Peace Talk — Autumn 2006
The Quarterly Newsletter of Peace Action Maine
For the past 15 years, life in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, has been characterized by fighting among the clans, road blocks, and checkpoints. The airport was closed for 10 years.
In March, a delegation of Somali leaders pleaded with U.S. military officials stationed in Djibouti to stop funding the warlords, who were devastating the city. Backing the warlords, they said, would end up strengthening an Islamist militia. The warnings were ignored. Abdel Kadir Mohamed Nur, a Somali-American businessman who led the delegation, has said that “the money was creating the war. If they had stopped the money, the warlords would have been weakened. It could have been peaceful. It could have been a power-sharing situation. Instead, it’s a failure.
“We told the Americans, ‘If you contribute money this way, you create terrorists and extremists because people think you are fighting their religion.’”
In June, the Islamic Courts Union, a grassroots movement dedicated to enforcing Sharia, a strict interpretation of Muslim law, wrested control of Mogadishu from the warlords. The checkpoints came down and the airport was reopened.
Many Somalis are afraid that the United States, through its surrogate, Ethiopia, will invade the country and that it will suffer as Afghanistan and Iraq are suffering. Ethiopia has a long history of crossing into Somalia to put down Islamic uprisings. She fears a hard-line Islamic state on her border and is also afraid that the Islamists will try to incorporate Ogaden, an Ethiopian area populated by Somalis, into Somalia.
Some Africa experts contend that the United States has lost its focus on how to deal with the larger threat of terrorism in East Africa by putting a premium on its effort to capture or kill a small number of high level suspects.
“We’ve strengthened the hand of the people whose presence we were worried most about,” said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group.
SS, ed.
I will try to spare the readers ‘famine stories,’ or the downing of American Blackhawk war planes or the killing and dismemberment of 18 American soldiers in that 1993 mission, or the American military killing of a thousand or so Somalis in retaliation for the killing of 18 American Marines.
I am saying this partly because the American people are being fed a one-sided tragic saga about US involvement in Somalia. Ridley Scott’s 2001 Hollywood film ŒBlackhawk Down’ based on Mark Bodwen’s memoir gave us ‘good guys’—usually white, heterosexual, virile and militaristic—fighting the ‘bad guys’—weak, black, feminized, liars and cowards.
The French, the British and the Italians all had their slice of Somalia for their global strategic needs. The history of Somalia’s struggle against colonial imposition is long and rich. At the turn of the last century, it was the British who used aerial bombing of northern Somalia after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of poorly-armed Somali guerrillas. The British had their own ŒIslamist bad guys.’ In the case of Somalia, it was Sayyid Muhammed Abdulla Hassan—a master military strategist and the greatest poet Somalia ever produced. He was Britain’s enemy number one. They called him the ‘Mad Mullah’. The British had no compunction in unleashing brute force against civilians who were suspected of supporting or sympathizing with anti-colonial guerilla fighters.
Famine was used as a powerful instrument of humiliation. This was particularly evident in America’s slow response to the 1991 collapse of central authority in Somalia and the ensuing civil war and mass starvation. When the US finally decided to get involved, rather than engaging in the difficult task of disarming the warlords and their armed gangs who were terrorizing the civilian population, Bush Sr’s administration had the Marines deliver food to the starving populace without offering them hope of long-term peace or security. Operation Restore Hope was a cynical PR mission designed to promote US hyper-militarism as a new means to deliver humanitarian aid.
The US refused to work under the United Nations peacekeeping forces, who were already operating in Somalia. By propping up, militarily and economically, the ruthless regime of Siyad Barre, the United States is complicit in the ultimate destruction of Somalia. Barre’s regime was responsible for much of the violence which led to the 1991 collapse of centralized authority in Somalia, the subsequent famine, the deaths of more than a million Somalis and the mass displacement of millions more.
The Cold War Connection
From 1969 to 1977 Somalia was a part of the Soviet bloc. This partnership ended in 1977 after Somalia suddenly invaded Ethiopia and took over Ogaden—a disputed region occupied for centuries by Somali nomads. A year later, Ethiopia’s own military dictator declared Ethiopia a socialist state. After many years of trying to turn Somalia—a deeply religious Muslim society—into a socialist society, with very little success, the USSR was ready to try its luck with Ethiopia. The Ethiopian army, with the tacit support of Jimmy Carter’s administration, and backed by the forces of the USSR’s proxy states—northern Yemen, Libya, and Cuba—attacked the occupying Somali forces. The Somali army was pushed back across the European-drawn 1960 border between Somalia and Ethiopia.
This was really the beginning of the end for Somalia as a modern state. The years 1977-1980 saw a succession of middle and junior ranking officers trying and failing to overthrow Barre’s dictatorial regime; they were all betrayed by their colleagues and friends. Many of them were tried in sham courts and shot by firing squad in public displays of terror. Despite Barre’s reign of terror, successive US administrations, starting with Jimmy Carter’s, supported Barre’s regime in exchange for unrestricted access to Somalia’s strategic Indian Ocean and Red Sea ports and military installations vacated by the USSR.
From 1978 to 1980, the period between when the Russians left and the Americans moved in to fill their space, we were subjected to daily aerial bombardments by Ethiopian war planes. In 1980, after I received my diploma as an assistant pharmacist, I was sent to work in a small village in the province of Bakool. I worked in a hospital built by the USSR to treat victims of communicable disease such as tuberculosis, but now converted to a trauma operation theater to treat wounded soldiers coming from the frontline. For the last 25 years I have been trying to forget what I saw during the one year that I worked in that hospital.
I saw the suffering of Somali nomads with curable diseases such as tuberculosis crossing the Ethiopian border for medical treatment. Somalis under Ethiopian rule were not treated as citizens and there was little infrastructure in the area of Ethiopia populated by Somali nomads. Since the hospital had been transformed into a war trauma center, the regular patients were displaced to makeshift tents. After working in the hospital, in some cases on 12-hour shifts, I would work as a volunteer at a local government-owned-and operated drugstore to sell cheap drugs to the local population.
We awaited the Ethiopian aerial bombardment and hoped we would survive somehow. The western nations did not come to our aid. After many years of Barre’s famous rhetoric against the west we were being taught a lesson. But those of us who were born in the 1960s and grew up under Barre’s false revolutionary rhetoric looked to the west for inspiration. We listened to western music and read forbidden western books such as George Orwell’s 1984. We naively thought that western powers did care about democracy, human rights and freedom of thought and self-expression. As Barre got weaker, and more isolated and vicious, we thought that it was the right moment to get rid of Barre’ terror regime by supporting progressive Somali dissidents living throughout the world.
But the west did not care about us or human rights. As we evaluate the current US meddling in the internal affairs of Somalia, it is pertinent to remember America’s support for the man who is responsible for the destruction of Somalia. It is equally important to bear in mind deeply-held grievances and counter-grievances between Somalia and Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s current involvement in the internal affairs of Somalia has as its objectives both a territorial motive and a desire to avenge the war of 1977-78. Bush junior and his CIA operatives might have very little understanding of the history of US past involvement in the internal affairs of Somalia. But, before putting all their political and strategic eggs into blood-soaked baskets of basically drug-addicted-chat-chewing warlords, or playing on the rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalism against its political enemies, or using Ethiopia as a proxy to carry out its dirty deeds for them—the Bush administration needs to engage a broader spectrum of the Somali people. Of course this is not going to happen, as a recent US-sponsored conference on peace talks amply demonstrated.
Instead, the administration quickly rehabilitated the term “warlord” by adding the term ‘secular.’ These secular warlords are a bunch of vicious thugs who were given cold hard cash to fight ‘Islamic terrorism.’ This is of course very stupid and will only dramatically increase support for the Sharia courts.
America’s playing of the terrorist card must be read in the context of its historic collusion with Barre’s regime of terror. The Bush administration’s support for the bloodthirsty warlords shows a clear continuation of America’s historic collusion with reactionary forces in Somalia.
Amina Mire is a Lecturer in Contemporary Sociology, Critical Race Theory and Gender/Women Studies at Carleton University,Ottawa Amina_mire@carleton.ca