Posted on 06/19/2022 12:07:48 PM PDT by robowombat
Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana? By Sri Lanka Guardian •June 16, 2022 •feature Vijay Prashad World View
In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.” His comments came after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation agreement with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed in May 2018. During a televised discussion, soon after the agreement was formalized in March 2018, Ghana’s Minister of Defense Dominic Nitiwul told Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, that Ghana had not entered into a military agreement with the United States. Pratt, however, said that the military agreement was a “source of worry” and was “a surrender of our [Ghanaian] sovereignty.”
A Ghanaian soldier greets a U.S. soldier from the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, during a field training exercise for the United Accord exercise at the Bundase Training Camp in Ghana in 2018. In 2021, the research institute of Pratt’s Socialist Movement produced—along with the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a dossier on the French and U.S. military presence in Africa. That dossier—“Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity”—noted that the United States has now established the West Africa Logistics Network (WALN) at Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In 2019, then-U.S. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said that a weekly U.S. flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus route.” The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is another name for a U.S. military base.
Now, four years later after the signing of the defense cooperation agreement, I spoke with Kwesi Pratt and asked him about the state of this deal and the consequences of the presence of the U.S. base on Ghanaian soil. The WALN, Pratt told me, has now taken over one of the three terminals at the airport in Accra, and at this terminal, “hundreds of U.S. soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving. It is suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities in other West African countries and generally across the Sahel.”
U.S. Soldiers Don’t Need Passports
A glance at the U.S.-Ghana defense agreement raises many questions. Article 12 of the agreement states that the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any regulations or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and inspection” and the Ghanaian government providing “unimpeded access to and use of [a]greed facilities and areas to United States forces.” Pratt told me that this agreement allows U.S. soldiers “far more privileges than those prescribed in the Vienna Convention for diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is their U.S. Army identity cards. They don’t even require visas to enter Ghana. They are not subject to customs or any other inspection.”
Ghana has allowed the United States armed forces “to use Ghanaian radio frequencies for free,” Pratt said. But the most stunning fact about this arrangement is that, he said, “If U.S. soldiers kill Ghanaians and destroy their properties, the U.S. soldiers cannot be tried in Ghana. Ghanaians cannot sue U.S. soldiers or the U.S. government for compensation if and when their relatives are killed, or their properties are destroyed by the U.S. Army or soldiers.”
Why Would Ghana Allow This?
The U.S.-Ghana agreement permits this disregard for Ghana’s sovereignty. Pratt told me that the political ideology of the Ghanaian government that is in power now has been to adhere to a long history of appeasement toward the demands made by colonial and Western states, beginning with Britain—which was the colonial power that ruled over the Gold Coast (the former name for Ghana) until 1957—and leading up to providing “unimpeded access” to the United States troops under the defense deal.
The current president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo, comes from the political ideology that the former prime minister of Ghana (1969-1972) Kofi Abrefa Busia also conformed to. In the early 1950s, Pratt told me, those following this ideology “dispatched a delegation to the United Kingdom to persuade the authorities that it was too early to grant independence to the Gold Coast.” This led to a coup in Ghana, where those supporting this ideology “collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the [then-President of Ghana] Kwame Nkrumah government on February 24, 1966, and resisted [imposing] sanctions against the South African apartheid regime in 1969,” Pratt said. The current government, Pratt added, will do anything to please the United States government and its allies.
Why Is the United States Interested in Ghana?
The United States claims that its military presence on the African continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. “There is no Chinese military presence in Ghana,” Pratt told me, and indeed the idea of Chinese presence is being used by the United States to deepen its military control over the continent for more prosaic reasons.
In 2001, then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group published the National Energy Policy. The contents of this report show, Pratt told me, that the United States understood that it could “no longer rely on the Middle East for its energy supplies. A shift to West Africa for [meeting the] U.S. energy needs is imperative.” Apart from West Africa’s energy resources, Ghana “has huge national resources. It is currently the largest producer of gold in Africa and… [is among the top 10 producers] of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world. It has iron, diamond, manganese, bauxite, oil and gas, lithium, and abundant water resources, including the largest man-made lake in the world.” Apart from these resources, Ghana’s location on the equator makes it valuable for agricultural development, and its large bank of highly educated English-speaking professionals makes it valuable for meeting the demands of the West’s service sector.
Apart from these economic issues, Pratt said, the United States government has intervened in Ghana—including in the coup of 1966—to prevent it from having a leadership role in the decolonization process in Africa. More recently, the United States has found Ghana to be a reliable ally in its various military and commercial projects across the continent. It is toward those projects, and not the national interest of the Ghanaian people, Pratt said, that the United States has now built its base in a part of Accra’s civilian airport.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
cuz they ain’t ghana leave...
What a silly little piece. The motivation for a US base is money. This article is written by a CCP source trying to scold us for doing the same thing they are doing in Africa.
That appears to be NATO Headquarters near Brussels. A place where no one works after five or on weekends. Amazing place.
“The US really is an empire.”
An empire subjugates the people of some locale, using them as labor and stealing the area’s assets like rubber, oil, diamonds, etc. An empire turns the subjegated lands into a protected market for its goods. The United States has conquered lots of places but hasn’t generally stayed unless they negotiate for and pay a fee for the land they use. The United States, until recently, has played the role of global policeman, thus protecting the shipping and cargoes of our allies. This was how the US defeated the Soviet Empire. The last move of that game was to bring China in on “our side.” Part of the deal was these “allies” got access to American markets. Because of the disparity in labor costs this meant lots of Americans lost jobs to their overseas competitors. But once the Soviets fell there was no longer any need to support this huge mission. The US has been withdrawing on a worldwide basis. This is allowing our former allies to fight among themselves. Japan and Korea have been suing each other and Korea has been seizing Japanese assets to pay for war crimes. (Despite a deal having been reached and paid off decades ago. It’s a political move by Korean politicians.) The point is that it is damaging to the American led order and...the US has done absolutely nothing. Had this happened during the cold war the US would have pressured the Korean government and the whole bruhaha would have gone away. S. Korea asked the Obama administration to handle the sinking of the Chonan by the North. Obama sent a stern diplomatic note. During the cold war the US would probably have doubled the sea patrols and flown in some anti missile systems.
The US has packed up and gone home. Our overseas footprint hasn’t been this small since before WWII. Some empire, eh?
Sun never sets on the US empire meme plz.
No good reason. Bring them home.
It is probably a bio lab.
Status of Forces Agreement covers the stationing of armed forces personnel without a VISA or use of a passport, e.g., Japan, The Netherlands, Korea, etc., as well as traveling on a leave status on military orders - no passport. This is just uninformed.
People will find out why with a decade or so.
All the blather from the previous two to three decades will
be forgotten, when these same people or their children ask
why the U. S. didn’t keep those access points knowing “this”
was going to happen.
Folks just never learn.
Even our own people don’t realize that the U. S. has been
far different than other nations, as they repeat that the
U. S. is no different than all those other nations.
They’ll find out.
The United States stations its military presence on the African continent having to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. We have never had more than 16K personnel in Ghana and it has been a joint exercise and training location for both countries for over 20 years. This year, the United States is investing over $20 million in training and equipment for the Ghanaian armed forces. We share both combat processes and their bases. We have no base of our own. At best, warehousing.
Wy69
Looking at a map of Africa, one sees that Gahana lies halfway between Liberia and Nigeria. Liberia was established by the U.S in the mid-1800s as a “return to Africa” home for freed slaves.
We had bases there during WWII as a logistical point and refueling point for US transport aircraft and bombers flying the “southern route” from the US-Brazil-Africa-North Africa & Europe.
Nigeria is an oil rich nation which has long been allied to the U.S. Current there are internal wars between radical Muslims and Christians over the control of the country, with may massacres of Christian settlements and church congregations by those Muslims.
Good post.
Out in the Indian Ocean somewhere
There’s a former army post
Abandoned now just like the war
And there’s no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
That’s what that old army post was for
—Paul Simon
Wakanda forever!!
Sounds like a good staging area to start shipping them back.
When I need experimental brain surgery, I know where I’m going…
Because we are governed by idiots?
The same reason we have bases all over the world.
Forward op centers for when you need them
And you might want to have a base here for contingencies. After all, “here today, Ghana tomorrow!”
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