking power from him, something Gen. Hemeti supports. Hemeti was the one who first pushed through the return to civilian rule after the former gangster President Bashir was overthrown in a palace coup by Gen. Burhan. Burhan has since staged another coup against the civilian government, and is the absolute ruler of Sudan today.

Apparently the CIA couldn’t get Gen. Burhan to act quickly enough to wipe out the RSF and arrest Hemeti, his main rival. The RSF, true to their name, struck first last week and the Sudanese Army under Burhan has been on the back foot from the get go.

The RSF has captured a long rumored Egyptian Air Force base in south Sudan, broadcasting images of Egyptian Air Force personnel and several Egyptian Air Force fighter bombers. This base was where the Egyptian military, whose salaries are paid by $1.5 billion in US funds dispersed by the CIA, were threatening to launch an attack on Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam if  Ethiopia didnt agree to give Egypt control of the Nile River’s water.

Gen. Burhan is well known for sending dozens of flights of heavy Antonov cargo planes with hundreds of tons of weapons to the CIA backed TPLF attempted coup against the Ethiopia government during the “ceasefires” the CIA forced the Ethiopians to accept during the war from 2020-2022.

Hemeti is supported by the Eritreans, from which he returned from a visit last month, and the Ethiopians, who have been threatened repeatedly by the Egyptians. Last year Hemeti visited Russian for an extended period and when he returned it turns out, thanks to a Burhan press conference, that Sudan and Russia had agreed to a Red Sea naval base for the Russian Navy. 

Burhan is the one who has been pressing for normalization of relations with Israel, something not popular with the Sudanese people but very much supported by the CIA.

Now Burhan has sent “his” air force force to bomb “his” capital city, something never before done in history. Questions are being raised about who is actually piloting the planes dropping high explosives on the citizens of Khartoum for most of the families of the Sudanese Air Force pilots live in Khartoum. Speculation is that Egyptian pilots are the only ones Burhan can rely on to carry out some pretty desperate acts, war crimes really, as his forces on the ground are being routed.

Hopefully this war, which came out of the blue and has developed rapidly will come to an end soon and the long suffering Sudanese people will be able to live in peace once again. Unfortunately, not if the CIA has its way, they want their henchman Burhan or no one, the US way or let all hell break loose. Happily, it looks so far that the latest CIA coup attempt in the Horn of Africa is being defeated. We will see what the future brings for Sudan. One thing is for sure, Eritrea and Ethiopia are not going to sit by and watch the CIA destroy peace in Sudan like they tried to do in Ethiopia.

Views expressed are the author’s own

You might be interested in

African Union; The Dream Vs. Reality

Published on
/

The predecessor of today’s African Union, the Organization for African Unity, OAU, was launched in 1963 with the glorious goal of uniting Africans to help liberate the continent from colonialism. Unfortunately, despite the dreams of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture and others, reality quickly showed its face and the dream turned out to be a fantasy.

Why do I say this? Because the OAU was founded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where the US-backed compradore Emperor Haile Sellasie regime was actively engaged in a counter-insurgency war against the Eritrean Liberation Front fighting for independence from…Ethiopia! To put it simply Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was the headquarters of the OAU which was formed for the purpose of ending colonialism in Africa all the while Ethiopia was killing Eritreans in an attempt preserve its control of its Eritrean colony.

Yet this hasn’t stopped all to many Africans and blacks in the west from continuing to propagate the line that the OAU, and the African Union that took its place were and are anti colonialist by every year celebrating African Liberation Day on the anniversary of the founding of the OAU.

Being that Eritrea is the only country in Africa that won its independence on the battlefield by defeating the Ethiopian ruler Haile Mengistu Mariam in 1991 and subsequently running Mengistu the butcher out of Ethiopia on the wings of a US military jet it is important to take a deeper look at Eritrea and its history of problems with the OAU and todays AU.

One of the best places to look at the corruption and bootlicking role of the AU is when it guaranteed the Algiers Peace Agreement between Eritrea and the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) regime in 2002. This took place after the TPLF regime had launched a war in 1998 in what was ultimately a failed attempt to re-colonize Eritrea. Despite major US help, both with funding, arms and intelligence in support of the  TPLF, the  western backed TPLF invasion of Eritrea was defeated by the Eritrean Defense Forces in 2000 at the battle of Tsorona.

After the defeat of the TPLF invasion followed by two years of negotiations a “final and binding” peace agreement between Eritrea and the TPLF was signed in Algiers on Dec. 12, 2002. The AU, alongside the EU, UN and the USA all promised in writing to enforce another “final and binding” agreement with UN sanctions if either party violated the deal. Part of the deal was to enforce a border demarcation between Eritrea and the TPLF, to be carried out by a supposedly neutral party overseen by the UN because the “border dispute” allegedly being the reason for Ethiopia launching its invasion of Eritrea in the first place.

Like what the world has witnessed in Ukraine regarding the war against the Russian people of the Donbas by the CIA coup government installed in Ukraine in 2008 the western powers had no intent in honoring the Minsk Agreement they “guaranteed”?

It turns out the AU really had no intention of enforcing the deal with the TPLF, following meekly in the footsteps of its masters in the west. What could the AU do, bite the hand that feeds it for the EU is the majority funder of the AU. And could the AU seeks sanctions against Ethiopia where it made it’s home from its birth and which it had help glorify with blatant falsifications of history claiming Ethiopia had never been colonized? 

The AU literally never lifted a finger to see the deal implemented and allowed the TPLF to continue to violate the deal until November 2020 when Eritrean fighters, at the request of the new Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed intervened in Ethiopia after the CIA instigated coup attempt by the TPLF in 2020. While destroying the backbone of the TPLF terrorist army Eritrea liberated the town of Badme and its surrounds, which had been awarded to Eritrea by the “final and binding” border demarcation deal later signed, again, with a promise of enforcement by the AU, EU, UN and the USA.

Today is should be clear for all to see that the purpose of the “final and binding” peace deal between Eritrea and the TPLF regime was not to bring peace to the Horn of Africa, just the opposite, rather to help the TPLF regime to lick its wound suffered in its defeat by Eritrea and consolidate its rule in Ethiopia while continuing to be the US policeman on the beat in the critically strategic Horn of Africa. 

And where is the AU in all of this? I guess you could say its silence proven golden for it has received billions of dollars from the EU and USA over the past twenty years for loyally keeping its mouth shut about the crimes committed by the TPLF.

Today, the AU leads delegations of African leaders to sit down with the criminals in the US government to talk about whats best for Africa? How the US is blackmailing Zambia and DRCongo into giving the US all of their cobalt and copper? How the US will not restore free trade access to the US with Ethiopia unless the CIA is given control over the supposed “investigation” into crimes committed in the war in Tigray from 2020-2022. If what the CIA through its mouth pieces in the western media has been saying is anything to go by, a whole cesspool of lies will be spewed about fabricated crimes by Eritrea and Ethiopia in Tigray. And the AU remains party to all of this, the judas goat leading the African sheep to slaughter in Washington DC.

There was a great dream involving the founding of the OAU but that dream quickly ran into the brick wall of reality and was still born at birth, never to actually do anything concrete to help bring about real independence from Africa’ former western colonial masters as well as the Ethiopian home-grown imperialists colonizing Eritrea.  Actually the opposite, the AU did what it could to help prevent Eritrea from achieving its independence from Ethiopia and beginning its historic leadership of Africa.

When it comes to the African Union its not about the dream, its all about the reality of a compromised, corrupt, subservient organization.

Views expressed the author’s own

Is Marxism-Leninism a Eurocentric, Racist Ideology?

Published on

One thing the Marxist-Leninist movement has never done is address how eurocentric, racist actually, they are. Why do I say this? Because nowhere in any Marxist-Leninist writings can you find any mention of African Genius, the best examples of which being the wonders of the Nile Valley, known by its Greek name as Egypt, though its inhabitants called their civilization Kemet, “Land of the Blacks”.

I doubt it was just plain ignorance, for what educated person going back hundreds of years has never heard of the Great Pyramids or the Sphinx or the Temple of Luxor, so spectacular that the word “luxury” sprang from it.

Maybe the Marxist-Leninists going back to Karl Marx, the father of their movement, thought those living in Kemet were actually white, something widely taught amongst historians up until today.

If not ignorance why is it there is a complete dearth of recognition never mind acknowledgement of the role Africa has played in influencing world civilizations amongst Marxist-Leninists?

Didn’t the Marxist-Leninists ever read the father of US History, the great Race Man W.E.B. Dubois, who in his 1949 masterpiece “The World and Africa” speculated that Kemet may have seen an early form of socialism being practiced. If the Marxist-Leninists didn’t read W.E.B Dubois aren’t they guilty of what Mao Tse Tung declared “no investigation, no right to speak”?

I have been fascinated by how such a powerful, revolutionary movement going back over 150 years could have completely missed African genius. I spent my early years as a revolutionary, part of the Maoist movement in the USA as a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA from 1975-1980 and never heard a single mention of African genius, or high civilization.

It wasn’t until 1990 that I began my own systematic study of Africa that I had my eyes opened, at last, thanks to DuBois, Ivan Van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, Basil Davidson, Asa Hilliard and many, many others. I went on to create and co-teach with Runoko Rashidi, co-Editor of Ivan Van Sertima’s Journal of African Civilization a course entitled “Africa’s Contributions to World Civilization” in 1993 so I pretty much grounded myself in African History.

I first started to wonder about the eurocentric, racist, really, nature of Marxism-Leninism when I read about Constantine Volney, whose work “Ruins of Empires” was a fundamental work of history that for the first time established Kemet as a high civilization created by black Africans. “Ruins of Empires” was so widely regarded that it went through multiple editions and translations. It was so popular that it was installed in the public section of the British Museums Library where Karl Marx spent many hours studying society as a part of writing his classic works.

I had to wonder, Volney published “Ruins of Empires” in the late 18th Century, and by the time Marx started his studies, it was a must-read for any respectable historian of Marx’s day. So I couldn’t help but wonder how Marx missed Volney and the early African Centered historical movement.

To make matters more perplexing Karl Marx’s nickname was “the Moor”, moor meaning black, due to his swarthy appearance resulting from his Sephardic (Moorish) Jewish family. How could Marx be known as a black man yet never mention Africa in anything he wrote?

Today, I have just about given up trying to debate the Marxist-Leninist movement about this, something you would think they would be eager to do since being called racists is pretty damning. But how could I not call them racist after they have spent a century and a half ignoring or ignorant of African Genius? I guess they would have to start to question to many sacred cows if they honestly took up my challenge on this question. It seems keeping their heads in the sand and ignoring their essentially eurocentric racist ideology is required if they are going to hold onto their hard-won beliefs. You could say in their case “Ignorance is Bliss”? Hell, black folk, especially Africans simply had no history, right?

Views are personal