Caribbean to Caliphate - People & Power

The Caribbean state of Trinidad and Tobago is traditionally most famous for its spectacular annual carnival, its cricketing prowess and of being the birthplace of calypso music. But more recently it's been getting a more disturbing reputation - as the nation with the highest recruitment rates of ISIL fighters in the Western Hemisphere.

So why have so many young Trinidadians been driven to travel thousands of kilometres to participate in the conflicts in Iraq and Syria?

According to Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of the Jamaat al-Muslimeen group, one of the lead causes why young, black men are joining ISIL is their marginalisation.

"The Africans are going to a pool of unemployment, they just sit in the ghetto and do nothing. And then drugs come in and it's a haven for the drugs. And now the guns are in and so the murder rate is just spiralling out of control," says Abu Bakr.

People & Power sent correspondent Juliana Ruhfus and director Dom Rotheroe to investigate how the Caribbean island nation has become a recruitment hub for ISIL.

Connect with People & Power:

YouTube - http://aje.io/peopleandpowerYT
Facebook - https://facebook.com/AJPeopleAndPower
Twitter - https://twitter.com/AJpeoplepower
Website - http://www.aljazeera.com/peopleandpower/

Last month South African President Jacob Zuma was forced from office by his own party, the African National Congress, when almost a decade's worth of corruption, bribery and racketeering allegations finally became too great to ignore. It is possible that within weeks he could appear in court to face charges relating to at least one of the many financial intrigues from his years in power.

As anyone following this story will know, his most infamous former associates, the billionaire Gupta brothers, are now fugitives from justice amid claims that during the Zuma years they systemically looted state assets on a truly astonishing scale - principally by using their friendship with the then-president to influence political appointments and win lucrative government contracts. They are believed to have fled the country and taken refuge in Dubai, where they own property.

But the former president and his state-capturing confrères aren't the only ones under scrutiny in South Africa these days. We've been to examine the role allegedly played by major international companies in scandals so toxic and far reaching, they look set to haunt the country for years to come.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

The Gambia is one of Africa's smallest, most impoverished and least developed countries, with many of its 2 million inhabitants heavily reliant on subsistence farming and with a youth unemployment rate of around 40 percent. It is inevitable then that migration to seek work and support families back home has long been a regular way of life.

For decades, remittances have accounted for as much as 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), one of the highest rates in the world of a country's dependence on funding from its diaspora.

But in recent years, the number of youth leaving the country has soared. Despairing of The Gambia's political and economic situation (which until 2017 was frozen under the dictatorial regime of now deposed President Yahya Jammeh) many lost hope in the future and began looking for a way out; encouraged by the apparent success of some earlier migrants who had sent money back home and painted a rosy picture of life in Europe on social media.

In 2011 Libya's civil war opened a new gateway, albeit a highly dangerous one, for human traffic out of North Africa to Europe and tens of thousands of young Gambians attempted the journey. Since then, Gambians have consistently been in the top 10 nationalities attempting to take boats across the Mediterranean.

Tragically many have died in the process. Others who have made it to Europe have struggled in the face of racism, discrimination and increasingly tough EU regulations to deter economic migrants from staying.

Now some of these have returned home - either disillusioned that their dreams of a prosperous new life came to nothing, or, in the worst cases, deeply traumatised by the experience - and they are determined to discourage others from following the same path.

Editor's note: Viewers are advised that some of the images and testimony of victims in this episode of People & Power are deeply disturbing.

Almost two decades ago, when Sierra Leone was in the grip of a brutal civil war, troops from Nigeria (operating under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS and its Military Observer Group ECOMOG) were deployed to protect civilians from rebel forces in the capital Freetown.

But instead, some of the peacekeepers turned on those they were meant to safeguard, committing atrocities that were captured on camera by a journalist, Sorious Samura, and later included in Cry Freetown, a landmark documentary about the conflict that shocked the world.

At the end of hostilities in 2002, a special United Nations-funded tribunal was established to "prosecute persons who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law," but in reality it only focused on the actions of combatants during the war - the alarming brutality of the Nigerian soldiers was never addressed.

Now Samura's harrowing footage has become central to a remarkable attempt by an international group of lawyers to finally get justice and redress for the victims.

Niger has long been a key staging point for migrants and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan West Africa, but the traffic reached a peak in 2015/16 when the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimated that 330,000 people followed the desert routes north - through often inhospitable country - to reach Libya or Algeria, and then the Mediterranean coast and sea crossings to Europe.

The exponential growth mostly came about because the chaotic descent of Libya into civil conflict in the years after the Arab Spring opened up new routes and border crossings and made it easier for people traffickers to operate in the security vacuum, but it also flourished because it generated significant income and employment for northern Niger and its largest city, Agadez. Much of this was from the perfectly legitimate businesses - in transport and accommodation - that sprang up to service and feed off and then further develop the migrant trade. The increased wealth was welcomed because it helped bring back a measure of stability to an area that had seen its own insurgency during the Tuareg Rebellion of 2007-2009 and which had been struggling economically in the aftermath.

But even as the traffic was burgeoning, the Nigerien government was coming under pressure from the European Union, which was keen to find a response to the alarming flows of people coming across the Mediterranean. Close to its own maritime borders the EU began working with the Libyan coastguard and others to refashion methods of deterring that sea borne traffic, but it also looked for innovative ways of stemming the movement of people on land much further south.

So, to the grateful relief of the EU, Niger passed new anti-smuggling laws. In early 2016, its interior minister Mohamed Bazoum ordered their implementation across the country, sending police out to arrest smugglers (most of whom, of course, had previously been operating within locals laws) and confiscating hordes of the ubiquitous pick-up trucks that drivers had become used to piling high with lucrative migrant passengers.

The new laws quickly began making a big dent in the migrant flow, bringing down the number of travelers passing through Agadez from around 24,000 a month in 2016 to around 5500 a month in 2017.

But there have been other consequences and many of them difficult for Niger. The economic fallout for the north of the country has been considerable - with revenues in Agadez alone being reduced by around $117 million a year, according to the IOM. Indeed the losses across the area have been so significant that the EU has had to offer $635 million to compensate those who had once made a living out of migration through a reconversion plan involving business grants and loans and other support, although so far the difficulties of qualifying for any such support seem to be keeping the take-up of these opportunities to a minimum.

Moreover, where previously migrants were able to move openly, they now have to use clandestine back routes through remote desert country to avoid villages and police patrols. This is dangerous. The UN roughly estimates that for every migrant death in the Mediterranean sea, now two die in the Sahara desert.

Meanwhile, community leaders fear that youth unemployment and the lack of long-term investment (notwithstanding the EU's struggling compensation scheme) to develop alternative economic models could lead to increasing criminality and insecurity. With the migrant traffic suppressed, police warn that drug trafficking is becoming an ever more attractive option and elders fear that idle young men who would once have worked in the migration trade could now easily fall prey to the competing radical attractions of Boko Haram or Daesh, which pose a growing threat across this part of West Africa.

So how to best assess the EU's apparent attempt to push Europe's borders this far south? Niger is rated as one of the world's least-developed nations by the UN, but is it now paying too high a price for Europe's anti-immigration policies? We sent correspondent Juliana Ruhfus and filmmakers Marco Salustro and Victoria Baux to find out.

West Africa - and particularly its most populous nation, Nigeria - is battling an opioid abuse crisis. Medicines such as tramadol, legally and legitimately prescribed by doctors for pain relief, are also being taken in life-threatening doses by millions in search of a fix or a release from poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity.

People & Power sent filmmakers Naashon Zalk and Antony Loewenstein to Nigeria to investigate how the drug is smuggled, traded and abused, as well as the widespread corruption that follows this illicit trafficking, and the appalling health consequences for those in its grip.

Read more: https://aje.io/9vjnr

-

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

Chocolate: A Taste of Independence in Togo Filmmaker: Fanny BouteillerAfrica is rich with natural resources, yet all too often the benefits of that abundance end up with overseas consumers, foreign investors and the international markets.This is often seen as the consequence of a post-colonial globalised economy, in which the rich somehow keep getting richer and the poorest, denied the full fruits of their labours, are kept in penury.It is also a state of affairs with which many on the continent are understandably deeply unhappy. They want more than the scraps the developed world leaves on the table.In Togo, West Africa, one such struggle now comes covered in chocolate.Over 60 percent of the population of Togo lives in poverty, with its cacao growers - producers of one of the country's main cash crops - helpless in the face of prices set by international buyers.But one man is advocating a new future for his country, through indigenous chocolate production."When we launched the plan of manufacturing chocolate, lots of people did not believe us. Most made fun of us. People said we were mad."Trained in Italy, Komi Agbokou is a chocolatier, activist and, increasingly, an anti-globalisation evangelist.He has recently returned to Togo with one mission: to incite his fellow citizens to turn their cacao into chocolate themselves rather than being forever exploited by the international market.Komi explains that current cacao prices are decided by "those who transform cocoa", forcing local farmers to sell their produce for prices over which they have no control.On a 600km (373-mile) trip from North to South Togo, Komi set out to change attitudes, teaching his countrymen to maximise their produce's worth for their own benefit.--- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came to power in 2018, he promised a new era of democratic reforms and an end to years of autocracy.

Political prisoners were freed, opposition parties were allowed to operate, and the new prime minister even won a Nobel Prize for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea after decades of an uneasy armistice.

But since then, long-standing ethnic divisions have made the future of this complex country more uncertain.

Earlier this year, we went to find out why.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

When a deadly new virus appeared in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, few would have imagined its wide-ranging effects. Within weeks COVID-19 was spreading around the world; within a year it had killed one a half million people and hospitalised tens of millions more, forcing nation after nation into lockdown and bringing many economies to a juddering halt.

As international travel stalled in the face of movement restrictions, the consequences were sometimes calamitous - even in places more normally adrift from events elsewhere.

One such place was Samburu, deep in the heart of Kenya, where people reliant on wildlife safari tourism were left struggling to survive.

This thought-provoking episode of People & Power, from filmmaker Andreas Knausenberger, is a salutary reminder of the coronavirus pandemic's unexpected effects on remote communities far from the glare of the global spotlight.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

A grass-roots campaign has started in Uganda against the increasing numbers of sexual assaults on women. According to one rights group, 90 percent of Ugandan women have experienced sexual harassment of some sort. Women are now fighting back by using social media and the courts.

Al Jazeera's Anna Cavell reports from Kampala.



- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
- Check our website: http://www.aljazeera.com/


#AljazeeraEnglish #Uganda #Kampala