U.S. Charges 3 in Drug Case With Helping Al Qaeda

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By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed narcotics and terrorism conspiracy charges on Friday against three West Africans they said were associates of Al Qaeda and a related terrorist group, marking the first time such charges had been brought against people said to be linked to Al Qaeda.

The men, who were taken into custody on Wednesday in Ghana and flown to the United States on Thursday night, were arrested after a four-month investigation in which paid informants working with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration posed as members of a Colombian terrorist group, according to court papers.

Federal authorities have long maintained that Al Qaeda has been involved in drug trafficking, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The two informants approached the defendants and sought their assistance in transporting and providing security for cocaine shipments as large as a ton from West Africa, through North Africa and on to Spain, according to the papers. One informant posed as a Lebanese radical who represented the Colombian group, the FARC, and the other as a member of the group.

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“Today’s allegations reflect the emergence of a worrisome alliance between Al Qaeda and transnational narcotics traffickers,” Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan said in a statement announcing the arrests. “As terrorists diversify into drugs, however, they provide us with more opportunities to incapacitate them and cut off the funding for future acts of terror.”

The three men in custody were identified as Oumar Issa, Harouna Touré and Idriss Abelrahman. They were charged with conspiracy to commit narco terrorism and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups — Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The court papers in the case, an 18-page criminal complaint unsealed in United States District Court in Manhattan, detail the international sting operation that ensnared the three men, all members of what prosecutors described as “a criminal organization operating in the West African countries of Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali.”

The group had close ties to Al Qaeda, which was to provide security for the last leg of the drug shipment’s journey through the North African Desert, according to the complaint.

The two informants met with the men several times from September to December to negotiate the terms and plan the shipments, sessions that were secretly recorded by the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to the complaints. The complaints said the informants also communicated with the defendants by telephone and e-mail as they made arrangements.

Mr. Touré initially cited a transportation price of $2,000 per kilogram of cocaine, as the men discussed shipments ranging from 500 to 1,000 kilograms, the complaint said. But he later upped the price to $10,000 a kilo, citing his own costs and expenses, including paying people along the route. While the informants initially balked, they eventually agreed, according to the complaint.

The three defendants identified themselves to the informants as associates of Al Qaeda and said they had provided similar services to the terrorist group in the past, officials said.

The men were set to be arraigned Friday afternoon before Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan.

A defense lawyer for Mr. Abelrahman, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said he was reviewing the charges.

“Mr. Abelrahman will benefit from the full panoply of rights guaranteed to him under the Constitution of the United States and the laws governing criminal procedure,” he said.

James M. Roth, a lawyer for Mr. Toure, declined to comment; Mr. Issa’s lawyer, Julia Gatto, could not be reached for comment.

The three men were charged under statutes passed in 2006 that give federal drug agents the authority to prosecute narcotics and terrorism crimes committed anywhere in the world if a link between a drug offense and a specified act of terrorism or a terrorist organization can be established.

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• Ghanaians linked to drugs, terrorism flown to U.S. for trial (cnn.com)

Guinea: September 28 Massacre Was Premeditated - Human Rights Watch

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In-Depth Investigation Also Documents Widespread Rape

October 27, 2009

(New York) – An in-depth investigation into the September 28, 2009 killings and rapes at a peaceful rally in Conakry, Guinea, has uncovered new evidence that the massacre and widespread sexual violence were organized and were committed largely by the elite Presidential Guard, commonly known as the “red berets,” Human Rights Watch said today. Following a 10-day research mission in Guinea, Human Rights Watch also found that the armed forces attempted to hide evidence of the crimes by seizing bodies from the stadium and the city’s morgues and burying them in mass graves.

Human Rights Watch found that members of the Presidential Guard carried out a premeditated massacre of at least 150 people on September 28 and brutally raped dozens of women. Red berets shot at opposition supporters until they ran out of bullets, then continued to kill with bayonets and knives.

“There is no way the government can continue to imply the deaths were somehow accidental,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This was clearly a premeditated attempt to silence opposition voices.”

“Security forces surrounded and blockaded the stadium, then stormed in and fired at protesters in cold blood until they ran out of bullets,” added Gagnon. “They carried out grisly gang rapes and murders of women in full sight of the commanders. That’s no accident.”

A group of Guinean military officers calling themselves the National Council for Democracy and Development (Conseil national pour la démocratie et le développement, CNDD) seized power hours after the death on December 22, 2008, of Lansana Conté, Guinea’s president for 24 years. The CNDD is headed by a self-proclaimed president, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara.

Human Rights Watch reiterated its call for full support for, and speedy implementation of, the international commission of inquiry into the violence as proposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to be led by the United Nations and with involvement from the African Union. Criminal investigation leading to fair and effective prosecutions of the crimes – through domestic efforts, but failing that, international efforts – is essential, Human Rights Watch said.

A four-member team of Human Rights Watch investigators interviewed more than 150 victims and witnesses in Guinea from October 12 to 22. Among those interviewed were victims wounded during the attack, witnesses present in the stadium, relatives of missing people, military officers who participated in the crackdown and the cover-up, medical staff, humanitarian officials, diplomats, and opposition leaders.

Killings at the Stadium on September 28

According to the accounts of numerous witnesses, a combined force of a few hundred Presidential Guard troops known as “red berets,” gendarmes working with the Anti-Drug and Anti-Organized Crime unit, some members of the Anti-Riot Police, and dozens of civilian-clothed irregular militias entered the stadium around 11:30 a.m. on September 28, sealing off most exits, following the firing of tear gas into the stadium by Anti-Riot Police. The stadium was packed with tens of thousands of peaceful pro-democracy supporters protesting the military regime and Camara’s presumed candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections.

There had been limited violence between opposition supporters and security forces during the course of the morning. In several deadly incidents, security forces fired at opposition members in an attempt to stop them from reaching the stadium. In response to one such lethal shooting, enraged opposition supporters set fire to the Bellevue police station.

However, witness accounts and video evidence obtained by Human Rights Watch showing the stadium crowd just before the shooting shows a peaceful and celebratory atmosphere with opposition supporters singing, dancing, marching around the stadium with posters and the Guinean flag, and even praying. Human Rights Watch has not seen any evidence that any opposition supporters were armed, and no security officials were wounded by opposition supporters at the stadium, suggesting that there was no legitimate threat posed by the opposition supporters that required the violence that followed.

Witnesses said that as soon as the Presidential Guard entered the stadium, its members began firing point-blank directly into the massive crowd of protesters, killing dozens and sowing panic. The attackers, particularly members of the Presidential Guard but also gendarmes attached to the Anti-Drug and Anti-Organized Crime unit, continued to fire into the crowd until they had emptied the two clips of AK-47 ammunition many of them carried. Since most of the exits had been blocked and the stadium was surrounded by the attackers, escape for the trapped protesters was extremely difficult, and many were crushed to death by the panicked crowd.

One opposition supporter, a 32-year-old man, described to Human Rights Watch how the red berets entered the stadium and began firing directly at the protesters, and how the killings continued as he tried to escape:

“They first began to fire tear gas from outside the stadium – many canisters of tear gas were fired into the stadium. Just then, the red berets entered from the big gate to the stadium. As soon as they entered, they began to fire directly at the crowd. I heard a soldier yell, ‘We’ve come to clean!’ I decided to run to the gate at the far end. As I looked back, I could see many bodies on the grass. I decided to try and run out of the stadium. At the far gate, one of the doors was open but there were so many people trying to flee, I decided to climb over the closed door…

“I ran toward the perimeter wall. Near the basketball court, a group of red berets and gendarmes from Tiégboro [Captain Moussa Tiégboro Camara, secretary of state in charge of the fight against drug trafficking and serious crime – no relation to the CNDD president, Dadis Camara] were chasing us. They fired on a group of eight of us, and only three of us were able to get away alive. Five of us were killed, shot down near the wall facing the [Gamal Abdel Nasser] University.

“We couldn’t get out there, so we ran back to the broken wall near Donka road. A group of red berets was there waiting for us, two trucks of them. They were armed with bayonets. I saw one red beret kill three people right in front of us [with a bayonet], so I wanted to run back. But my friend said, ‘There are lots of us, let’s try and push through,’ and that is how we escaped.”

One of the opposition leaders described to Human Rights Watch how he watched in disbelief from the podium as the killing unfolded below them:

“We went up to the podium and when the people knew the leaders had arrived, many more people came into the stadium, filling it up. We were just preparing to leave the stadium and tell people to go home when we heard gunshots outside, and then tear gas was fired. The soldiers put electric current on the metal doors by cutting down the electric wires overhead and encircled the stadium.

“Then they entered the stadium firing. They began firing from the big entry gate to the stadium. We were up on the podium and could see people falling down; it was just unbelievable. When everyone ran away, there were bodies everywhere and we remained on the podium.”

Witnesses also described the killing of many more opposition supporters by the Presidential Guard and other security forces on the grounds surrounding the stadium, which is enclosed by a two-meter-high wall. As protesters tried to scale the walls to escape, many were shot down by the attackers. The opposition supporters said they were also attacked by men in civilian dress and armed with knives, pangas (machetes), and sharpened sticks.

The evidence collected by Human Rights Watch strongly suggests that the massacre and widespread rape (documented below) were organized and premeditated. This conclusion is supported by the evidence, both from witnesses and video, that the security forces began firing immediately at the protesters on entering the stadium, and that the opposition protest was peaceful and did not represent a threat requiring a violent response. The manner in which the massacre appears to have been carried out – the simultaneous arrival of the combined security force, the sealing off of exits and escape routes, and the simultaneous and sustained deadly firing by large numbers of the Presidential Guard – suggests organization, planning, and premeditation.

Ethnic Dimension

During interviews, many Guineans expressed shock at the apparent ethnic nature of the violence, which threatens to destabilize the situation in Guinea further. The vast majority of the victims were from the Peuhl ethnic group, which is almost exclusively Muslim, while most of the commanders at the stadium – and indeed key members of the ruling CNDD, including Camara, the coup leader – belong to ethnic groups from the southeastern forest region, which are largely Christian or animist.

Witnesses said that many of the killers and rapists made ethnically biased comments during the attacks, insulting and appearing to target the Peuhl, the majority ethnicity of the opposition supporters, and claiming that the Peuhl wanted to seize power and needed to be “taught a lesson.” Human Rights Watch also spoke with witnesses to the military training of several thousand men from the southeast forest region at a base near the southwestern town of Forécariah, apparently to form a commando unit dominated by people from ethnic groups from the forest region.

Many of the Peuhl victims reported being threatened or abused on account of their ethnicity. For example, one woman who was gang raped by men in uniform wearing red berets described how her attackers referred repeatedly to her ethnicity: “Today, we’re going to teach you a lesson. Yes, we’re tired of your tricks… we’re going to finish all the Peuhl.” A young man detained for several days in the Koundara military camp described how a red beret put a pistol to his head and said, “You say you don’t want us, that you prefer Cellou [the leading Peuhl opposition candidate, Cellou Dalein Diallo]… we’re going to kill all of you. We will stay in power.”

Death Toll and the Government Cover-Up

Human Rights Watch’s research confirms that the death toll of the September 28 massacre was much higher than the government’s official toll of 57 dead, and is more likely to be about 150 to 200 dead. According to hospital records, interviews with witnesses and medical personnel, and the records collected by opposition political parties and local human rights organizations, at least 1,000 people were wounded during the attack on the stadium. Human Rights Watch found strong evidence that the government engaged in a systematic attempt to hide the evidence of the crimes. During the afternoon of September 28, members of the Presidential Guard seized control of the two main morgues in Conakry and prevented families from recovering the bodies of their relatives.

In the hours that followed, witnesses and family members said, soldiers, most wearing red berets, removed bodies from the city morgues and collected bodies from the stadium, then took them to military bases and concealed them. Human Rights Watch investigated more than 50 cases of confirmed deaths from the massacre and found that half of those bodies had been taken away by the military, including at least six that had initially been taken to the main Donka Hospital morgue.

For example, the body of Mamadou “Mama” Bah, a 20-year-old student killed on September 28, was transported to Donka morgue by the local Red Cross. The body disappeared and has not been recovered. Bah’s father described what he experienced to Human Rights Watch:

“The Red Cross took the body to Donka Hospital morgue, and I followed them myself. At the hospital, I spoke to the doctors and they told me I should come back the next day to collect the body. But the next day, the morgue was encircled by red berets who refused anyone access. We tried to negotiate with them, but they refused. On Friday, I went to the Grand Fayçal Mosque when they displayed the bodies from Donka morgue, but his body wasn’t there. It had disappeared.”

Hamidou Diallo, a 26-year-old shoe salesman, was shot in the head and killed at the stadium. A close friend, who was wounded, watched the red berets remove Diallo’s body from the stadium and take it away to an unknown location. Despite an extensive search of the morgue and the military bases, the family was unable to find Diallo’s body.

One witness inside the Almamy Samory Touré military camp described to Human Rights Watch how in the hours after the massacre, the military brought 47 bodies from the stadium to the camp, and then later that evening went to the morgue that he was told was at the Ignace Deen Hospital and collected an additional 18 bodies. The witness further stated that the 65 bodies were taken from the military base in the middle of the night, allegedly to be buried in mass graves.

Widespread Rape and Sexual Violence

The Presidential Guard, and to a lesser extent gendarmes, carried out widespread rape and sexual violence against dozens of girls and women at the stadium, often with such extreme brutality that their victims died from the wounds inflicted.

Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed 27 victims of sexual violence, the majority of whom were raped by more than one person. Witnesses described seeing at least four women murdered by members of the Presidential Guard after being raped, including women who were shot or bayoneted in the vagina. Some victims were penetrated with gun barrels, shoes, and wooden sticks.

Victims and witnesses have described how rapes took place publicly inside the stadium, as well as in several areas around the stadium grounds, including the nearby bathroom area, the basketball courts, and the annex stadium. In addition to the rapes committed at the stadium, many women described how they were taken by the Presidential Guard from the stadium and from a medical clinic where they had sought treatment to private residences, where they endured days and nights of brutal gang rape. The level, frequency, and brutality of sexual violence that took place at and after the protests strongly suggests that it was part of a systematic attempt to terrorize and humiliate the opposition, not just random acts by rogue soldiers.

A 35-year-old teacher described to Human Rights Watch how she was gang raped at the stadium:

“After the shooting began I tried to run, but the red berets caught me and dragged me to the ground. One of them struck me twice on the head with the butt of his rifle. After I fell down, three set upon me. One whipped out his knife and tore my clothes off, cutting me on the back in the process. I tried to fight but they were too strong. Two held me down while the other raped me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t leave them to do what they wanted. Then the second one raped me, then the third. They beat me all the while, and said again and again they were going to kill all of us. And I believed them – about three meters away another woman was being raped, and after they had finished, one of them took his bayonet and stuck her in her vagina, and then licked the blood from his knife. I saw this, just next to me… I was so terrified they would also do this to me.”

A 42-year-old professional woman who was held in a house and gang raped for three days described her ordeal to Human Rights Watch:

“As I tried to run from the firing, I saw a few red berets raping a young woman. One of them put his gun in her sex and fired – she didn’t move again. Oh God, every time I think of that girl dying in that way… I can’t bear it. As this happened, another red beret grabbed me hard from behind and said, ‘Come with me, or I will do the same thing to you.’ He led me to a military truck with no windows. In it were about 25 young men and about six women, including me. After some distance they stopped and the soldiers told three or four women to get out. Later they stopped at a second house where they told the women who remained to get out. I was immediately led into a room and the door was locked behind me.

“Some hours later three of them came into the room – all dressed in military and with red berets. One of them had a little container of white powder. He dipped his finger in it and forced it into my nose. Then all three of them used me. They used me again the next day, but after a while others came in, two by two. I didn’t know how many or who. I felt my vagina was burning and bruised. I was so tired and out of my head. The first three of them were watching each other as they raped me.

“I was there for three days. They said, ‘You don’t really think you’ll leave here alive, do you?’ and at times argued among themselves, ‘Should we kill her now?’ ‘No… let’s get what we need and then kill her.’ At times I heard another woman crying out from a nearby room, ‘Please, please… oh my God, this is the end of my life.’ On the last day at 6 a.m., the soldiers put a cover over my head, drove for some time, and then let me go on a street corner, completely naked.”

Commanders at the scene clearly were aware of the widespread rapes, but there is no evidence that they made any attempt to stop them. One opposition leader told Human Rights Watch how he was led out of the stadium by Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité, the commander of the Presidential Guard, past at least a dozen women as they were being sexually assaulted by red berets. He noted how Toumba did nothing to stop the rapes:

“I saw lots of cases of rape. The opposition leaders were taken slowly out of the stadium, so we saw a lot. As we came down from the podium, I saw a woman naked on the ground surrounded by five red berets who were raping her on the grass. I saw other naked women there being taken away by the red berets [to be raped]. There were even more rapes outside the stadium. Just outside the stadium, where the showers are, there was a woman naked on the ground. There were three or four red berets on top of her, and one had pushed his rifle into her [vagina]. She was screaming so loudly in pain that we had to look and see it. All along that passage, there were about a dozen women being raped. Lieutenant Toumba was right next to us and saw it all, but he didn’t do anything to stop the rapes.”

Responsibility for the Massacre, Sexual Violence, and Other Abuses

Based on the evidence gathered, Human Rights Watch found that the massacre and sexual violence committed on September 28 at the stadium appeared to be both organized and pre-planned. All those responsible, including those who gave the orders, should be held criminally accountable for their actions, as should anyone who tried to cover up the crimes and dispose of any evidence. That the killings, sexual violence, and persecution on the grounds of ethnicity appear to have been systematic suggests that this may have been a crime against humanity. As such, the principle of “command responsibility” applies. Those in positions of responsibility, who should have known about the crime (or its planning) and who failed to prevent it or prosecute those responsible, should be held criminally responsible.

Human Rights Watch believes that independent criminal investigations leading to the identification and prosecution of those responsible, including those liable under command responsibility, are urgently needed. Among those whose possible criminal responsibility for the massacre and sexual violence should be investigated are:

• Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, president of the CNDD: While Camara was not believed to have been present at the stadium on September 28, he was involved in trying to prevent the protest. All witness accounts said killings were carried out by members of the Presidential Guard, which Camara ultimately commands, and that the person in command of the red berets at the stadium was Camara’s personal aide de camp and head of his personal bodyguard, Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité. Evidence suggests that the Presidential Guard at the stadium came there from the Alpha Yaya Diallo military camp where Camara is based. Further, there is no evidence that Camara has initiated any proceedings to discipline or hold accountable any of his subordinates directly implicated in the massacre and rapes.

• Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité: Many witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch have stated that Toumba was physically present at the stadium and in direct command of the Presidential Guard that carried out the massacre and widespread sexual violence there. There is no evidence that he made any attempt to stop troops from carrying out the killings or the sexual violence.

• Lieutenant Marcel Kuvugi: Kuvugi is a deputy to Diakité and sometimes serves as Camara’s personal driver. Witnesses, including several opposition leaders, have said he violently attacked and repeatedly threatened to kill the political opposition leaders present at the stadium. The political leaders said that when they were taken from the stadium to a clinic for first-aid treatment, Kuvugi threatened to shoot them if they got out of the car and to throw a grenade at them, keeping them from getting medical treatment.

• Captain Claude “Coplan” Pivi, minister for presidential security: There are conflicting reports about whether Pivi was present at the stadium during the massacre. Witnesses have alleged that he participated in attacks on the homes of opposition leaders on the evening of September 28 and in the violent attacks on opposition-dominated neighborhoods in the following days.

• Captain Moussa Tiégboro Camara: As secretary of state in charge of the fight against drug trafficking and serious crime, Tiégboro commands the elite gendarme unit that took part in the massacre at the stadium. Witnesses have stated that Tiégboro was present. Witnesses have also said the gendarmes made several attempts to stop the protesters before they reached the stadium, in a few instances firing into the crowds and killing at least three protesters. Witnesses have stated that the gendarme unit then participated in the massacre at the stadium, though its members were less frequently implicated in murder and rape than were the Presidential Guard. At least 72 protesters were detained in the custody of the gendarme unit following the massacre, and those held by the unit said they were severely mistreated.

Need for an International Commission of Inquiry and Criminal Accountability

Due to the serious nature of the crimes committed by Guinea’s security forces, particularly the Presidential Guard, on September 28 and on the days that followed, there should be a strong response from the international community. Human Rights Watch therefore calls upon the African Union, ECOWAS, the European Union, and the United Nations to:

• Support fully the international commission of inquiry into the events of September 28 proposed by ECOWAS and already established by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to ensure that it immediately has the resources to carry out its investigation and promptly publish its results, and urge Guinea’s authorities to cooperate fully with this inquiry.

• Strongly urge Guinean authorities to ensure that prompt, independent, fair, and open criminal investigations take place into the crimes and their cover-up, leading to the fair and effective prosecution of those allegedly responsible in accordance with international standards, including those who gave orders or who are liable under command responsibility. Should the Guinean authorities fail to ensure such investigations and prosecutions, the Guinean government, the AU, ECOWAS, EU, and UN should fully support international investigations and prosecutions, including by the International Criminal Court (ICC) if the requirements of its statute are met. Guinea is a state party to the ICC, which gives the court jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed on its territory. Following the violence on September 28, the ICC prosecutor indicated that Guinea is under preliminary examination by his office. Preliminary examination is a phase that may precede the opening of an investigation.

Human Rights Watch plans to release a full-length report on its findings. Human Rights Watch is now releasing a summary of its core findings because of the gravity of the abuses committed and the need for immediate international action to bring the perpetrators of the abuses to justice.

For African Immigrants, Bronx Culture Clash Turns Violent - NYTimes.com

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By SAM DOLNICK

The storefronts on a stretch of Webster Avenue in the South Bronx tell the story of local shifts as well as any census: a Senegalese-run 99-cent store, an African video store, an African-run fast-food spot, a mosque, several African restaurants.

The owner of Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., named for the coalition of West African nations, envisioned it as a community hub in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont, where Americans would try his wife’s cassava soup and realize it’s not so foreign after all. But a year in, the owner, Mohammed M. Barrie, said he could count the number of American patrons on one hand.

Meanwhile, he and his customers have been taunted, he said, and his restaurant’s window urinated on. Someone tried to break into a diner’s car. Then there is the bullet hole in the front window, a mark from a gunshot through the window late one night last summer.

“Those people, they don’t respect African people,” said Mr. Barrie, a Sierra Leone native who settled in the United States in 1998. “I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, they still ...” He trailed off.

Down the block, Muhammed Sillah sat in front of the tiny Al Tawba mosque, eyeing the jungle gym across the street and remembering when he used to let his children play outside.

“Spanish kids, American kids — but no African kids,” said Mr. Sillah, a Gambian mechanic raising five children in Claremont. “We’re scared.”

Their fear and frustration are shared by many local West African immigrants, whose fast-growing presence in the neighborhood — and in the city over all — has been accompanied by increasing tensions with the local black American residents.

“They think they’re better than black people,” James Carroll, a retired Army specialist standing in front of a busy convenience store, said of the West African immigrants. “We’re supposed to be one community — we’re supposed to be able to get along — but they don’t give it a chance.”

Some of the tension can be attributed to cultural differences that all immigrants face, though the West Africans in Claremont, as conservative Muslims, have the added challenge of adjusting to a post-9/11 New York. But resentment and mistrust has escalated to actual violence, and, they say, left them feeling under siege.

After reports of nearly two dozen attacks on West African immigrants in the last two years, community leaders reached out to the police, who interviewed 17 Africans in the neighborhood and filed 11 criminal complaints. Two of those were deemed hate crimes, including an attack in June that left a Gambian immigrant hospitalized for eight days. They have made no arrest in either bias case, but a police mobile truck with a video camera now stands outside the mosque.

Claremont straddles the 44th and 42nd Precincts, two of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. This year, there have been 319 robberies in the 44th Precinct and 237 assaults in the 42nd. At the Butler Houses, part of a complex of housing projects that loom over the neighborhood, police sirens provide a background soundtrack, and residents of all colors and nationalities caution against walking around at night.

But the West Africans say the attacks on them are calculated. “It’s prejudice,” said Dembo Fofana, who said a beating in June by 10 to 15 men left him with broken ribs and internal bleeding. “It’s because we’re African, and we’re Muslim.”

Mr. Fofana, who came to this country 21 years ago, has not returned to his job at a bakery since the assault. He stays home, recovering, receiving disability checks and caring for his five children.

“There’s a lot of tension,” he said. “Just yesterday, someone said, ‘What would you think if I came to Africa and tried to take your property?’ I told him, ‘Brother, I’m not taking anything from you. I’m just trying to live my life.’ ”

The African population in the Bronx has grown considerably in recent years: the census reported 12,063 sub-Saharan Africans in 1990, while the most recent census estimate was 61,487.

In the community district that includes Claremont, black Americans made up 44 percent of the population, according to 2000 census figures, with 52.9 percent of the area Hispanic. African immigrants were nearly 10 percent of the population, a number likely to be much higher in the 2010 census.

The Africans in Claremont hail mainly from poor, French-speaking countries: Guinea, Mali, Senegal. Like immigrants across New York, many are here illegally, working long hours for little pay. Many work as taxi drivers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers — jobs that keep them on the street late at night.

But some say the Muslims deliberately hold themselves apart. A 37-year-old American man who gave his name as Dre pointed to the pavement in front of the mosque where the African men, easily identifiable in their beards and skullcaps, gather each afternoon. “If you don’t give praise to Allah, don’t go there,” he said. “It’s just like Afghanistan.”

Kantara Baragi, the imam of the Al Tawba mosque, acknowledges that insularity is part of the problem. “We don’t hang around,” said Mr. Baragi, whose delicate frame nearly disappears inside his long, flowing robes. “We just go to work. We don’t have a relationship with people here. They don’t know us.”

So community leaders organized two meetings this summer with police officials, politicians, community board members and housing association leaders. The goal, Mr. Baragi said, was “to let them know us so they don’t look at us like strangers.”

Zain Abdullah, an assistant professor of religion, race and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia, says it is common for African immigrants to suffer harassment when they settle in traditionally black neighborhoods in big cities, like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia.

“Many African-Americans feel that the influx of Africans coming in represents a kind of invasion,” he said. “Culturally, African-Americans have always imagined themselves as Africans, or at least of African descent, but they might have never encountered Africans from the continent. The actual encounter is shocking.”

Mr. Baragi, the imam, says he tries to accommodate his neighbors. His mosque, which blends in with the other storefronts, does not sound the call to prayer through speakers because “we don’t need to force everyone to hear what we’re doing.”

Instead, five times a day, from the sidewalk or, when it is cold, from behind the front door, a man from Al Tawba sings the call in a voice drowned out by the rumbling traffic.

Down the block at Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., a young man walked in last week wearing a Yankees hat tilted askew, an oversize military-style jacket and baggy pants. He looked like any member of the crowd hanging out in front of the Butler Houses, but Fofana Alhusane’s outfit was calculated, a camouflage to hide his Gambian roots.

“African clothes are dangerous,” he said. “I used to wear them, but I saw a few people get beat up, so now I wear New York clothes.”

Lost Treasures of Timbuktu - Time

Image by Robert Goldwater Library via Flickr

by Vivienne Walt

Stepping through a low doorway into his small house, Fida Ag Mohammed sits at a table and pats a pile of books in front of him. Even in the dim light it's clear that these are no ordinary volumes. The books are covered with intricately hand-tooled sheep- or goatskin; inside, hundreds of pages of yellowed paper are filled with Arabic calligraphy — the painstaking penmanship of Mohammed's forebears centuries ago. "One of my ancestors from the 12th century began our family library," Mohammed says. "There are hundreds of collections like this."

Those collections — stashed in libraries, locked away in closets or buried in the desert sands — have been preserved, in large part, by Timbuktu's isolation from the rest of the world. Landing in this blisteringly hot Malian town in the southwestern corner of the Sahara feels a little like arriving at the end of the earth. Dirt tracks melt into the featureless desert sands. Chickens peck in the shade between mud-walled houses. Little wonder that Timbuktu is a byword for remoteness. (Read: "Out of Africa: Saharan Solar Energy".)

But Timbuktu's manuscripts might just change that. The books date from between the 14th and 16th centuries, a time when the town was a thriving trading hub and intellectual center for West Africa. Now, scared that Timbuktu's 50,000 or so surviving books might disintegrate or be sold off to foreign collectors, African and Western organizations are racing to salvage the treasures, preserving them from the ravages of climate, dust and the passage of hundreds of years. Millions of dollars have been spent in laborious conservation and cataloguing of the works. A sleek new museum, completed last April, is scheduled to open to the public in November. The museum will display tens of thousands of Timbuktu's books to the world, and, its backers hope, shatter any lingering notion that Africa has no historic literary tradition of its own. (Read: "The U.N.'s World Digital Library".)

There is a catch, though. As Timbuktu opens to outsiders and word of its treasures spreads, so too does the interest in the books from outside collectors. In some ways, saving these old manuscripts could imperil them further. In decades past only the hardy visited Timbuktu; the journey required days of travel up the malaria-infested Niger River. Today, dozens of tourists arrive several times a week on small commercial planes from Bamako, the capital of the former French colony. Timbuktu has become a favorite jumping-off point to explore the world's biggest desert. As the modern world rushes in, attitudes among Timbuktu's youth — the generation who will take custody of all those precious manuscripts — is changing fast. Entertainment in Timbuktu these days includes sitting under the stars watching European football matches on satellite television. "This generation has the Internet, they see movies, they go away to study," says Mohammed, who is astonished at the changes he has seen in his 42 years. To look after the books "we choose a child who can take care of the manuscripts: someone who's always going to stay here." But kids keep leaving, the world keeps rushing in. Timbuktu's books have survived centuries of isolation. Can they survive their modern-day fame?

A Rush to Save the Treasures
Sitting at a junction of the Sahara's historic commercial routes on a lazy bend of the Niger River, Timbuktu used to be a hectic crossroads where gold traders heading north met herders and salt merchants trekking south across the desert. The city's lucrative trade fueled Mali's empires as well as a rich ethnic blend of black Africans and Mediterranean people, and an intellectual ferment with dozens of Koranic schools. Refugees from the Inquisition in Spain brought their libraries with them, and soon began writing and buying more books. Timbuktu's literary output was enormous, and included works covering the history of Africa and southern Europe, religion, mathematics, medicine and law. There were manuscripts detailing the movement of the stars, possible cures for malaria and remedies for menstrual pain. "I have here my family's whole history," says Ismael Diadié Haidara, whose ancestors carried their books to Timbuktu from Toledo, Spain when they fled religious persecution in 1467, and later wrote and purchased thousands more. "Families which were exiled, which had no country, had their libraries. It was people's security. They could say, 'This is where we come from.' "

About half the surviving works — some illuminated in gold and crimson, others illustrated with maps — are intact. But even the best works are fragile, the pages brittle, the covers damaged. "There are a lot of problems with the manuscripts," says Timbuktu's imam Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, 62, who has bought several manuscripts from locals who need the cash and sense they might otherwise lose them altogether. "Houses collapse in the rain. The termites eat them. People borrow them and never bring them back."

Malian researchers were amazed at what they found when they began riding camels through the Sahara in the 1970s in search of older works. "We were totally astonished by the volume of manuscripts. There were boxes and boxes of them from the 16th and 17th centuries," says Mahmoud Zouber, who in 1976 became the first director of Timbuktu's Ahmed Baba Institute, the main government-run research center, and who is now counselor on Islamic affairs to Mali's President. Zouber says he immediately realized the manuscripts' primary source importance. "Colonizers had always argued that they were here to civilize Africa," he says. "But there were many points of light. Clearly Africa was not living in obscurity."

The growing sense that the manuscripts are tangible proof of Africa's sophisticated history has inspired a series of projects to restore, conserve and keep them in Mali. A few of the 32 family libraries in Timbuktu have received foreign funding from institutions such as the Ford Foundation or governments such as those of Spain, Norway and Dubai. Six years ago, South Africa's government began the museum project to house the Ahmed Baba Institute's huge collection. Until now there has been no building in Timbuktu with the space or sophisticated temperature control in which to keep old documents. Curators hope the new building will persuade locals to entrust their collections to Mali's government, by loaning or selling them to the museum. "It inspires confidence in people," says Riason Naidoo, who led the Timbuktu project for South Africa.

The End of Isolation
The flurry of projects and interest has boosted Timbuktu's tourism trade. The driver who meets me at the tiny airport introduces himself (in perfect English) as "Jack — like Jack Bauer [from television's 24]." Crowds of Europeans converge every January to attend the musical Festival of the Desert in nearby Essakane. And young locals — armed with French and English — ply their trade as guides for adventure tour groups. (See pictures of the Festival au Desert in Mali.)

As news of the manuscripts has filtered out over the past few years, another group of visitors has begun arriving: antiques collectors and dealers looking to snap up rare and valuable treasures at bargain prices. Locals say the number of collectors has increased markedly over the past year. The village of Ber, an hour's drive from Timbuktu across the blazing sand and past boys leading donkeys that haul spindly thorn branches home for firewood, might seem remote and protected. But when I arrived there in May, collectors had recently visited in search of manuscripts, according to locals. "Since April, people have descended on the village from Libya, Burkina Faso, Morocco," says Mohammed Ag Mahmoud, 83, the imam of the tiny community of mostly Tuareg tribesman.

Preserving the documents in normal times is not easy: a flood flattened one house in Ber last October, obliterating more than 700 manuscripts. Mahmoud says his family's collection of thousands of manuscripts include many with termite damage. One of his sons, Omar Ag Mohammed, shows me about 30 of the books, which are kept stashed in a rickety wooden closet in his small house. The most cherished volumes are not here, but buried in the desert. "We use ashes to protect them from the termites," he tells me. "Then we build a dome on top of them, so we know where to find them."

But the real threat comes from people — both outsiders and insiders. Ber might at first seem unchanged by modern life. Tuareg traders still arrive on camel, bearing giant bricks of salt which they transport across the Sahara for weeks — just as traders did centuries ago when the area's manuscripts were originally written. In Mahmoud's mind, too, local attitudes remain unchanged. Locals remain fiercely distrustful of outsiders, he says, including Mali's government in Bamako, with which locals have been at odds for years. Many people still jealously guard family heirlooms as a tangible form of security. "We won't sell our manuscripts, even if you offer us billions. They will be left to the children who will look after them. We know which those are."

And yet younger Malians, even in Ber, deep in Mali's remote north, are very different from their parents' generation. Few can read the manuscripts' old Arabic script, and some are beginning to ignore long-held taboos against selling them. When I visit Essayouti, Timbuktu's imam, at home, he shows me four 
 15th century leather-bound manuscripts that locals had sold him the day before for about $200. Many locals, he says, simply need the money, or don't know who will next look after the books. "We are trying to explain to each new generation why these are important," he says, peeling back the pages of one of the tomes. "We tell them to pass them along through the generations. But many young people have no use for them. There are some who will see them as an easy way to make money."

If Timbuktu's children decide to sell the manuscripts, there will be nothing to stop them. Unlike antiquities laws which protect old carvings, for example, Mali has no law barring people from taking manuscripts out of the country. As international interest in the works grows, so too could their value on the world market, according to some experts. In 1979, Zouber, the President's counselor, bought 25 Timbuktu manuscripts from the daughter of a former French diplomat who had been stationed in Mali and had taken them with him when he left; Zouber tracked her down in Cannes and paid about $25,000 for the lot. "Now they're worth perhaps 10 times that amount," he says.

Such sums might be a great temptation to a generation that has so far seen little material benefit from its heritage. Fida Ag Mohammed says many elders still favor passing manuscripts down from father to son. "Each generation must appoint one youth to take care of them," he explains. "It has to be someone who will never leave." But as young Malians grow more modern and more mobile, getting them to stay may prove difficult.

Recession in the West Cuts Off An Economic Pipeline in Ghana

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

ADUASE, Ghana -- When the U.S. housing crash triggered economic chain reactions around the world, one ended in a lush forest near this village, where on a recent day Emmanuel Awatey was tapping his machete on a log that he very much wanted to chop up.

In previous years, Awatey would have done just that, and then carried the wood on his head to the red dirt road nearby. A truck there would have ferried it three hours to the Tekura handicrafts workshop in Accra, Ghana's capital, where it might have been carved into a stool by an artisan, then shipped duty-free to the United States, then sold at Cost Plus World Market for display in an American home.

But the U.S. housing market and the global economy collapsed. And so has work for Awatey, the carvers and others working what had been a thriving pipeline from Ghanaian rainforest to American retail.

"If work comes tomorrow, we will head to the forest," said Awatey, 44, a sinewy subsistence farmer who, like others in his village, used to make as much as $25 a week chopping and carrying cedrela wood for Tekura. "But it all depends on the ones who bring the work."

'Wiping Out' the Vulnerable

The financial crisis has checked demand for African commodities, slowing the continent's economies. Less visibly, however, it has also stunted small African exporters who had become fledgling trade success stories -- and micro-level poverty busters -- in a region often associated with gloom.

In many cases, these exporters were lifted by a decade-old U.S. program meant to promote economic development through duty-free access to American markets. Now a U.S.-triggered meltdown is erasing many of the gains.

"We had small- and medium-sized businesses that had so much hope. They invested capital, they took loans. And the rug has been pulled out from under them," said Rosa Whitaker, a former assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa and architect of the program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA. "It's wiping out some of the world's most vulnerable people."

In the first quarter of this year, AGOA exports from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States, including oil, plummeted 59 percent, while non-oil exports such as textiles and agricultural products dropped 22 percent.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is set to discuss the program, which expires in 2015, at a forum Wednesday in Kenya as part of her seven-country trip to Africa.

Ghana's overall economy has remained steady because of strong prices for its cocoa and gold. But exports under AGOA dropped by more than one-third in 2008, and fell 86 percent, to $5.2 million, in the first five months of this year. While much of the plunge came from a fall in exports of foreign oil processed in Ghana, it also reverberated through particleboard factories, mango farms and jewelry studios.

As in many sub-Saharan countries, Ghanaian textile and apparel exporters have been particularly hard-hit, including some that U.S. officials once touted as AGOA poster children. Among them is Prosper Adabla's formerly humming factory near Accra, which manufactured tube socks for export.

An end to worldwide quotas on Chinese apparel exports in 2005 brought stiff competition. Two years later, Adabla's U.S. partner went bankrupt. Adabla shut his factory last summer, leaving $1 million worth of socks unsold and 1,000 workers jobless.

"The demand has dried up, number one. Number two, the partners have either gone bankrupt or are no longer in business or have decided to buy from China," Adabla said. "AGOA gave us an option . . . but if you can't sell your product, it's useless."

Few Ready for Tough Times

Ghana's small handicrafts industry, which was already expanding because of free-market reforms meant to grow nontraditional exports, got an additional boost from the program and then another from a booming U.S. housing and consumer market.

Earlier this decade, big American retailers such as Pier 1, World Market and TJ Maxx were snatching up handmade candleholders and baskets from Ghana. When Target ordered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods from Tekura and other enterprises in 2004, hundreds of rural carvers won work chiseling African art for American abodes.

But most of the orders dried up by the end of 2007. Spokesmen for Pier 1, TJ Maxx and World Market did not respond to or declined requests for comment, but retail analysts say the explanation is evident.

In an era when retailers are trimming inventories, cutting price points and closing stores, African accessories count as luxuries, said Nick McCoy, an analyst with RetailForward in Ohio.

Robert Ellis, whose Fritete African Art Works was the forerunner of Ghana's handicrafts exporters, said cracks in the industry began showing before U.S. and world financial woes. Asian factories were making cheaper copies. Ghanaian artisans were not updating their work often enough. And when demand fell, he said, few had built a foundation to get them through tough times.

Ellis, who proudly shows off a 2005 Target ad touting "AFRICAN DESIGNS 14.99 -- 79.99" that includes his rustic wood table, watched his export sales drop from $305,000 in 2007 to $70,000 in 2008. Six muscular carvers now toil in his wood-strewn workshop, down from 150 in December.

He has sold property and paid off debts, and he says he thinks he can survive the crash. Smaller Ghanaian producers, he said, "will need a miracle."

AGOA has never become a silver bullet for micro-enterprise in Africa, whose share of global trade is just 2 percent. Ninety percent of exports under the program still come from oil, though non-oil exports have tripled since 2001.

Small businesses complain about the program's byzantine guidelines and say U.S.-provided training is not tailored enough. While some African governments saw the program as an opportunity and created export-friendly policies, others ignored it. More generally, poor roads and power supplies hinder commerce, and little companies cannot afford the 30 percent interest rates that African banks typically slap on long-term business loans.

In Tekura's quiet offices on the muddy outskirts of Accra, Josephine and Kweku Forson said they are waiting out the storm. Their sleek stools and masks -- all made from trees cut as part of government reforestation programs -- are gathering dust. Sales fell in half from 2007 to 2008 and are on track to fall another 60 percent this year.

In the sawdust-filled workshop on a recent day, Kwabena Appiah, 25, was one of just 10 artisans on duty. He was lucky: The Forsons said that they had regretfully let go more than 100 workers, and that they were especially worried about the woodcutters in the forest.

Out in Aduase, a tiny settlement where goats scurry about, those 20 or so woodcutters were once again getting by on their cassava and plantains. The clothes, haircuts and even rat poison they purchased with the extra income were on hold, Awatey said.

The woodcutters said they had no idea where the trees they chopped ended up after they left Ghana. But they said they knew why the wood was staying put for now.

"Because of the recession," said 32-year-old Paulina Ohenewaa, "there are economic problems everywhere in the world."