From: nyt@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Subject: Somalia:Military Means More Death &
Date: 18 Dec 92 06:07:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:28qyVB15w165w@nyxfer.uucp:-805610746:000:4118
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!nyt    Dec 17 22:07:00 1992


Subject: Somalia:Military Means More Death & Hunger
From: nyxfer!nyt (NY Transfer News)

Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


MILITARY BRINGS MORE DEATHS, HUNGER

By Brian Becker

The initial effect of the Pentagon intervention into Somalia has 
been to dramatically reduce the number of people being fed by 
emergency relief operations.

Hundreds of thousands of Somalis depend on foreign relief 
kitchens for their meals. Yet the U.S. military command ordered 
all foreign relief workers to stay home for the first 48 hours 
after the troops landed.

The U.S. invasion force is consumed not with feeding starving 
people--but with military  sweeps, arbitrary arrests, 
door-to-door searches, setting up roadblocks and disarming people
with guns.

Marines and French Foreign Legionnaires gunned down nine unarmed 
Somali citizens at a roadblock Dec. 11 when their truck brakes 
apparently failed. The media initially reported the Pentagon's 
version--that the truck was loaded with weapons. They later 
admitted there were no weapons and the passengers in the truck 
may have been a family.

Two of the nine died. The U.S. Central Command announced it would
not apologize for the shooting since the troops acted within the 
"rules of engagement," which allow them to shoot anyone they 
"perceive" as threatening them.

U.S. troops are primarily involved in setting up a huge logistics
operation to bring food and water for themselves, not starving 
Somalis. To avoid criticism, however, on Dec. 11 the Pentagon did
stage a Marine-escorted truck caravan carrying 20 tons of food 
from a warehouse to a single feeding center in northern 
Mogadishu.

The TV networks reported this as a great accomplishment, the 
beginning of the end of the famine. In truth the caravan was just
a publicity stunt. According to the Dec. 13 Washington Post, in 
the three days before U.S. troops landed a single relief agency 
had successfully moved 2,800 tons of food on its own using the 
old system of paying Somali truckers, cargo handlers and security
personnel.

CRISIS IN FAMINE BELT

The U.S. military operation also immediately increased the 
suffering inside the interior region of southwest Somalia, which 
is known as the famine belt. Civil war has been more intense in 
this area.

Rakiyaa Omaar and Alex de Waal, former director and associate 
director of the London-based group Africa Watch, report that 
hunger-related deaths had fallen in the town of Baidoa in recent 
months. They say a "delicate web of negotiated agreements 
[between clan leaders] had allowed the area to return to a 
modicum of stability."

Omaar and de Waal, along with many relief workers, assert the 
U.S. military has driven rival armed clan militias from the 
capital city of Mogadishu into Bandoa and other cities in the 
famine belt. By announcing its intention to occupy the area some 
time in the future, the U.S. set off a round of fighting between 
rival clans jockeying to be in stronger positions by the time the
foreign occupying force arrives.

In a commentary in the Dec. 13 Washington Post, Omaar and de Waal
wrote: "Until last week ... inside the town and the surrounding 
villages, relief agencies operated with losses to looters of less
than 5 percent. The bottom line: Food was cheap and plentiful and
death rates had fallen by 90 percent. In the last few days, this 
has all gone up in smoke."

Since the Marines landed "all the agreements so painstakingly 
worked out [among elders and clan leaders] no longer hold force."
This has led to the  "displacing of thousands of people and 
forcing aid agencies to evacuate their staff."

Omaar and de Waal were fired two weeks ago. They had opposed U.S.
military intervention in Somalia.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)
 

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