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.
Why not turn it into a prison for certain prisoners, black and white, whom we don’t ever want back in the USA. Once their prison term is served, give the Ghana government money to watch them in Ghana.
Still waiting for the list of all the honest rank and file FBI agents who resigned in protest against the Comey/Strzok/Paige era coup attempt(s) against President Trump.
Hannity assured us they were out there in big numbers.
And let's not forget the FBI led massacre at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco 29 years ago in the spring of 1993.
They slaughtered 76 Americans including 25 children and two pregnant women.
No due process for the dead but certainly one of the Fibbies proudest moments.
.
Same reason we should have kept Bagram and should have maintained a hard base in Iraq.
Russia now has justification to invade Ghana, demand it declare "perpetual neutrality," conquer some of its territory, and proceed to set up postage-stamp-sized territories within it that it will then declare are "sovereign states."
While they're at it, the Russians can then also "denazify" the Ghanaians.
There are literally dozens of Russians in Ghana who are being denied the right to make testimony in court or receive school instruction in their native language.
And Ghana isn't a "real" state, anyway! I defy anyone to show me a map of Africa from the 18th century that lists "Ghana" as a sovereign state!
Regards,
We have friends in the 32nd - they claim it is “safe” over there - I hope they are right
For a year. Suicide rate is high.
In the fwiw department.
5.56mm
The US doesn't have a political empire - but a military empire.
I don't.
Exactly
You might as well ask why the US has semi-permanent outposts in Chebelley and Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Entebbe, Uganda, Mombassa & Manda Bay, Kenya, Liberville, Gabon, St Helena, Ascension Island, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Dakar, Senegal, Agadez & Niamey Niger, and N’Djamena, Chad. Plus another 16 ‘temporary’ outposts.
But the short answer is uranium. Prospectors think Ghana might have a shit-ton of it.
Most likely, that “undisclosed” base is Chievres AB outside of Brussels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chièvres_Air_Base
Belgium is a postage stamp in size, so the possibility of the US having an undisclosed base there is slim to none.
BTW, we’re not alone over there. As of 2020 at least 13 foreign powers have a substantial military presence on the continent. The US and France are at the forefront of conducting operations on African soil. Moreover, private military groups are active in several conflict zones on African soil.
American soldiers are involved in training missions in 40 African countries. American special forces operate across east Africa in so-called forward operation locations in Kenya and Somalia.
The major contributors to training in Africa besides us, France, and China are India, Turkey, the United Arabs, and Russia.
For some observers it might seem like foreign governments are imposing their militaries on Africa, but, in fact, many African governments are keen to host them. Bilateral agreements with major powers generate income for African states. The opening of China’s military base in Djibouti is a case in point. Most of Djibouti’s economy relies on Chinese credit.
The presence of foreign military forces has also played a significant role in fighting terror groups. These include groups like al-Shabaab in East Africa and jihadists in Mali. This explains why several African countries are willing to turn to foreign governments for advice, intelligence and support. Thankfully we are one of them to try to keep a balance of power in Africa. Kind of a two way back scratch.
wy69
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.