JOHANNESBURG: The United States sees Africa’s 54 nations as “equal partners” in tackling global problems, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in South Africa Monday.
“Our strategy is rooted in the recognition that sub-Saharan Africa is a major geopolitical force — one that has shaped our past, is shaping our present, and will shape our future,” Blinken said at the University of Pretoria in a speech detailing the Biden administration’s policies for Africa.
“It’s a strategy that reflects the region’s complexity, its diversity, its agency; and one that focuses on what we will do with African nations and peoples, not for African nations and peoples,” he said.
Blinken said that the United States and African nations “can’t achieve any of our shared priorities — whether that’s recovering from the pandemic; creating broad-based economic opportunities; addressing the climate crisis; expanding energy access; revitalizing democracies; or strengthening the free and open international order — if we don’t work together, as equal partners.”
South African academics and students responded warmly to Blinken’s speech, which was a broad declaration of US intentions toward sub-Saharan Africa. The United States is often faulted for overlooking the continent in recent decades, opening space for Russian and Chinese interests to make significant inroads.
The United States’ top diplomat is in South Africa as part of a three-nation tour of Africa including Congo and Rwanda in what is seen as a contest between Western nations and Russia to win support from African countries over the war in Ukraine.
Blinken’s tour follows recent trips to African countries by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and French President Emmanuel Macron.
South Africa is among many African countries that have taken a neutral stance on the Ukraine war.
Before his speech, Blinken met in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, with Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor. Pandor appears to have maintained her country’s refusal to criticize Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Instead, in a press briefing following the meeting, Pandor criticized the US and other Western powers for focusing on the Ukraine conflict to the detriment of other international issues.
“We should be equally concerned at what is happening to the people of Palestine, as we are with what is happening to the people of Ukraine,” she said.
Before the closed-door meeting with Pandor, Blinken had said that the United States’ good relations with South Africa would allow them to be frank in discussing their differences.
Many African countries have declined to follow the US lead in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some were among more than a dozen African governments that have signed security deals with the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian mercenary group that the US and other countries say is backed by the Kremlin.
Sub-Saharan nations also have been major recipients of Chinese investment through its “Belt and Road Initiative,” which supports infrastructure developments.
Blinken says US is ‘equal partner’ with African countries
https://arab.news/z23t9
Blinken says US is ‘equal partner’ with African countries
- US top diplomat is in South Africa as part of a three-nation tour of Africa including Congo and Rwanda.
Federal judge rules Kilmar Abrego Garcia can’t be re-detained by immigration authorities
- Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporting him, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
The Salvadoran national’s case has become a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.
The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, in Maryland, wrote in her Tuesday order. “From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from a gang that had threatened his family. By mistake, he was deported there anyway last year.
Facing public pressure and a court order, President Donald Trump’s administration brought him back in June, but only after securing an indictment charging him with human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, Trump officials have said he cannot stay in the U.S. In court filings, officials have said they intended to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia.
In her Tuesday order, Xinis noted the government has “purposely — and for no reason — ignored the one country that has consistently offered to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee, and to which he agrees to go.” That country is Costa Rica.
Abrego Garcia's attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, argued in court that immigration detention is not supposed to be a punishment. Immigrants can only be detained as a way to facilitate their deportation and cannot be held indefinitely with no viable deportation plan.
“Since Judge Xinis ordered Mr. Abrego Garcia released in mid-December, the government has tried one trick after another to try to get him re-detained,” Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote in an email on Tuesday. “In her decision today, she recognized that if the government were truly trying to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the United States, they would have sent him to Costa Rica long before today.”
The government should now engage in a good-faith effort to work out the details of removal to Costa Rica, Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote.
