Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?
(2001)–Willem Oltmans–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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NkrumahGhana became independent on March 6, 1957. Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) was the first head of state. He, too, joined the ranks of the nonaligned movement founded in 1955 by Sukarno in Bandung. Washington looked at the neutral nations with suspicion and hostility. Many us lawmakers considered these Afro-Asians Communists in disguise. For the invisibles Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Sihanouk, Bhutto and Nkrumah were leftist rabble-rousers, that could not be trusted. The more of these shady characters could be put out of business, the better off the free world would be. Never mind free elections or human rights. Fascists military dictators are much to be preferred over wishy washy leftists or fellow travelling Marxists, the idiotic professional spies reasoned. On February 26, 1966, General J.A. Ankrah announced a coup. A National Liberation Council had been formed. The Convention Peoples Party had been suspended. Nkrumah was out. Ghanian Daniel Amihia told the bbc that he had masterminded the coup and, he boasted, that he had been trained by the cia. President Nkrumah was at that moment with 22 man delegation in Hanoi and Peking. He wanted to quickly return to Africa, but landed March 2, at Conakry, capital of neighbouring Guinée because of threats to his life in Accra. President Sekoué Touré organised a mass rally in sports arena and declared that Nkrumah had become also head-of-state of Guinée. In his book Dark Days in Ghana Nkrumah wrote: ‘It has been one of the tasks of the cia and other similar organisations to discover potential Quislings and traitors in our midst, and encourage them by bribery and the promise of political power, to destroy the constitutional government of their countries. The us Embassy and the embassies of Britain and West-Germany were implicated in the overthrow of my Government.’Ga naar eind44 us Ambassador Franklin Williams made 13 million dollars available, including payment for three hired hands who were prepared to kill the President, if he dared to return to Accra. The former President apparently opened some Intelligence files when writing his book. He identified a number of cia activities in his region. In 1966, an attaché of the us Embassy in Somalia with the rank of colonel had approached Army officers and organised to deliver arms to them to arrange for a coup. In 1965, an attaché of the us Embassy in Cairo. Taylor Odell, was caught red-handed receiving confidential documents from an Egyptian cia agent, Mustafa Amin. Odell was expelled. In south Sudan, the so-called Azana Liberation Front was founded with cia funds, the purpose being to promote the separation of the south from the rest of the country and declare Azana independent. Also, between 1961 and 1964, the cia murdered a number of politicians | ||||||||||||||||||
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in Burundi, the last of them was Prime Minister Pierre Ngendandumwe. He was killed by an employee of the us Embassy, Gonzalve Muyenzi. In his apartment millions of cia money were found. The cia was deeply involved in a coup in Tanzania in 1964. Nkrumah wrote, that an entire book could be filled with proof of cia involvement in Africa alone. He compiled a partial list:
Nkrumah stressed in his book, that ten of the 38 independent states of Africa established military regimes as the result of coups. He did not relate each and every coup directly to the cia, but he wrote nevertheless: ‘The activities of the cia no longer surprise us. We have experienced many examples of the work of this organisation in recent years. (...) We know both the strength and the limitations of imperialist intelligence organisations. While being responsible for a great deal of unrest in Africa in recent years, they have not been as successful as many would have | ||||||||||||||||||
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us believe. This is partly, because they haven been frequently outwitted by the superior techniques and organisation of certain counter-intelligence services. As I write here in Conakry, I have just learned that five cia experts have arrived in Liberia to find out how I manage to communicate with my supporters inside Ghana.’ President Nkrumah also relayed an incident, during which us Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in June 1966 told a meeting of us business leaders, that President Sukarno, President Ben Bella and Nkrumah's own downfall would be followed by the overthrow of more leftwing world leaders. ‘He started to name them,’ the author reported, ‘but thought better of it, and ended his predictions with an enigmatic smile.’Ga naar eind45 Richard Nixon represented the us at the independence ceremony. ‘Kwame Nkrumah had been educated at the Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania’, he wrote in 1982 in his book LeadersGa naar eind46. Nixon continued: ‘I had not reckoned with the extent to which Nkrumah would prove such a genius. In fact, at that time, I found him very impressive both in demeanour and in what he said. Nkrumah professed a deep admiration for American democracy and all that it had achieved.’ Nixon presented him with a technical library as a gift. Nkrumah developed a vision for a United States of Africa, a torch recently taken up by Muammar el-Qaddafi of Lybia. In the mid-60s the price of cocoa - Ghana's principal export - collapsed. The economy ran into trouble. Nixon, and no doubt the invisible government in Washington, quickly changed their minds about the first President of Ghana. He did not run to Washington for help, and supported the newly established Organization for African Unity in Addis Abeba instead. He also supported other liberation movements in Africa and became a close friend of Guinea's Sekoué Touré. Nixon writes how Touré came to the us in 1960 and how he came across to the then vice-president as ‘a warm and charming man.’ Nevertheless, Tricky Dick changed his mind about Touré likewise, and noted he was anyway a Marxist, with the predictable bad result for his country Guinea. Nixon describes Nkrumah as becoming anti-Western, paranoid and promoting militant pan-Africanism. He then proceeds in one breath to draw a comparison with Sukarno. ‘When I first saw him in 1953, he spent most of our meeting talking not about the awesome problems on his own country, but about his territorial designs on Dutch New Guinea - or West-Irian, as the Indonesians call it. I was not surprised Sukarno's obsession with Irian was legendary. In Canberra, just a few days earlier, Prime Minister Robert Menzies had warned me to expect a lecture on the subject.’Ga naar eind47 Nixon portrays Nkrumah and Sukarno ten years after his own Watergate debacle as leaders who were not knowing what they were doing. What the former President of the us demonstrated was never to have un- | ||||||||||||||||||
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derstood the essence of the New-Guinea issue being the last province of the former Netherlands East Indies the Dutch had failed to hand-over to Indonesia when sovereignty was finally extended in 1949. It was more than understandable, that Indonesians - including the critics of Sukarno - were united in the desire, that Irian should be liberated from Holland. Apart from describing Sukarno as someone who had married at least six times, Nixon painted a picture of a leader, who in the end became the victim of a Communist coup in 1965. He followed the official Washington line, while he should have known better having been involved with the cia since the fifties up to the Watergate break-in. Although it sounds incredible, he concluded this passage comparing Sukarno and Nkrumah, by writing, ‘Together they illustrate one of the unfortunate truths about leadership: that those best able to reach the people on an emotional level often have the worst programs.’ Poor Nixon seemed to have forgotten, that he promised, running for the White House in 1968, he would end the war in Vietnam. I travelled for one week in New-Hampshire with him, when at each stop he repeated, that Eisenhower had taught him how he ended the war in Korea. He was going to stop the Vietnam conflict. Of course the war dragged on for seven more years. He and Kissinger even broadened it to Laos and Cambodia. It's quite remarkable indeed, that Prince Norodom Sihanouk is not mentioned at all, in this book as if he never existed. In The us Intelligence Community Jeffrey Richelson established that in 1985 several persons were arrested in Accra working for the cia.Ga naar eind48 Felix Peasah, a security officer at the us Embassy pleaded guilty. Theodore Atiedu, a police inspector in Ghana's Bureau of National Investigation did the same. Also convicted were Stephen Balfour Ofusu, Chief Superintendent of Police. Who gave government secrets to the cia and arranged taps on telephones of diplomatic missions and high-level government officials. Another Ghanian, Robert Appiah, a technician with the Post and Telecommunications Corporation was convicted of handing secret keys to a cia officer. There are no doubt other books on intelligence services arranging the demise of ‘unwanted’ African leaders other than Patrice Lumumba or Kwame Nkrumah, forth-coming. Former State Department official William Blum, has discovered and reported in Rogue StateGa naar eind49 how it happened, that on August 5, 1962, after Nelson Mandela was on the run for seventeen months from the Pretoria authorities, a car was flagged down near a roadblock outside Howick, Natal with a white man in the back seat and a black driver. The chauffeur was Mandela. The South-African regime had been tipped off by the cia. In 1986 the South-African press reconstructed how a cia officer, Donald C. Rickard, working undercover for the us Consulate in Durban, had tipped off Pretoria. On June 10, 1990, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported, that a | ||||||||||||||||||
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retired us intelligence officer revealed that within hours of Mandela's arrest a senior cia operative, Paul Eckel, told him: ‘We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch.’ President George Bush (senior) was asked in 1990, when Mandela was freed by President F.W. de Klerk, after having been locked up for 28 years, whether he would apologize for what the cia had done. His spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater replied: ‘This happened during the Kennedy Administration (...) don't beat me up for what the Kennedy people did.’ |
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