February 18, 2010
Shi’a in Senegal: Iran’s Growing Reach into Africa
J.Peter Pham, PhD
As
the Iranian regime celebrated its 31st birthday last week, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first ordered and then boasted that the nuclear
plant at Natanz had successfully enriched uranium to 19.75 percent
purity, making, he claimed, Iran “a nuclear state.” President Barack Obama responded at a White House press conference that the United States would be working over the next few weeks to develop “a significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated they are from the international community as a whole.”
While that’s a worthy objective, the administration should be aware
that while it has been busy trying to coax the mullahs to the
negotiating table, Tehran has hardly been idle, sending its public
officials, diplomats, military officers, and mullahs around the globe,
preemptively constructing a web of political, military, and commercial
links against the day when they might come under serious pressure. And
perhaps nowhere has this pattern of behavior been more evident than in
Africa, where the Islamic Republic’s growing reach presents a challenge
to the strategic interests of America and its partners in an
increasingly vital part of the world.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
Iran’s controversial president, is in the vanguard of Iran’s push. Two
years ago in New York he said he saw “no limits to the expansion of
[Iran’s] ties with African countries”. Last year Iran’s diplomats,
generals and president criss-crossed the continent, signing a
bewildering array of commercial, diplomatic and defence deals. By one
tally, Iran conducted 20 ministerial or grander visits to Africa last
year, reminiscent of the trade-and-aid whirlwind the Chinese brought to
Africa in the mid-2000s.
The
reason is not hard to fathom. Iran wants diplomatic support for its
nuclear programme in parts of the world where governments are still
biddable. In Latin America Iran’s president has already exploited
anti-American sentiment in countries such as Bolivia, Nicaragua and
Venezuela. In Africa, by contrast, where most countries have strong
ties to the West, Iran has concentrated on strengthening Muslim
allegiances with offers of oil and aid.
As an example of the Iranian regime’s push into Africa, British newsweekly singled out the West African country of Senegal:
Take
Senegal, a 95 percent-Muslim country. Though poor and quite small in
population, it carries diplomatic weight in Francophone Africa and
influence at the UN, where quite a few African governments look to it
for a lead on some big votes. So Iran has been bombarding it with
goodwill. As well as the Khodro car factory, the Iranians have promised
to build tractors, an oil refinery and a chemical plant, as well as to
provide a lot of cheap oil.
Senegal’s
President Abdoulaye Wade has gratefully accepted this bounty, in return
paying four official visits to Iran. In November he hosted Mr.
Ahmadinejad in Senegal, publicly assuring him that he endorsed Iran’s
right to nuclear power – and accepted that this was for peaceful
purposes only.
While
this attention is certainly welcome and, in fact, overdue, it only
scratches the surface of what has been a longstanding and calculated
Iranian strategy, one that combines political and economic leverage
with religious infiltration. Take the example invoked by The Economist, Senegal.
Traditionally,
Senegalese Islam was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and dominated by Sufi
orders founded by saints whose descendents, having inherited the baraka, or spiritual power, of their forefathers, continue to lead the various orders. The oldest Sufi brotherhood (tarīqa; plural, turūq) in Senegal is the Qadirīyya, which traces its origins to ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in 12th century Baghdad, while the largest is the Tijāniyya, which began in Fez, Morocco, with Ahmad al-Tijani in the late 18th century. Perhaps the best known and, arguably the richest and most influential, of the Senegalese turūq is the Murīdiyya, founded in 1883 by a Senegalese marabout, Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism and is hailed by followers as the mujjadid, or renewer of Islam, in his age. The smallest Senegalese order is the Layene,
which constitute an autonomous political-religious community for the
Lebou people of the Cap-Vert peninsula north of the capital of Dakar,
who are led by their own khalifa-general.
Although
members of the Lebanese diaspora – currently estimated to number some
40,000 in Senegal, half of whom are Shi’a – have played a significant
part in Senegalese economic and commercial affairs for over a century,
it was only with the arrival of Lebanese cleric, Abdul Monem El-Zein,
and the establishment of the Islamic Institute in Dakar’s Plateau
neighborhood in 1978 that Shi’a Islam had an institutional presence in
the West African country. The Lebanese sheikh had trained in Najaf,
Iraq, under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the latter’s more
than decade long exile in the Shi’a holy city. While El-Zein’s mission
was supposed to be to strengthen the religious identity of the
immigrant flock that supported him, he also undertook to convert
Senegalese Muslims to Shi’a Islam, eventually founding half a dozen
mosques and more than one hundred madrasas, or religious schools, around the country, many of them staffed by Senegalese clerics he has trained.
Meanwhile,
the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran made a considerable impression on a
number of Senegalese, including two brothers, Ahmed Khalifa Niasse and
Sidy Lamine Niasse, sons of a prominent Tijāni marabout who had grown
disaffected with the Sufi orders. The former became known at the time
as the “Ayatollah of Kaolack,” a region bordering Gambia, for his
outspoken calls for the overthrow of Senegal’s venerable first
president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a scholarly Roman Catholic who
founded the country as a secular state and, when he left office in
1980, became the first post-independence leader in Africa to
voluntarily relinquish power. The latter founded Wal Fadjri,
now the country’s major independent daily newspaper, but originally a
biweekly Islamist magazine which featured lengthy abstracts the
collected works of the Ayatollah Khomeini, attacks on the Iraqi regime
of Saddam Hussein (this was during the Iran-Iraq War), and criticisms
of Saudi Arabia and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
These
activities drew the suspicion of Senegalese authorities who, under
then-President Abdou Diouf, shut down the Iranian embassy in Dakar in
1984, accusing its diplomats of abusing their status to spread
religious propaganda and covertly financing Senegalese media and other
organizations with an eye towards interfering in the internal affairs
of the country. The diplomatic mission was allowed to reopen in the
1990s and relations between Dakar and Tehran have warmed considerably
since Abdoulaye Wade became president in 2000.
Wade
has visited Iran no fewer than four times – in 2003, 2006, 2008, and
2009 – and has received numerous Iranian leaders in Dakar, including
Ahmadinejad, who has been a regular visitor since 2006. After
Ahmadinejad’s most recent visit in November 2009, Wade informed the Senegalese cabinet that he “reaffirmed his support for Iran’s commitment to struggle against the proliferation of nuclear weapons” (!) and likewise expressed confidence in “the assurance by his Iranian counterpart to not exploit uranium for anything other than peaceful and civilian uses.”
This was not the first time that Wade has made obsequious comments
about the Iranian regime that went well beyond diplomatic pleasantries.
In 2008, after meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Senegalese head of state gushed, “We always set Iran as our example.”
While it might be premature conclude, as Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute did two years ago in a report on “Iran’s Global Ambition,” that Senegal is “now quietly turning into West Africa’s Venezuela,”
it is true that the West Africa nation has seen a continual stream of
Iranian money, including both investment in key economic sectors and
strategically targeted development assistance. As The Economist reported regarding one project in the geographic center of the Murīdiyya brotherhood, “The
Israelis had offered to help the notable Sufi Muslim town of Touba to
build a water and sewage system. But negotiations were abruptly broken
off at an advance stage after Iran promised to carry out the same
work—and give a bigger donation to the town as well as the water pumps.”
Furthermore, just this month, Iran’s agricultural minister, Jihad Sadeq
Khalilian, and his Senegalese counterpart Fatou Gaye Starr signed four
deals for cooperation in research, education and training, production of plants, water, soil and related industries.
In
any event, the Wade regime’s close ties with the Islamic Republic will
come in handy for the mullahs this week as Iran’s domestic human rights
record came up for its quadrennial examination before the United
Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Iran was one of 16 nations
being looked at during the current session in a process called
“Universal Periodic Review” (UPR). As part of the process, Iran
submitted a report on itself which has been rebutted point-by-point by Amnesty International in a press release
which characterized the Iranian filing as distorted in its portrayal of
the situation in the country. After a three-hour “interactive dialogue”
at the Human Rights Council, Iran’s UPR process now goes to a troika of
countries to consider and make recommendations. The three are Mexico,
Pakistan, and, you guessed it, Senegal. Human rights advocates are not
exactly holding their breath in anticipation of any further steps, even
relatively toothless ones like the appointment of a “special
rapporteur,” or monitor, to follow the rights situation in Iran.
In
addition to the political and economic ties, there has also been a
quiet shift on the religious front in Senegal. For example, under Wade,
permission was given for an Iranian cleric to build a traditional Shi’a
seminary, or hawza, in Senegal, not far from the University of Dakar. At the Hawza al-Rasūl al-Akram,
Senegalese youth are trained using Arabic-language Shi’a texts by
mullahs trained in Iranian institutions. Already there is a small, but
not insignificant, number of Senegalese Muslims who have been converted
to Shi’a Islam through the efforts of these institutions and the whole
raft of Iranian-sponsored “nongovernmental” organizations which the
Wade regime has permitted to set up shop in Senegal, a country which,
as I pointed out last month, is slated to receive some $540 million in American taxpayers’ money over the next five years.
Of
course, not every government is as nonchalant as that of the Wades of
Senegal regarding the type of denominational imperialism practiced by
Iran. In fact, it was precisely attempts at this kind of incursion that
caused Morocco to sever its relations with Iran last March. According
to the statement issued at the time by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Rabat, the Iranian diplomatic mission “attempted to change the religious foundations of the Kingdom” through activities which constituted an “intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom” where, as I reported here last year,
national religious unity – built on the Maliki school of jurisprudence,
the Ash‘ari theology, and the Sufi mysticism favored by the king in his
capacity as Amir al-Mu’minin (“Commander of the Faithful”), a
title his family claims on the basis of its descent from Fatima,
daughter of Muhammad, and the fourth caliph, Ali – is an essential part
of the country’s highly effective, comprehensive counterterrorism
policy.
Of
course, no one ever accused the Iranian regime of being particularly
interested in countering the inroads of Islamist extremists. To the
contrary, some of its partnerships in Africa aim specifically at
exporting the Islamic Revolution by exploiting the potential in Muslim
countries and communities on the continent. Late last year I reported
on the Iranian regime’s close relations with Eritrea, whose government
was subsequently slapped with sanctions by the UN Security Council for
its part in supporting the Islamist insurgency in central and southern
Somalia spearheaded by the al-Qaeda-aligned Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (“Movement of Warrior Youth,” al-Shabaab).
Since
Umar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, the Iranian mullahs have also
maintained close political, security, and ideological ties with the
Islamist regime in Khartoum. Last spring, just days after the
International Criminal Court charged the Sudanese despot with no fewer
than five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war
crimes for his role in the humanitarian disaster that is Darfur, the
head of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, Ali Larijani,
visited Sudan and publicly embraced Bashir. Also last year, an attack,
reportedly by Israeli planes, on a convoy of twenty trucks loaded with
weapons southwest of Port Sudan drew worldwide attention to the arms
smuggling through Sudan which had been going on for years. The arms,
paid for by the Imam Khomeini Foundation, included long-range Fajr
missiles which, if they had been allowed to reach there destination in
Hamas-controlled Gaza, would have been capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
In
addition to the Palestinian Hamas, Iran’s longstanding ties with
another Middle Eastern terrorist organization, the Lebanese Hezbollah,
give it another African connection. As I noted here last month,
Hezbollah has considerable influence and reach within the Lebanese
Shi’a diaspora communities in West Africa, including the one in Senegal
presided over by Abdul Monem El-Zein, who is himself reputed to be rather close to the ruling mullahs of Tehran.
Not
all of Iran’s activities in Africa are necessarily directly
governmental. In fact, many are economic and commercial, although the
line between the government and the private sector is blurred in Tehran
by the cronyism inherent in business empires like the one controlled by
the family of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and numerous
enterprises owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Last year,
Deputy Foreign Minister Muhammad Reza Baqeri urged Iranian businesses
to increase their operations in Africa, citing its importance to the
nation. Just last week, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted
in a report by the official Fars News Agency as saying, “Iran
has drawn a comprehensive plan for cooperation with Africa in different
fields… We are ready to design a proper mechanism with [the Common
Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, COMESA] for cooperation in
agriculture, car manufacturing, and implementation of technical and
engineering service projects and for supplying Africa with commercial
merchandise and products as well as other fields.” Hossein
Hosseini, director-general for Arab and African affairs at Iran’s Trade
Promotion Office, told an Iranian-African business conference last year
that there was a program of forty-eight projects to expand ties with
African countries, including air links, transportation, and joint banks.
In his message to the annual summit of the African Union earlier this month, President Ahmadinejad declared that “all-out ties and cooperation” with the member states was a “strategic goal”
of the Islamic Republic while parliamentary speaker Larijani, in
Kampala, Uganda, for the meeting of the Islamic Inter-Parliamentary
Union last month, said that expanding relations with Africa is “one of the most important priorities of Iran.”
There is no doubt that the regime in Tehran is pursuing a coordinated
diplomatic, military, and economic strategy to secure key footholds
which it hopes to expand, gradually integrating Africa into its
ambitious designs to create an alternative, anti-Western international
bloc. To this end, the Fars News Agency has reported
that the Iranian president was due to meet a number of African heads of
state at an Iran-AU summit scheduled for later this year. The question
thus is not so much what Iran is doing as whether, in the face of the
challenge from the rogue regime in Tehran, the United States and other
countries have the clarity of vision and strength of will to commit the
resources necessary to counter Iran’s machinations with a comprehensive
strategy of their own to actively engage African countries, isolating
the mullahs and their followers as well as the containing the spread of
their noxious ideology.
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