Somalia’s crisis made in USA

The Somalian Transitional Federal Government, installed by Ethiopian troops at the end of 2006, has decided to move the resistant population out of the capital, an action it calls “empty the sea.” The resistance to its rule in Mogadishu has been so strong, with attacks on Ethiopian troops lasting for hours and involving mortars and other heavy weapons, and has so much mass support, that the TFG took drastic measures.

The president of the TFG, Abdullahi Yusuf, a British- and U.S.-backed military leader, wants the city empty. He said in Nairobi, Kenya, in mid-November, that Mogadishu’s civilians can either choose to fight the Islamic insurgents or they will themselves become targets of his “war on terror.” (British Guardian, Nov. 21) Mogadishu’s Mayor Mohammed Dheere has accused aid workers of “feeding terrorists” by helping those who have fled. (The Age, Melbourne, Nov. 22.)

Nearly 200,000 residents of Mogadishu have been forced to flee as the fighting intensified at the end of October and the beginning of November. Most have joined unofficial refugee camps, already spread out along 20 miles of the road west to Afgoi. They live under trees in the dust and pay to use latrines, which is a recipe for cholera and other diseases that flourish in poor sanitation. About one million of Somalia’s 10 million people are internally displaced.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees considers Somalia worse off than Darfur in Sudan. The hunger is greater, the violence more intense, yet no major U.S. newspaper or TV channel has bothered to cover this rapidly unfolding tragedy. African newspapers cover the Somalia events.

“If this happened in Darfur, there would be a major outcry,” said Eric Laroche, the U.N.’s humanitarian co-coordinator for Somalia. “Since it is in Somalia, no one cares. Somalia is a forgotten emergency.”

While the UNHCR has complained, Anders Knudsen, who is program coordinator for the Danish Refugee Council, says that the UNHCR carries a lot of the blame itself because the UNHCR supports the TFG, which it recognized as the legitimate government of Somalia.

Addressing the difficulties the U.N. has had in delivering supplies to the refugees, Knudsen said, “The problem is that the United Nations-supported transition government has no support from the population, and therefore the U.N. emergency vehicles are not welcome among the clan militias, because they regard the United Nations as the extended arm of the transition government and Ethiopia in Mogadishu.”

While the corporate media may ignore Somalia, neither the European Union nor the U.S. has forgotten it.

The European Parliament passed a resolution in Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 22, condemning “the serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law committed by all parties to the conflict in Somalia” and calling for an immediate end to hostilities. French navy ships have been escorting ships with relief supplies into Somalia’s southern ports supposedly to protect them against pirates. These pirates have flourished since the Siad Barre government, which was beholden to the U.S., was driven from power.

Harvests in southern Somalia, the breadbasket of the country, have been nearly destroyed by a combination of floods, drought and locust swarms.

The first U.S. setback in this African nation was in 1993 when two U.S. helicopters hunting down “warlords” were shot down. Armed Somali fighters killed 18 Marines who survived the crashes in the helicopters. This incident was used as the basis of a book and film called “Black Hawk Down” and forced the Clinton administration to withdraw the U.S. occupation troops from Somalia.

Washington’s justification for its 1992-1993 intervention was that no centralized state had asserted itself in Somalia after Barre’s fall in 1991. The Pentagon’s aborted intervention was supposed to be part of a “peacekeeping mission.”

U.S. meddling in Somalia had begun much earlier, however. It first interfered in Somalia in the late 1970s when Washington urged Barre to invade neighboring Ethiopia, which at that time was led by a pro-socialist government allied with the Soviet Union.

A number of liberal analysts and NGOs are again calling for this 1990s type of “humanitarian” intervention. Washington justifies its current intervention based on the alleged terrorist threat. The government the Ethiopian intervention overthrew was based on “Islamic courts,” which Washington considers an enemy.

While Somalia is a poor country whose major exports come from its herds and gum arabic, it occupies a strategic position on the Horn of Africa. The major naval base at Berbera allows any navy based there to control the flow of oil to Europe and to China through the Red Sea. Thus, the interest of the EU and U.S. to intervene in Somalia.