From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: NLNS: Cynical Manipulation of Hunger
Date: 21 Jan 93 17:03:30 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: ?
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu

/* Written  6:28 pm  Jan 18, 1993 by nlns@igc.apc.org 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; (718) 449-0037.

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