Vijay Prashad
TriContinental

In countries like Senegal, the IMF has been complicit with irregular debt practices and fraudulent accounting in order to undermine sovereignty and favour multinational corporations.

In February 2025, Senegal’s Court of Auditors released a report that found ‘anomalies’ in the management of public finances between 2019 and 2024, during the presidency of Macky Sall (2012–2024). For instance, the court found that while Sall’s government had suggested that the budget deficit for 2023 was 4.9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it was in fact 12.3%.

The court went to work on this reconstruction of public finances because of a very significant accusation made by Senegal’s new prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, at a press conference in Dakar in September 2024. What the auditors found, and what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) validated, was that the actual debt ratio in 2023 was 99.7% of GDP – not 74.7% – and that the deficit had been underestimated by 5.6% of GDP (in August 2025, the debt ratio was revised to 111% of GDP).

The financial situation in Senegal, Prime Minister Sonko said, is ‘catastrophic’ because of three problems inherited from the decade of Sall’s rule:

● An ‘unbridled debt policy’ that increased the country’s public debt while erasing the possibility of any growth to pay off that debt
● An administration that hid this indebtedness and the deep problems in the economy from the Senegalese people (who nonetheless rejected Sall’s chosen successor, Amadou Ba, in the March 2024 presidential elections and chose Bassirou Diomaye Faye instead)
● ‘Widespread corruption’, including the defrauding of the country’s COVID fund by four ministers

Kim Petersen
Dissident Voice

Common decency demands that when someone slanders you in a public forum that you should have the right to respond in that same forum.

TRNN is an independent news network that provides thought-provoking news, analysis, and commentary. TRNN is much more than news headlines. For the greatest part, news events are reported in context and with relevant background information. This distinguishes TRNN very much from state and corporate media news. In addition, TRNN senior editor Paul Jay is very adept at playing devil’s advocate, laying out the corporate media/government line whereby guest analysts can probe and expose propaganda and disinformation.

Since criticizing the corporate media is very much like flogging a dead horse and because getting the real news out there is so important, I tend to focus my media criticism on TRNN. For instance, I criticized TRNN for parroting a corporate-state media message about North Korea (without providing relevant background information).[1] Its US electoral coverage in 2008 and 2012 was fundamentally anti-democratic because of its inordinate focus on the evilist parties rather than alloting equal coverage to all parties (albeit third party coverage did increase from 2008 to 2012).

Recently TRNN has been presenting a series called “Reality Asserts Itself.” Some fine insight has been provided by Chris Hedges, Vijay Prashad, and Max Blumenthal. However, in a recent installment of the show, Blumenthal engaged in, what can best be described as, character assassination. Blumenthal’s target was the jazz musician/author Gilad Atzmon.[2]

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani (L), Emir of Qatar, key backer
of Syrian opposition, shakes hands with United Nations Secretary
General Ban Ki-Moon before their meeting on September 25 dur-
ing the General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York.

[Article originally published on Sep. 28, 2012]

Make no mistake - the Emir of Qatar is on a roll

What an entrance at the UN General Assembly in New York; Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani called for an Arab coalition of the willing-style invasion of Syria, no less. [1]

In the words of the Emir, "It is better for the Arab countries themselves to interfere out of their national, humanitarian, political and military duties, and to do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria." He stressed Arab countries had a "military duty" to invade.

What he means by "Arab countries" is the petromonarchies of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC), previously known as Gulf Cooperation Council - with implicit help from Turkey, with which the GCC has a wide-ranging strategic agreement. Every shisha house in the Middle East knows that Doha, Riyadh and Ankara have been weaponizing/financing/providing logistical help to the various strands of the armed Syrian opposition engaged in regime change.

The Emir even quoted a "similar precedent" for an invasion, when "Arab forces intervened in Lebanon" in the 1970s. By the way, during a great deal of the 1970s the Emir himself was engaged in more mundane interventions, such as letting his hair down alongside other Gulf royals in select Club Med destinations.

So is the Emir now preaching an Arab version of the R2P ("responsibility to protect") doctrine advanced by The Three Graces of Humanitarian Intervention (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power)?

This is certainly bound to go down well in Washington - not to mention Ankara and even Paris, considering French president Francois Hollande has just called for UN protection of "liberated zones" in Syria.

Vijay Prashad
CounterPunch

Sirte all but flattened. Thousands killed. - What's so humanitarian
about that? Wasn't the UN Resolution 1973 (2011) about "the
protection of civilians" and the Security Council's "strong commit-
ment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and
national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya"? Did the UN do
anything whatever to stop the vicious US-NATO attack on Libya?

Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to

“investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.”

The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions as to hold the identified perpetrators accountable. On June 15, the Commission presented its first report to the Council. This report was provisional, since the conflict was still ongoing and access to the country was minimal. The June report was no more conclusive than the work of the human rights non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch). In some instances, the work of investigators for these NGOs (such as Donatella Rovera of Amnesty) was of higher quality than that of the Commission.

Due to the uncompleted war and then the unsettled security state in the country in its aftermath, the Commission did not return to the field till October 2011, and did not begin any real investigation before December 2011. On March 2, 2012, the Commission finally produced a two hundred-page document that was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Little fanfare greeted this report’s publication, and the HRC’s deliberation on it was equally restrained.

Nonetheless, the report is fairly revelatory, making two important points:

■ first, that all sides on the ground committed war crimes with no mention at all of a potential genocide conducted by the Qaddafi forces;
■ second, that there remains a distinct lack of clarity regarding potential NATO war crimes.

Not enough can be made of these two points. They strongly infer that the rush to a NATO “humanitarian intervention” might have been made on exaggerated evidence, and that NATO’s own military intervention might have been less than “humanitarian” in its effects.

It is precisely because of a lack of accountability by NATO that there is hesitancy in the United Nations Security Council for a strong resolution on Syria.

“Because of the Libyan experience,” the Indian Ambassador to the UN Hardeep Singh Puri told me in February, “other members of the Security Council, such as China and Russia, will not hesitate in exercising a veto if a resolution – and this is a big if – contains actions under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which permits the use of force and punitive and coercive measures.”

Benjamin Dangl
Upside Down World

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Benjamin Dangl’s new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (October, 2010, AK Press).

Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States. Read this much-needed book.”

The motorcycle thundered off the highway onto a jungle road of loose red dirt framed by trees, families lounging in front of their farmhouses, and small herds of disinterested cows. We pulled up to a dusty store to buy food for our stay in the rural community of Oñondivepá, Paraguay, and asked the woman behind the counter what was available. She nodded her head, picked up a saw, and began hacking away at a large slab of beef. We strapped the meat and a box of beer on to the back of the motorcycle and roared off down the road.

A volleyball game was going on when we arrived in the area where landless activist Pedro Caballero lived. His wife offered us fresh oranges while his children ran around in the dirt, playing with some wide-eyed kittens. The sun had set, so Caballero’s wife lifted a light bulb attached to a metal wire onto an exposed electric line above the house, casting light on our small gathering of neighbors. Suddenly, the dogs jumped to action, joining in a barking chorus, and lunged toward the edge of the woods. They had found a poisonous snake, a common cause of death in this small community far from hospitals.