NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9544

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From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: Somalia:Bay of Piglets
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{From THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 15, 1992}

BAY OF PIGLETS
BUSH'S LAST HURRAH PROVES IT IS STILL TRUE: Get 'em by the balls
and their hearts and minds will follow
by James Ridgeway

Washington, D.C.--The best thing Ronald Reagan ever did for the
American military was drum up the big Red Scare one last time. He
laid it on a little thick---how any country that couldn't
manufacture condoms was a threat to the national security of the
United States was always a tough thing to figure out--but Reagan
inspired the Pentagon, gave it a sense of purpose at a time when
the rest of American society seemed to be losing whatever moral
drive it had.

However manly you had to be to face down the Ultimate Threat,
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and George Bush's
assumption of the presidency, all that macho swashbuckle seems a
little like overcompensation. In a one-superpower world, America
may be unmatched, but it also needs a new purpose for its
military machine---perhaps a kinder, gentler one, but one that is
no less expensive to the national treasury.

Operation Restore Hope is aimed at speeding food to the starving
people of Somalia. Then again, >EVERY< American war is supposedly
fought in the name of a greater humanitarian purpose. Think of
the New World Order, which was baptized in blood along the murder
mile from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. Just as we blamed the
Iraqi people for being so benighted as to accept the moral
equivalent of Hitler for a leader, we are now blaming the Somalis
for allowing teenage anarchy to starve thousands of innocent
people, many of them little children. In the minds of the
American people, these gun-toting, khat-chomping, food-thieving
teens are like a thousand little Saddams, waiting to be popped by
clean-shaven Marines from San Diego. We can now do to these
little motherfuckers what we >WANTED< to do to the Crips and Bloods
last spring. No Miranda here.

In fact, civil anarchy reigns in Somalia because we like it like
that. The Western powers have been diddling with Somalia for over
a hundred years, and as the Cold War went into its last, phony
stages the country was whipsawed across the ideological divide.
Khat isn't the only reason these people don't know whether
they're coming or going.

ON THE HORN

The Horn of Africa---on which Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti,
and Somalia are impaled--is situated at the juncture of the
Middle East and Africa, and for centuries this arid corner of the
world has been a battleground for competing empires. It borders
the strategic Red Sea shipping lanes, through which pass oil and
other commodities. In the middle of the last century Britain and
France established coaling stations at the mouth of the Red Sea,
and from then on the West has viewed the Horn of Africa as a
strategic choke point along the lifeline from Europe to Asia.

The imperial powers had little use for what there was of the
domestic economy of the Horn, of course--neither the nomads
roaming dry coastal plains nor the settled peasants on the
interior highlands excited any greed. The majority of these
people lived below the poverty line. Instead the colonizers
grabbed the ports. The French took Djibouti, the British the
northern Somalian coast, and the Italians Eritrea and southern
Somalia.

"While colonial capitalism transformed many other regions, it
bypassed the Horn," THE MIDDLE EAST REPORT has noted. "Nearly a
half-century after the Europeans first seized colonies in the
region, there were almost no schools or roads, books or
newspapers, mines or production facilities. In 1935, when
Mussolini launched his attack on Ethiopia, Ethiopian warriors
went into battle carrying spears..."

Britain came to control most of the region until after World
War II, when it came to be overshadowed by the growing influence of
the U.S., first in Ethiopia and more recently Somalia itself. The
Horn became a focal point of sorts in the Cold War. The U.S.
contended with the Soviet Union here---in a place where
capitalism had the natural disadvantage of trying to proselytize
some of the most destitute people on the planet--and both
countries pumped millions worth of armaments, bases and economic
development into the arid region.

All that was accomplished was to temporarily prop up one
repressive government or another which, instead of guaranteeing
their citizenry's security, produced famine and death for
thousands. Ravaged by the petty jealousies of their factional
leaders, today hundreds of thousand of refugees reel across the
Horn in search of sustenance. Millions of children face
malnutrition; millions more depend on outside food aid.

What economic aid has been sent to Somalia over the years has
been military hardware. Most economic aid is aimed at increasing
export sales of the Western benefactors, not at developing food
self-sufficiency. During the 1980s, when nearly 2 million people
in the Horn were dying from starvation, Ethiopia happily exported
coffee while Sudan harvested a record cotton crop. The profit
from these sales went to buy guns, repay foreign debts (often
incurred by buying more guns), and to pay off the ruling elites.

The Republic of Somalia consists of former Italian and British
territories that were joined in 1960. Somalia is the only state
in Africa whose members hsare a history, language, and culture---
probably with Hamitic origins. "The Somali belief iin a common
ancestry has been the basis of their natinal solidarity," Howard
University professor Bereket Habte Selassie wrote in his book
CONFLICT AND INTERVENTION IN THE HORN OF AFRICA "Every colonizer
of the Somali has had to contend with the nationalist feeling
this process has engendered."

Islam reinforces this sense of national solidarity. Sopmali
resistance to colonial intrusion was shaped and inspired by
Mohammed Abdille Hassan---the man the British called the "mad
mullah." Salassie said that Hassan fought every colonial power;
whenever the British, French, Italians, or Ethiopians carved up
the region, drawing one or another new border, his people would
cross right over, ignoring it. From 1900 to 1920 Mohammed Abdille
Hassan was never defeated. You can't expect that the descendants
of the followers of the Mad Mullah, who have spent the better part
of a century fighting off the combined might of the Western
powers, to automatically buckle at the sight of Light Mountain
Division behicles with their Fort Drum plates.

THE POSTCOLONIAL DECAY

In 1969, after less than a decade of post-colonial civilian rule,
Siad Barre, the commander of the military, took power. With
little ado, he suspended the constitution, locked up leading
politicians, and announced plans to transform this conservative
Islamic nation of nomads into a modern socialist state through a
process of "scientific socialism."

Known as "Our Father, the Father of Knowledge," Barre quickly
built a personality cult. With the help of the East Germans he
established a network of Stasi-like secret agents and informers
operating through the National Security Service, along with a
paramilitary gang called the Victory Pioneers---who we sometimes
compared to Papa Doc Duvalier's Tontons Macoute in Haiti. He
forged ties with Moscow, which provided military, technical, and
economic assistance. The Soviet Union provided humanitarian help
during the drought of the mid 1970s.

Barre stamped out dissent, enforced strict censorship,
discouraged contact between Somalis and Westerners, banned
foreign journalists, and declared war on the "scourge" of
tribalism.

"During his two decades in power Siad Barre proceeded, with
studied deliberation and thorough effect, to dismantle the
institutions that allowed people to articulate their grivances
and that provided a framework for the resolution of conflict,"
writes Rakiya Omaar, a Somali and, until last week, the executive
director of Africa Watch. Omaar is surely the most informed and
passionate voice heard in Western circles on the plight of her
country. "Powerless to bring about change peacefully, many people
left the country or turned to violence setting the stage for the
current turmoil."

When in 1974 Marxist guerrillas overthrew Haile Selassie in
nearby Ethiopia, Siad Barre took advantage of the confusion to
seize Ogaden, a desert region settled by Somalis but controlled
by Ethiopia. The new socialist Ethiopian government, formerly a
client of the United States, asked Moscow for help, and the
Soviet Union switched sides. It abandoned the Somalis and sent
airlifts of military equipment to Ethiopia. The Soviet military
advisers in Mogadishu were dispatched to Addis Ababa, where they
unburdened themselves of the minute details of Somalia's army to
the Ethiopian high command. Thereupon, Addis Ababa's forces,
equipped with Soviet arms and supplemented with Cuban combat
units, forced the Somali army in March of 1978 to retreat out of
Ogaden, leading to endless tumult on the border of the two
countries.

Having been dumped by the Soviets, the Somalis next turned to the
United States, which became their most important source of
economic and military aid. In return, the U.S. was granted a base
in Berbera for surveillance of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

The defeat in the Ogaden led to the current grisly impasse. The
government had never liked the members of the Isaak clan, which
historically lived along the frontier with Ogaden. With the war
over, the government backed the refugees fleeing the fought-over
region, offering them jobs, education, and reportedly
establishing paramilitary operations among them. The refugees
preyed on the local Isaaks who, after futile appeals to Siad
Barre, set up a revolutionary guerrilla operation of their own
and started attacking the Somalian army. The army responded by
shelling the civilians. The fighting spread; other guerrila units
joined in, and in January 1991 Siad Barre was forced out of
office. The military and political factions responsible for
ousting him then fell to fighting among themselves, pitting
military leaders against one another and clan against clan,
subclan against subclan.

Just in Iraqgate, contacts between Bush White House and Somali
military leaders continued into 1989, and were eventually curbed
only because of pressure from Congress. Bush backed Siad Barre up
to the last moment, even when, as Africa Watch put it, the regime
was engaged in a "war with its own people." The Bush
administration, for example, asked Congress for $20 million in
economic support funds in July 1989, a few days after the Siad
Barre government massacred some 450 people as they left a mosque
in Mogadishu. As a result, many of the weapons used in Mogadishu
are of both Soviet and U.S. manufacture. From the Soviets came
mortars, howitzers and anti-aircraft batteries; the U.S. supplied
their own assault rifles and Soviet-made-AD-47s, the M-198  155mm
howitzer, which can lob an 18 pound shell 48 mniles, the 106mm M-
40A1 recoiless rifle, and the 105mm M-56 field gun. In addition,
the Somalis have arms received in the past from France, Libya,
China, and Korea, and different factions are now getting weapons
from Kenya, China, and the Saudis.

The United Nations' execution of its "peacekeeping role" has been
a farce throughout all of this. When Siad Barre fled after the
indiscriminate killing of civilians began, the UN and its
specialized agencies turned coat and ran, citing the lack of
security.

In 1991, private relief agencies like the Red Cross, Britian's
Save the Children Fund, and others warned that up to one-quarter
of Somalia's children would die this year without international
help and begged the UN special agencies---UNICEF, World Food
Program, etc.---to act. Another vain plea to the United Nations!
They sat on their asses and watched the disaster occur.

Dangerous as the situation was, they didn't have to turn their
backs on the Somalis, as the stubbornly brave private relief
agencies have shown. Besides, this wasn't the first time these
bureaucrats of the New World Order had looked on hunger in the
Horn of Africa with crocodile eyes. During the 1984 Ethiopian
famine, the World Food Program deliberately scaled down estimates
of emergency food needs and, during the Sudan famine, the UN took
no action for three years. The one UNICEF program helping
voluntary agencies to fly supplies into the stricken area was
actually CLOSED DOWN as the starvation approached its height.
Caring for civilians was left to the International Committee of
the Red Cross, the U.S. International Medical Corps, Save the
Children, and France's Doctors Without Borders.

In mid February the UN supposedly arranged a ceasfire--which
didn't work, of course--and then proceeded to insist that before
the supposed forerunner of a world government sent medicines or
distributed any food, the ceasefires must be shown to be holding.
This even though, on the ground in Somalia, nobody cares about
the ceasefires--they assume that will take care of itself. What's
needed is some kind of well-planned distribution system to get
the food out through as many ports as possible. The gangs use the
food as a commodity, as something of value they must be hired to
protect or steal; once there is a great deal of food in the
countryside, it will lose its value, and the political situation
will ease.

WHY THE WEST LIKES PICTURES OF STARVING PEOPLE

Famine, as I have repeatedly argued, opens the door to enormous
aid programs aimed ostensibly at "humanitarian" goals but really
at reorganzing local economies and hooking national production
into a global system. When our main enemy was communism, Agency
for International Development policies were targeted to compete
against socialist ventures--collective farms and cooperatives,
for example--in favor of private enterprise. Today, as the chief
provider of economic and humanitarian assistance to Africa, the
U.S. will be able to set the terms of economic development across
the continent.

They can do that not only through the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank but, more importantly, by distributiong food--for
food aid brings a change in the way people live. Egypt is one
often cited example. It was once self-sufficient in grains, but
with American aid its grain imports have increased and domestic
production fallen off. Most of the imported grain goes to feed
animals--in fact, most of the domestic production feeds animals
as well. The meat is grown for foreign consumption. The
government uses what's left of the aid imports to provide
staples, then heavily taxes farmers who grow graihn and uses
subsidies to further encourage the production of meat. It is now
a regular and appropirately thankful market for American grain
supplies.

This elaborate Western history of ecnomic assistance to
struggling nations around the world to develop markets for
American goods is intimately tied to the traditions of
colonialism. Remember that modern mechanized agriculture was
developed at the end of the 19th century to feed not only
ourselves but th eimperial pwers of Europe. With the end of World
War II, we supported the creation of a self-sufficient European
agricutlture, and sought in stead new markets in the newly
independent former European colonies. We've never sought to make
THEM self-sufficient in food.

We've been taught the world has a shortage of food, when in fact
is has a vast abundance. There's enough wheat, rice, and other
grains produced to provide every human being with 3600 calories a
day---enough food to make everyone fat. As the Institute for Food
and Development Policy long has pointed out, "Virtually every
`hungry' country produced enough food for all its people.
Redistribution of a tiny fraction of each country's food supply
would wipe out hunger. For example, in Indonesia, with the
second-greatest number of undernourished people in the world,
redistributing a mere 2 percent of the available food would make
a healthy life possible for everyone."

In Somalia, Africa Watch writes, "in normal times, Mogadisu and
the adjoining areas of the country are at the hub of a complete
food system," with food coming from small farms and large
irrigated spreads outside the city. Some towns concentrate on
fishing; meat, often camel meat (camels are Somali's largest
export), domes from the interior. Somalia traditionally has also
imported some food from neigboring countries and from the rest of
Africa. Somalia has beome the country most dependent on imported
food in sub-Saharan Africa, although it was self-sufficient in
food grains up to the ealry 1970s and has enough arable land to
grow food for everyone.

The civil war takes the lion's share of the blame for the
disruption, but Somali farmers already had to deal with dropping
food prices, tight credit, high taxes, and the dumping of U.S.
and European Community commodities on their market. The there's
the World Bank and its big Bardheere Dam project, which will
displace thousands of families while providing cheap irrigation
for export agricutlture.

"Famine takes root when farmers lose their means of production,"
writes Gayle Smith in MIDDLE EAST REPORT. In Africa, grain yields
and overall harvests have declined over the last decade. Food
production is down by 15 percent from 1981. One out of every five
Africans now depends on food aid. The famine has depleted Africa
of more of its population than in any period since the slave
trade.

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

Operation Restore Hope also represents a continuance of a broad
new program for the United Nations, which of late has preferred
to leave economic matters in the hands of those captives of the
multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, and concentrate instead
on new kinds of peacekeeping.

The basic idea is to strip the United Nations of economic
activities that tend toward redressing the balance betwen the
industrial North and the underdeveloped South. At the same time,
the reformers aim to widen the influence of internationl
coporations within the UN.

"I am not all that concerned about financial or technical
assistance to the Third World," Secretary General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali has said. "For the South, what matters is that the
North pay attention, on a political level, to events there. That
is more important than financial and technical aid."

Before Somalia there were about 40,000 UN troops deployed in
countreis around the world---from El Salvador, where they are
monitoring a ceasefire, to Yugoslavia, where they try to separate
Serbs and Croats and protect Bosnian food relief shipments, to
Cmabodia, where they will end up administering an entire country.
The UN charter says the organization can use peacekeeping forces
only to resist outside aggression, but increasingly the UN is
plunging into internal conflicts to stop widespread violence. The
peacekeeping operations---not including Somalia---cost $2.7
billion last year, more than twice the regular budget of the UN.

But as the current issue fo FOREIGN POLICY points out, what's
involved here is redefining the nature of sovereighnty. What
America wants is a new definition that allows for both expert
assistance to struggling nations and, in the case of places like
Somalia or Bosnia, the establishment of outright trusteeships
under the aegis of the United Nations.

The Bush administration and the United Nations have by now
dithered so long that a military mission long ago became
inevitable, but if the past is prologue---Grenada, Panama,
Nicaragua, even the Kurds---Operation Restore Hope could easily
turn into a dreadful quagmire of lost hopes. It can never work
unless the U.S., either on its own or through the UN, mounts an
extensive political and economic relief operation aimed at the
entire region, a sort of Peace Corps with muscles earmarked for
the Horn. You can't just take the guns away from 16-year-old
boys, as if you were pacifying South Central L.A. That will have
to accompanied by some sort of massive vocational training
program.

(Additonal reporting by Tiarra Mukherjee)
---------------------------------------------
P_news is a conference for progressive news,
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comments about this article or others, send
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