மத்திய ஆபிரிக்காவில் ஒபாமா திறக்கும் அடுத்த உலக மறுபங்கீட்டு போர்க்களமுனை.

ஏகபோக முதலாளித்துவத்தின் மூன்றாவது உலகப் பொது நெருக்கடியில் இருந்து மீள்வதற்கு ஏகாதிபத்தியவாதிகள் உலக மறு பங்கீட்டுப் பிராந்திய யுத்தங்களை நடத்தி வருகின்றார்கள்!

சோவியத் சமூக ஏகாதிபத்தியத்தின் வீழ்ச்சிக்குப் பின்னால்

முதலில் கிழக்கைரோப்பிய நாடுகளைப் பங்கீடு செய்தார்கள்.

இரண்டாவதாக மத்திய ஆசியாவைப் பங்கீடு செய்தார்கள்.

மூன்றாவதாக மத்திய ஆபிரிக்காவுக்குள் நுழைகின்றார்கள் 

ஒபாமா திறக்கும் உகண்டா களமுனை இந்தத் தொடர் யுத்தத்தின் அடுத்த உலக மறுபங்கீட்டு போர்க்களமுனையே ஆகும்!

=புதிய ஈழப்புரட்சியாளர்கள்=

U.S. Deploys Troops in Pursuit of African Rebels

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has authorized the deployment of up to 100 combat-equipped U.S. troops to central Africa to help hunt down the leaders of a rebel force known as the Lord's Resistance Army.

A senior administration official said 12 troops have been deployed so far under what he called a training mission aimed at helping African forces find and kill Joseph Kony, the fugitive head of the rebels.

The U.S. forces will deploy to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"Although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense," Mr. Obama said in a letter to Congress released Friday.

The U.S. deployment will include special operations forces, defense officials said. Pentagon officials noted that U.S. forces are routinely deployed to Africa for training missions.

 Former U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin discusses the White House's decision to send up to 100 combat-equipped U.S. troops to central Africa to help hunt down leaders of a rebel force known as the Lord's Resistance Army.

The Lord's Resistance Army is believed to have killed, kidnapped and mutilated tens of thousands of civilians since the 1990s. Military officials said they believed Mr. Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, and other top LRA leaders are currently hiding the Central African Republic.

The LRA, which says it is a religious group, first emerged in northern Uganda in the 1990s but was driven out by the Ugandan military. Although Mr. Kony is thought to command just a few hundred armed loyalists, the LRA's mobility and the difficulties of the terrain has made the group hard to find, officials said.

Foreign Firms Angle for Uganda's Oil Reserves

by  Guy Chazan and Nicholas Bariyo|The Wall Street Journal|Monday, February 01, 2010

(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL), Feb. 1, 2010

A skirmish over an oil field on the shores of Africa's Lake Albert highlights Big Oil's intense interest in Uganda -- a rising star of African energy.

The battle centers on the Ugandan assets of Heritage Oil PLC, a small U.K.-based explorer, which is selling its stakes in the much-coveted Lake Albert Rift Basin. The area has yielded some of sub-Saharan Africa's largest onshore oil discoveries of recent years.

Big energy companies like Italy's Eni SpA, France's Total SA and China National Offshore Oil Co. all are vying for access to Uganda's oil wealth. Uganda's onshore oil is particularly appealing because it is relatively inexpensive to produce. That sets it apart from other frontier provinces, like the deep waters off Brazil's coast and the Arctic Ocean, where the majors require an oil price of around $60 a barrel just to break even.

Initially, Eni looked to be the likely winner, announcing in November that it was buying Heritage's stakes for $1.5 billion in cash and assets. But Tullow Oil PLC, Heritage's partner in the oil field, exercised its contractual right to block the sale and acquire the stakes itself at the same price.

Tullow's purchase, however, is subject to approval by the Ugandan government. The initial reaction was negative, with the country's energy minister saying the government didn't want one company to end up with control of the whole oil field and would prevent the sale if necessary.

Heritage and Tullow share ownership of two blocks in the oil field, while Tullow owns all of a third. Acquiring Heritage's stakes would give Tullow full ownership of all three blocks, covering 3,900 square miles, more than twice the area of Rhode Island.

The government's position appeared to soften after Tullow Chief Executive Aidan Heavey met with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala recently. Tullow said that once in full possession of the oil field it would sell half to either Cnooc or Total to help finance the construction of a refinery and an 800-mile pipeline that would carry the oil to world markets.

Such an arrangement would allow Tullow to control who it works with as well as concentrate on its core activities -- exploring for and pumping oil, rather than refining and transporting it to market.

Tullow also announced plans last Wednesday to raise around $1.6 billion in a rights issue to help it develop Uganda's oil.

Tullow now is the favorite to take the Heritage stakes, with Cnooc edging out Total as Tullow's most-likely partner, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Museveni met with Cnooc executives in Kampala last week and is expected to meet them again this week to finalize details, the person said. Cnooc and Total declined to comment.

Eni hasn't given up, however, and last week sweetened its package. The company's CEO, Paolo Scaroni, said in a newspaper interview that Eni would not only develop the Lake Albert field and build a refinery and pipeline to the Indian Ocean, but also would construct an electricity plant in Uganda and upgrade a railway line from Kampala to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. He said Eni would invest $13 billion in the "integrated development plan." Eni declined to comment for this article.

Tullow declined to comment on Eni's new offer.

What has attracted companies like Eni to Uganda is the one billion barrels of crude already discovered in the Lake Albert Rift Basin, a vast, oil-rich area close to Uganda's border with Congo to the west, and the huge untapped potential of the region. Tullow estimates that about 1.5 billion barrels, roughly the same amount as Yemen's oil reserves, remain to be discovered in the basin.

Uganda also is seen as more stable politically than many of its neighbors, though the north of the country is wracked by armed conflict between the army and a rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Uganda plans to produce around 150,000 barrels of oil a day in four to six years, most of which will be exported. For comparison, that is slightly less than the output of Brunei. The steady revenue stream from oil could radically change the fortunes of the east African country, one of the world's poorest

October 14, 2011

Obama Sending 100 Armed Advisers to Africa to Help Fight Renegade Group

By THOM SHANKER and RICK GLADSTONE NYTimes

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that he had ordered the deployment of 100 armed military advisers to central Africa to help regional forces combat the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity.

The deployment represents a muscular escalation of American military efforts to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, which originated as a Ugandan rebel force in the 1980s and morphed into a fearsome cult-like group of fighters. It is led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet known for ordering village massacres, recruiting prepubescent soldiers, keeping harems of child brides and mutilating opponents.

“For more than two decades, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa,” Mr. Obama wrote in a letter to Congress announcing the military deployment. “The LRA continues to commit atrocities across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan that have a disproportionate impact on regional security.”

The decision by Mr. Obama to deploy armed military advisers into the region was welcomed by human rights advocates who have chronicled the atrocities committed by Mr. Kony and his subordinates. But it also raises the risk of putting American military personnel in harm’s way in another region of the world while the United States is winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama wrote that he had decided to act because it was “in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”. He also wrote that the deployment was justified by a law passed by Congress in May 2010, the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, which favored “increased, comprehensive U.S. efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability.”

American efforts to combat the group also took place during the Bush administration, which authorized the Pentagon to send a team of 17 counterterrorism advisers to train Ugandan troops and provided millions of dollars worth of aid, including fuel trucks, satellite phones and night vision goggles, to the Ugandan army. Those efforts scattered segments of the LRA in recent years; its remnants dispersed and regrouped in Uganda’s neighbors. In the spring of 2010, apparently desperate for new conscripts, Mr. Kony’s forces killed hundreds of villagers in the Congolese jungle and kidnapped hundreds more, according to witnesses interviewed at the time.

Unlike the earlier effort, the 100 military advisers dispatched by Mr. Obama will be armed. They will be providing assistance and advice to their African hosts, Mr. Obama said, and “will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”

The initial deployment will be in Uganda, the president said, and the advisers will operate in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo “subject to the approval of each host nation.”

A senior Pentagon official underscored that the American military personnel would not be operating independently nor carrying out unilateral operations.

The official also said the United States had provided about $33 million in support to regional efforts to battle the Lord’s Resistance Army since 2008, an effort that has not been sufficient to guarantee that local security forces dismantle the group.

One specific effort has trained a light infantry battalion of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s military, with that unit now deployed in the Dungu region of northeastern Congo where the Lord’s Resistance Army has been operating.

The Special Operations forces assigned to the new mission “bring the experience and technical capability to train, advise and assist partner security forces in support of programs designed to support internal security,” the Pentagon official said.

“Our intention is to provide the right balance of strategic and tactical experience to supplement host nation military efforts,” the official said. “Ultimately, Africans are responsible for African security, but we remain committed to our partners to enable their efforts to provide for their own security.”

Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said his group had been advocating for such a deployment. Putting more skilled advisers in the field with the armed forces of these countries would be a significant improvement over the previous level of assistance, he said. “I would not suggest that U.S. forces should be fighting the LRA themselves,” he said, but “there are lot of things they can do with this kind of deployment that they weren’t able to do previously.”

Mr. Malinowski also said the Lord’s Resistance Army probably has only a few hundred fighters, “but they are incredibly vicious and have committed numerous massacres. It’s a group that seems to exist for no other purpose than to kill.”

Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 14, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled Tom Malinowski’s surname as Malinowsky.