Clean machine: troops on laundry duty at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti headquartersfor the US surveillance operation
Posted on 01/23/2003 4:32:38 PM PST by MadIvan
Clean machine: troops on laundry duty at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti headquartersfor the US surveillance operation |
America beefs up its prescence in a region seen as a terror haven
A PORTRAIT of Osama bin Laden, a bull’s eye marked in the middle of his forehead, is pasted on an upturned oil drum outside the commanding colonel’s offices at the new US support base here for anti-terrorist operations.
Camp Lemonier has been quietly established over the past few months at the end of a dusty road on the outskirts of Djibouti city. Surrounded by coiled barbed wire fences, watchtowers and huge sand-filled defence bags, it provides a desolate home to about 900 US troops, including special forces, army and Marine detachments, airmen and military police.
The camp is also the most visible sign of a much upgraded US military presence in a region it considers a haven for al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
Djibouti, the tiny fly-blown former French colony at the tip of a turbulent East Africa, once described by the French poet Rimbaud as “this awful, filthy country”, is perfectly placed for such an operation.
Situated where the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden meet, it is only an hour or so in a fishing vessel or motor-powered dhow across the Bab al-Mandab strait from Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral home and the site of a bomb attack on the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors, and an attack last October on a French oil tanker. Djibouti also has borders with Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, the latter a failed state where the US suspects that al-Qaeda sympathisers planned the 1998 bombing of its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and a suicide attack that killed 13 people last November at a hotel used by Israeli holidaymakers in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.
Last week Britain and several other Western governments warned their citizens about a possible Bali-style terrorist attack in the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, a favourite tourist destination in the Indian Ocean a half-day’s ferry ride from Mombasa.
Much of the US base’s activities are shrouded in secrecy. Humvee military vehicles race up to its entrance in clouds of dust and quickly disappear through raised barriers. Helicopters swoop in and out, ferrying supplies, equipment and personnel to warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden. Visitors, their approach monitored at a distance, are eyed suspiciously and rigorously searched before being allowed to enter. Inside, lines of air-conditioned military tents, many still unoccupied, and MASH-style hospital facilities, occupy areas of the camp’s 36 hectares (88 acres) and groups of fatigue-clad soldiers busily go about their duties. Tough reporting restrictions are enforced. Photography is banned.
Captain Will Klumpp said: “This is an expeditionary force. We do not want to set up permanent facilities. We want it to look as temporary as possible.”
Near by, formerly derelict buildings with new roofs appear to tell a different story. The base now has gyms and volleyball courts, and US contractors are said to have been retained to build swimming pools and other facilities. Brick shelters have been erected near the living quarters in case of outside attack.
“Force protection is one of our primary aims,” Captain Klumpp said. “We are here for a specific purpose, which means we take every precaution.”
The Americans first slipped into Djibouti just over a year ago, after the Government offered facilities. It took over Camp Lemonier, which had been largely neglected by the Djiboutian Army after it had inherited it from the French. Old buildings were quickly repaired or replaced, communications equipment was installed and defences were erected.
The troops occasionally venture into the nearby desert for live-fire training exercises. In December the base helped to orchestrate marine assaults on remote beaches a few hours’ drive up the coast.
With America’s might on show, a mixed force of more than 3,000 burst ashore, shocking impoverished local people who had not been warned of their arrival. The troops built rear combat bases, raced around in tanks and Humvees and peppered nearby sand caves before quietly slipping off to sea again.
Djibouti and American officials deny that the exercises have anything to do with training for a possible attack on Iraq. “Our activities and operations in the Horn of Africa are in no way connected to the situation in Iraq” is the official line of the US military.
It is eagerly repeated by Djibouti government officials, who say that their agreement with America does not allow their country — a Muslim state and member of the Arab League — to be used as a base for an attack on another country. Likewise, although nobody bothers denying that the CIA is in Djibouti, suggestions that it was used as the launchpad for an unmanned Hellfire “drone” missile attack on Yemen that killed six suspected al-Qaeda fighters on November 3, including Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, reputed to be a top bin Laden aide and the planner of the attack on the Cole, are rejected.
Mahmoud Ali Youssef, Minister for International Co-operation, said: “It was not fired from Djibouti — that would be against our agreement.
“I don’t know where it came from, but Djibouti cannot be used for attacks on other countries. The US has lots of ships all along the coast to prevent any one escaping from Afghanistan hiding in places like Somalia. It probably came from one of them.” He agreed, however, that Djibouti, one of Africa’s poorest countries, had no means of monitoring the Americans.
He hoped that the US presence would inject some badly needed money into the economy, but said that there had been little sign of it.
Washington recently sent to the area the USS Mount Whitney, one of its most high-tech command-and-control vessels, to serve as the headquarters of its new Horn of Africa task force, which covers Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Yemen. Rear-Admiral Donald Bullard, deputy commander of the task force, said that the Mount Whitney’s technological capabilities would be used to root out terrorists in the area, much of which lies beyond the control of central governments. “This is bad news, real bad news, for terrorists,” he said.
The task force’s arrival is seen as a symbol of renewed US commitment and re- engagement with an area it largely abandoned when an ill-fated humanitarian mission to Somalia in 1992 went badly wrong and resulted in the deaths of American servicemen in a shoot-out with Somali warlords’ militias.
Regards, Ivan
Which would be dismantled within 24 hours if a Democrat was elected to be the President.
Point Blank Reality.
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