NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/10222

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-21 | 18.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!noc.near.net!hri.com!ukma!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
From: [e-mail] (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: NLNS: Cynical Manipulation of Hunger
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 21 Jan 93 17:03:30 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: ?
Lines: 350
Approved: [e-mail]
Originator: [e-mail]
Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu

/* Written  6:28 pm  Jan 18, 1993 by [e-mail] in igc:nlns.news */
/* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.7 *** 1/18/93" ---------- */
Somalia, and the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger
Mitchel Cohen, Red Ballon

"To give food aid to a country just because they are
starving is a pretty weak reason."
            -- Henry Kissinger

(NLNS)--Months before the United States sent troops to
Somalia to supposedly protect food supply lines from the
pilferage of "evil warlords," Italy was completing
arrangements to ship that nation's toxic wastes to
Somalia, with nary a protest from the U.S. By early
September, Italian companies were almost finished
"building two incinerators to be installed in Somalia that
would handle at least two 550,000-ton shipments of toxic
waste next year for an estimated profit of $4 million to
$6 million." U.N. environmental chief Mostafa Tolba said
the dumping could aggravate the destruction of Somalia's
ecosystem and threaten further loss of life in the ravaged
nation.
    "Africa," writes Silvia Federici, a professor at
Hofstra University and editor of the Committee for
Academic Freedom in Africa's newsletter, "is being
turned into the chemical/nuclear dust-bin of the world,
the region where expired pharmaceutical products, toxic
wastes, and materials banned in other countries, from
medicines to pesticides, are dumped." Combined with
other information gleaned from first-hand accounts but
generally unreported in the corporate press, a much more
insidious picture of U.S. involvement in Somalia is
emerging, one closely paralleling the odious, but accurate
observation by Henry Kissinger, even as U.S. government
officials try to paint a more benign "humanistic" portrait
of its motives for public consumption.
    How badly we long to--even need to--believe that
the U.S. government would, maybe this time, actually
feed people because they are starving, no strings
attached! Most people would understandably want to
reach out and comfort those in pain, feed those who are
starving, house those who are homeless. We want the
government to work that way, but it doesn't, and it won't.
Nor will it reveal its own role in creating all the misery to
begin with. It's time we took Henry Kissinger's maxim at
its face as an accurate representation of how U.S. policy
works, and stop fooling ourselves into believing the lies
spun for us which enable the ruling class to slip in its
murder and mayhem by riding the Trojan Horse of our
suddenly eager morality.
    Although people have been and continue to be
desperate for food in particular areas of Somalia, the
country as a whole is not wracked by generalized mass
starvation, chaos and random violence. That is just one
more lie used to manipulate us into accepting the
stationing of U.S. troops in the Horn of Africa. "In fact,"
explains Rutgers [University] professor Said Samatar, who
is from Somalia, "these horrors are occurring only in a
limited portion of Somalia, notably in the ...southwest
between Mogadishu, the capital (where all the press are
clustered), and the regions surrounding Baidoa and
Kismayu. The rest of the country is relatively peaceful
and well-governed by an alliance of traditional elders
and local leaders that has re-emerged in the wake of  the
collapse of the central authority ...In the entire country
there is only one ['warlord']--General Aidiid--worthy of
the name. And even he does not exercise supreme
authority over a horde of followers whom he can deliver
either into the field of battle or to the negotiating table."
We cannot allow the U.S. government the luxury of
framing the issues for us ("mass starvation," "warlords,"
"chaos"), and thereby orchestrating our emotions and
controlling the terms of the debate.
    Here's an example of how such manipulation works:
The U.S. claims that up to 80 percent of all relief is being
stolen--which is the ccurrent jusitification for sending the
troops. But Rakiya Omaar, who had been the director of
Africa Watch until the middle of December (before she
was summarily fired by Human Rights Watch director
Aryeh Neier for not mouthing his approved liberal
version of the government's line), cites relief
organizations such as Save the Children and the
International Committee of the Red Cross as enduring a
loss rate of only 5 to 10 percent, fairly a constant figure
in all famine relief. Right now, reports Omar, Mogadishu--
which was in the most desperate situation of all the
Somalian cities and is the focus of U.S. media attention--
"is totally flooded with food" and "everybody can buy
rice; its very cheap." The mortality rate, she says, had
dropped and the overall situation had been improving
before the troops were sent. Many relief  workers in
Somalia go even further, complaining that their efforts
are being hindered by the U.S. military intervention: "We
can't get to people we used to, and they are dying," said
James Fennell of CARE. Before the troops hit the beaches,
relief agencies had hired guards "to ride shotgun on
trucks, losing some supplies to looters--but also reaching
many thousands of people who were too weak to seek
help in feeding centers. [But] the Marines' first move in
Baidoa was to disarm the airport security force, tough ex-
soldiers CARE had hired as escorts. ...Tibebu Haile
Selassie, deputy director of UNICEF in Mogadishu...said,
'the situation is worse than it was before.'"
    Much of Somalia's economic life is organized around
the growth and export of cattle (traditionally camel meat,
although that is changing)), which utilizes the large
pastoral spreads provided by nature in that region.
Throughout Africa, the vastly different natural
landscapes, social and economic arrangements, and
deposits of natural resources make it inappropriate to
apply certain generalizations about the continent to
individual African societies. Nevertheless, the policies of
the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and
international capital--such as the forced development of
export crops, even though that destroys local self-
sufficiency and disposesses small-plot farming,
concentrating the ownership of land in a few giant
corporations--are a universalizing force on the continent,
and resistance to them is widespread despite--or possibly
because of--the variety of societies. This common
imposition enables us to supply to Somalia, today,
observations Silvia Federici had written several years ago
about Africa in general: "The survival of communal ties
and the lack of a tradition of wage dependence
have...fostered a sense of entitlements with respect to the
distribution of wealth in the community and by the state.
Second, [they are] responsible for the fact that most
African proletarians fail to experience capital's laws as
natural laws, even though the demand for what industrial
development can provide is now a general factor of social
change.
    "Africans' resistance to capitalist discipline must be
emphasized given the tendency in the U.S. to see Africans
either as helpless victims of government corruption and
natural disasters or as protagonists of backward struggles
revolving around tribal alliegances (a myth perpetrated
by the Western media). In reality, from the fields to
factories, the markets and the schools, struggles are being
carried on that not only are often unmatched for their
combativeness by what takes place in the 'First World,'
but are most 'modern' in content. Their objective is not
the preservation of a mythical past but the redefinition of
what development means for the proletariat: access to
the wealth produced internationally, but not at the price
capital puts on it." [Silvia Federici]
     European colonialism's failure to break the back of
the village structures in Africa, including much of
Somalia, had cut deeply into world capitalist profits from
that continent. Beginning in 1977, when Somali dictator
Siad Barre was dumped by the Soviet Union and became
a client of the U.S., the International Monetary Fund has
imposed a series of stringent regulations on Somallia. And
for 15 years, villagers throughout Somalia have resisted
the hardline U.S./IMF policies. Only in those areas around
the capital mentioned above, where IMF measures were
able to break down the traditional structures and be fully
imposed, do we find the kinds of hunger, disease, and
disruption of peaceful village life that so powerfully stir
our compassion. And even there, the starvation was
caused by the imposition of a brutal central authority in
Somalia, not by its collapse (contrary to the current U.S.
government/media/liberals' line); all the misery we're
called on to fight today in those areas are a direct result
of U.S./ IMF measures.
    Of course Somalis are resisting the foriegn attempts
to dump toxic wastes there and to forcibly proletarianize
their communities. That resistance, over the past decade
and one-half, prompted the U.S. government to arm
troops loyal to now-deposed Somali dictator Siad Barre.
Doug Ireland points out, "If you read Sophronia Scott
Gregory's piece [in Time] too quickly you might have
missed...one slim paragraph: 'Washington was eager for a
strategic outpost near the Arabian oil fields and struck an
agreement to take over the old Soviet military facilities.
For the next 10 years the U.S. poured hundreds of
millions of dollars into arming the country.'" The situation
is reminiscent of the U.S. arming of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, and Noriega in Panama. These were U.S. clients,
owned and paid for by American tax dollars. And, like
Hussein, Barre often turned those U.S.- and Soviet-made
weapons against dissident Somali movements. As
Alexander Cockburn reported, "Somalis do not forget Siad
Barre's massacres in the late 1980s of some 150,000
northerners in the former British Somaliland, or his near
total destruction of northern towns like Hargesia with the
help of South African bomber pilots and U.S. logistical
backup and diplomatic protection." More than half a
million Somalis were rendered homeless and forced to
move across the desert into Ethiopia. Cockburn goes on to
detail some of the resistance to the imposition of capital--
a resistance rooted in the village social structures that so
frustrates the U.S. and IMF elites: "Although devastated
by Siad Barre in the 1980s and in urgent need of seed
and agricultural assistancce, Somaliland is not in the
desperate straits of sections of the south, and its chief
political organization, the Somali National Movement,
makes a decent case for exercising its right to self-
determination.
    "In May of 1991 the S.N.M. convened a congress of
some 5,000 people and chose an interim government
with an interim assembly of 140 people. Although the
Isaak clan is dominant, the S.N.M. has reached out to
minority groups. Los Angeles-based Sael Samater--his
brother Ibrahim is the president of the interim legislative
assembly--regards U.S./U.N. intervention as 'John Wayne'
talk. He outlined for me the suspect motivations of
various players, including [U.N. Secretary General} Ghali,
Islamic fundamentalists backed by Saudi Arabia and the
Emirates, and even Italy, whose interest in the affairs of
its former colony is as intense as Germany's toward its
former dependencies of the Nazi years, Croatia and
Slovenia." Among its hidden rationales, then, military
intervention provides a way of annulling the rebirth of
Somaliland and, in the same breath, the force needed to
roll back the enormous gains won by the national
liberation front of Eritrea, after decades of war there
against Italy and Ethiopia, and the military hardware of
both the Soviet Union and the U.S. Last year, Eritrea,
which borders Somalia, finally succeeded in winning its
independence, and embarked on a socialist course of
reorganization. It is not unreasonable to suspect the U.S.
command of, sooner or later, inventing excuses to deploy
troops on the Eritrea/Somalia border. Thus far, the press,
like most observers, has failed to notice the U.S. desire to
repeal the Eritrean revolution, as well as the Somali
National Movement in the north, preferring instead to
stick to thee Pentagon-prepared script of "fighting against
the warlords."
    As images of U.S. troops in foreign lands agin fill
our TV screens, we in the U.S. are being primed for the
latest round of imperialist colonization under the pretext
of "feeding starving people"--at the point ot a bayonet.
From the start we were inundated with breathless
propaganda about "evil Somalian warlords," soon to be
exposed, no doubt, as "worse than Hitler," just in case
Somali resistance forces put up a fight against the
uninvited machine-gun toting "guests." Thus, already in
place are the quick rationalizations required to rally
American liberals around U.S. policy despite their
occasional squeamishness over the bloodier aspects of
imperialism. And "progressives" in the U.S. (like Aryeh
Heier of Human Rights Watch, and SANE/FREEZE) are
leaping to the bait; they are already rushing to line up
alongside the government, calling on it to "insure the
safety of aid shipments and relief workers," parroting the
government's line, as though the threat to relief workers
or food shipments in Somalia is real (in actuality, it's no
worse than anywhere else in the world, according to the
statistics quoted earlier), and applauding the use of
troops (but "only" for "protection"). These are the same
groups that helped define the politics of the Campaign for
Peace in the Middle East during the Gulf War, which
supported sanctions against Iraq and participated in the
reprehensible "Support Our Troops" yellow-ribboning of
every doorway, tree and vestibule; clearly, the liberal
anti-war establishment has learned nothing from the war
about the way imperialism operates, nor from the
invasion of Panama before that, and the propaganda
barrage around both.
    Unfortunately,  many "progressive" people living in
the U.S. and in Europe still cling to notions of progress
that entail destroying other people's "antiquated" ways of
living in order to "make things better for them" and to
"save them from themselves." This 20th century version
of the "white man's burden" is capitalism's ideologically
liberal complement; it seeks a cleaner imperialism--one
hopefully without death-squads--and it launches its
crusades against militant resistance by demonizing those
who "just can't see the light." It calls for, "as non-violently
as possible," removing the weapons from the hands of
those "natives" who, not knowing what's best for them,
resist attempts to modernize their communities and pull
them into liberalism's version of the 21st century, by any
means necessary.
    And so now we find American newspaper coverage
of Somalia laced with terms like "warlords," "gangs,"
"violent bands," "chaos," "random violence"--a way of
framing the situation that is accepted and regurgitated by
"progressives" as much as by the government. The white
supremacy concealed in North American's demonization
of "bad Negroes" versus those seemingly more docile and
compliant with the interests and intentions of
international capital is used to justify armed intervention,
all the while remaining well within the boundaries of the
dominant liberal ideology. The mindset was driven home
by a Marine Corps colonel, Bob Agro-Melina, who
described the various bands and communities in Somalia
as similar to "gangs like the Bloods and Crips in Los
Angeles." He added, "to secure the area, we've got to
disarm them."
    Clearly, whatever hunger exists in Somalia is a
direct result of U.S./IMF/World Bank policies over the
years, policies that have spawned a strong resistance
movement in Somalia, like everywhere else--though we
hear nothing of it in the press. None of capital's goals can
be accomplished without first crushing (or co-opting)
those movements. Consequently, there's more to the U.S.
invasion of Somalia than meets the stomach. Progressive
people in the U.S. cannot allow ourselves to be seduced
into endorsing the schemes of capital, which has learned
to conjure up morally appealing pretexts for that
purpose, when: 1) Hunger wouldn't exist there in the first
place if it [were] not for capital's economic intervention
over the last decade; 2) Mass starvation in Somalia is
limited to those areas where capital as able to fully
implement its programs, and not throughout the society,
contrary to what we're being led to believe; 3) The food-
supply lines are not under particularly heavy attack,
certainly no greater than anywhere else in the world; 4)
U.S. troops were not invited by Somalia, or any Somalian
regional councils or authorities; in fact, Somalis were
themselves specifically not invited to participate in any
talks concerning armed intervention; 5) Troops are used
to disarm all resistance to the imposition of a U.S.-
mandated central authority; and 6) The U.S., along with
the former U.S.S.R., is responsible for arming Somalia to
begin with, arms the U.S. troops may soon be facing in
battle.
    What are capital's real goals in Somalia? In a
phrase, the re-colonization of Africa, which includes: 1)
establishment and strengthening of military bases; 2)
dumping of toxic wastes; 3) rolling back the successful
liberation struggle in Eritrea and the growing movement
in northern Somalia; 4) guarding the oil-shipping lanes;
and 5) deepening the "proletarianization" of the African
working class in order to generate cheap, dependable
labor and the extraction of precious natural resources.
Thus far, the meaningful ways in which daily life is
organized in Somalia's supposedly "chaotic," decentralized
traditional villages have circumvented most prior
attempts by international capital and colonial powers--
unloved, uninvited and making no pretext of their need
for a non-chaotic central authority--to impose capital's
wholly unnatural rhythms on African life. The U.S., under
the pretext of feeding starving people (a situation it
caused, along with the IMF and World Bank, to begin
with), is attempting to use its might to "Latin
Americanize" Africa by busting apart the communal
village networks once and for all--as England had done to
collective usages of land at home by military
enbforcement of the Enclosure Acts of the 1600s--making
the continent fit for capitalist accumulation. The New
World (Bank) Order's hot toxic breath is blowing up the
hunger in the sands. Consequently, there's more to the
U.S. invasion of Somalia than meets the eye.

Mitch Cohen and the Red Balloon can be reached at: 2652
Cropsey Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11214; [phone].

--- 30 ---