Somalis battle U.S.-backed occupation troops

Heavy fighting broke out Jan. 20 when resistance fighters attacked puppet government troops in southern Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. Two soldiers from Ethiopia’s occupation army were killed and the Ethiopian army responded with tanks and heavy artillery.

The battle was on when the guerrilla fighters who oppose the Ethiopian occupation responded with machine guns and mortars, especially when the fighting spread to the Bakara market, which is the most important trading area in Somalia.

Late reports from the BBC monitoring service and Garowe Online, a Somali online news service, said that 20 had died, including four Ethiopians and two government soldiers, and that at least 150 wounded civilians had been treated in the hospital for shrapnel and gunshot wounds.

The U.S. backed the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia politically, and U.S. special forces supplied the Ethiopians with intelligence and provided some commando operations in the effort to oust the Islamic Courts government. The United Nations estimates that the Ethiopian occupation has forced at least 600,000 people to leave Mogadishu. The surviving refugees face extremely harsh conditions, which the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees describes as worse than those refugees from Darfur, Sudan, face.

Another sign of U.S. intervention in Somali’s affairs came when U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Dr. Jendayi Frazer had lunch with Dahir Riyale Kahin, who calls himself the “president” of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia, Jan. 14 at the State Department.

Earlier, in December, an unnamed Pentagon official told the Washington Post in Djibouti, a small country bordering Somaliland to the northwest, “Somaliland should be independent.” Another defense official said, “We should build up the parts that are functional and box in” Somalia’s unstable regions, particularly around Mogadishu. U.S. support for a breakaway of Somaliland would be another example of the imperialists using “divide and conquer” tactics in an attempt to subdue a rebellious colony.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his December visit to Djibouti gave a public speech, claiming that worries about al-Qaida drove U.S. efforts in Somalia. Since the Ethiopian offensive installed the Transitional Federal Government in January 2007, the Pentagon has conducted at least two AC-130 gunship air strikes and a naval strike targeting opponents of that government, which Washington describes as “suspected al-Qaida operatives,” along with a number of “targeted” commando raids.

The U.S. has a history of military intervention in Somalia, and despite the overwhelming U.S. military advantage, has already been humiliated there in battle.

In 1993 two U.S. helicopters hunting down opponents of their intervention were shot down after they fired on and killed many Somalis in Mogadishu. Armed Somali fighters then killed 18 Marines who survived the crashes. 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.

During 1990-1993, Washington’s justification for its intervention was that Somalia was a failed state and there was a humanitarian crisis. The Somali people saw it as a foreign invasion and resisted strenuously. Currently, the African Union has a so-called peacekeeping force in Mogadishu and this force—mainly Ugandan—is announcing high and clear that it has no connection with the Ethiopians, trying to dissociate itself from the hated invasion and occupation.

It is unlikely that the U.S. is going to be able to install a stable puppet government in this strategically important region.

A number of Somali groups have expressed the strong desire that the U.S. should uphold and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia instead of trying to split off Somaliland.

They have urged “the Defense Department to adhere to the letter and spirit of the official policy of the United States on Somaliland, the official and stated policy of the Security Council on Somalia and follow the example of the African Union in rejecting any efforts to further destabilize Somalia.”

They point out that by recognizing Somaliland’s secession, the U.S. would challenge the Somali people’s achievement in achieving unity and solidarity when the northern British-ruled territory joined with the southern Italian-ruled region to form an independent Somalia in 1960.