From: Hank Roth <odin@world.std.com>
Subject: Somalia:Bay of Piglets
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 20:28:10 GMT

<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{From THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 15, 1992}

BAY OF PIGLETS
BUSH'S LAST HURRAH PROVES IT IS STILL TRUE: Get 'em by the balls 
and their hearts and minds will follow
by James Ridgeway

Washington, D.C.--The best thing Ronald Reagan ever did for the 
American military was drum up the big Red Scare one last time. He 
laid it on a little thick---how any country that couldn't 
manufacture condoms was a threat to the national security of the 
United States was always a tough thing to figure out--but Reagan 
inspired the Pentagon, gave it a sense of purpose at a time when 
the rest of American society seemed to be losing whatever moral 
drive it had.

However manly you had to be to face down the Ultimate Threat, 
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and George Bush's 
assumption of the presidency, all that macho swashbuckle seems a 
little like overcompensation. In a one-superpower world, America 
may be unmatched, but it also needs a new purpose for its 
military machine---perhaps a kinder, gentler one, but one that is 
no less expensive to the national treasury.

Operation Restore Hope is aimed at speeding food to the starving 
people of Somalia. Then again, >EVERY< American war is supposedly 
fought in the name of a greater humanitarian purpose. Think of 
the New World Order, which was baptized in blood along the murder 
mile from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. Just as we blamed the 
Iraqi people for being so benighted as to accept the moral 
equivalent of Hitler for a leader, we are now blaming the Somalis 
for allowing teenage anarchy to starve thousands of innocent 
people, many of them little children. In the minds of the 
American people, these gun-toting, khat-chomping, food-thieving 
teens are like a thousand little Saddams, waiting to be popped by 
clean-shaven Marines from San Diego. We can now do to these 
little motherfuckers what we >WANTED< to do to the Crips and Bloods 
last spring. No Miranda here. 

In fact, civil anarchy reigns in Somalia because we like it like 
that. The Western powers have been diddling with Somalia for over 
a hundred years, and as the Cold War went into its last, phony 
stages the country was whipsawed across the ideological divide. 
Khat isn't the only reason these people don't know whether 
they're coming or going.

ON THE HORN

The Horn of Africa---on which Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, 
and Somalia are impaled--is situated at the juncture of the 
Middle East and Africa, and for centuries this arid corner of the 
world has been a battleground for competing empires. It borders 
the strategic Red Sea shipping lanes, through which pass oil and 
other commodities. In the middle of the last century Britain and 
France established coaling stations at the mouth of the Red Sea, 
and from then on the West has viewed the Horn of Africa as a 
strategic choke point along the lifeline from Europe to Asia.

The imperial powers had little use for what there was of the 
domestic economy of the Horn, of course--neither the nomads 
roaming dry coastal plains nor the settled peasants on the 
interior highlands excited any greed. The majority of these 
people lived below the poverty line. Instead the colonizers 
grabbed the ports. The French took Djibouti, the British the 
northern Somalian coast, and the Italians Eritrea and southern 
Somalia.

"While colonial capitalism transformed many other regions, it 
bypassed the Horn," THE MIDDLE EAST REPORT has noted. "Nearly a 
half-century after the Europeans first seized colonies in the 
region, there were almost no schools or roads, books or 
newspapers, mines or production facilities. In 1935, when 
Mussolini launched his attack on Ethiopia, Ethiopian warriors 
went into battle carrying spears..."

Britain came to control most of the region until after World 
War II, when it came to be overshadowed by the growing influence of 
the U.S., first in Ethiopia and more recently Somalia itself. The 
Horn became a focal point of sorts in the Cold War. The U.S. 
contended with the Soviet Union here---in a place where 
capitalism had the natural disadvantage of trying to proselytize 
some of the most destitute people on the planet--and both 
countries pumped millions worth of armaments, bases and economic 
development into the arid region.

All that was accomplished was to temporarily prop up one 
repressive government or another which, instead of guaranteeing 
their citizenry's security, produced famine and death for 
thousands. Ravaged by the petty jealousies of their factional 
leaders, today hundreds of thousand of refugees reel across the 
Horn in search of sustenance. Millions of children face 
malnutrition; millions more depend on outside food aid. 

What economic aid has been sent to Somalia over the years has 
been military hardware. Most economic aid is aimed at increasing 
export sales of the Western benefactors, not at developing food 
self-sufficiency. During the 1980s, when nearly 2 million people 
in the Horn were dying from starvation, Ethiopia happily exported 
coffee while Sudan harvested a record cotton crop. The profit 
from these sales went to buy guns, repay foreign debts (often 
incurred by buying more guns), and to pay off the ruling elites.

The Republic of Somalia consists of former Italian and British 
territories that were joined in 1960. Somalia is the only state 
in Africa whose members hsare a history, language, and culture---
probably with Hamitic origins. "The Somali belief iin a common 
ancestry has been the basis of their natinal solidarity," Howard 
University professor Bereket Habte Selassie wrote in his book 
CONFLICT AND INTERVENTION IN THE HORN OF AFRICA "Every colonizer 
of the Somali has had to contend with the nationalist feeling 
this process has engendered."

Islam reinforces this sense of national solidarity. Sopmali 
resistance to colonial intrusion was shaped and inspired by 
Mohammed Abdille Hassan---the man the British called the "mad 
mullah." Salassie said that Hassan fought every colonial power; 
whenever the British, French, Italians, or Ethiopians carved up 
the region, drawing one or another new border, his people would 
cross right over, ignoring it. From 1900 to 1920 Mohammed Abdille 
Hassan was never defeated. You can't expect that the descendants 
of the followers of the Mad Mullah, who have spent the better part 
of a century fighting off the combined might of the Western 
powers, to automatically buckle at the sight of Light Mountain 
Division behicles with their Fort Drum plates.

THE POSTCOLONIAL DECAY

In 1969, after less than a decade of post-colonial civilian rule, 
Siad Barre, the commander of the military, took power. With 
little ado, he suspended the constitution, locked up leading 
politicians, and announced plans to transform this conservative 
Islamic nation of nomads into a modern socialist state through a 
process of "scientific socialism."

Known as "Our Father, the Father of Knowledge," Barre quickly 
built a personality cult. With the help of the East Germans he 
established a network of Stasi-like secret agents and informers 
operating through the National Security Service, along with a 
paramilitary gang called the Victory Pioneers---who we sometimes 
compared to Papa Doc Duvalier's Tontons Macoute in Haiti. He 
forged ties with Moscow, which provided military, technical, and 
economic assistance. The Soviet Union provided humanitarian help 
during the drought of the mid 1970s.

Barre stamped out dissent, enforced strict censorship, 
discouraged contact between Somalis and Westerners, banned 
foreign journalists, and declared war on the "scourge" of 
tribalism.

"During his two decades in power Siad Barre proceeded, with 
studied deliberation and thorough effect, to dismantle the 
institutions that allowed people to articulate their grivances 
and that provided a framework for the resolution of conflict," 
writes Rakiya Omaar, a Somali and, until last week, the executive 
director of Africa Watch. Omaar is surely the most informed and 
passionate voice heard in Western circles on the plight of her 
country. "Powerless to bring about change peacefully, many people 
left the country or turned to violence setting the stage for the 
current turmoil."

When in 1974 Marxist guerrillas overthrew Haile Selassie in 
nearby Ethiopia, Siad Barre took advantage of the confusion to 
seize Ogaden, a desert region settled by Somalis but controlled 
by Ethiopia. The new socialist Ethiopian government, formerly a 
client of the United States, asked Moscow for help, and the 
Soviet Union switched sides. It abandoned the Somalis and sent 
airlifts of military equipment to Ethiopia. The Soviet military 
advisers in Mogadishu were dispatched to Addis Ababa, where they 
unburdened themselves of the minute details of Somalia's army to 
the Ethiopian high command. Thereupon, Addis Ababa's forces, 
equipped with Soviet arms and supplemented with Cuban combat 
units, forced the Somali army in March of 1978 to retreat out of 
Ogaden, leading to endless tumult on the border of the two 
countries.

Having been dumped by the Soviets, the Somalis next turned to the 
United States, which became their most important source of 
economic and military aid. In return, the U.S. was granted a base 
in Berbera for surveillance of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

The defeat in the Ogaden led to the current grisly impasse. The 
government had never liked the members of the Isaak clan, which 
historically lived along the frontier with Ogaden. With the war 
over, the government backed the refugees fleeing the fought-over 
region, offering them jobs, education, and reportedly 
establishing paramilitary operations among them. The refugees 
preyed on the local Isaaks who, after futile appeals to Siad 
Barre, set up a revolutionary guerrilla operation of their own 
and started attacking the Somalian army. The army responded by 
shelling the civilians. The fighting spread; other guerrila units 
joined in, and in January 1991 Siad Barre was forced out of 
office. The military and political factions responsible for 
ousting him then fell to fighting among themselves, pitting 
military leaders against one another and clan against clan, 
subclan against subclan.

Just in Iraqgate, contacts between Bush White House and Somali 
military leaders continued into 1989, and were eventually curbed 
only because of pressure from Congress. Bush backed Siad Barre up 
to the last moment, even when, as Africa Watch put it, the regime 
was engaged in a "war with its own people." The Bush 
administration, for example, asked Congress for $20 million in 
economic support funds in July 1989, a few days after the Siad 
Barre government massacred some 450 people as they left a mosque 
in Mogadishu. As a result, many of the weapons used in Mogadishu 
are of both Soviet and U.S. manufacture. From the Soviets came 
mortars, howitzers and anti-aircraft batteries; the U.S. supplied 
their own assault rifles and Soviet-made-AD-47s, the M-198  155mm 
howitzer, which can lob an 18 pound shell 48 mniles, the 106mm M-
40A1 recoiless rifle, and the 105mm M-56 field gun. In addition, 
the Somalis have arms received in the past from France, Libya, 
China, and Korea, and different factions are now getting weapons 
from Kenya, China, and the Saudis.

The United Nations' execution of its "peacekeeping role" has been 
a farce throughout all of this. When Siad Barre fled after the 
indiscriminate killing of civilians began, the UN and its 
specialized agencies turned coat and ran, citing the lack of 
security.

In 1991, private relief agencies like the Red Cross, Britian's 
Save the Children Fund, and others warned that up to one-quarter 
of Somalia's children would die this year without international 
help and begged the UN special agencies---UNICEF, World Food 
Program, etc.---to act. Another vain plea to the United Nations! 
They sat on their asses and watched the disaster occur.

Dangerous as the situation was, they didn't have to turn their 
backs on the Somalis, as the stubbornly brave private relief 
agencies have shown. Besides, this wasn't the first time these 
bureaucrats of the New World Order had looked on hunger in the 
Horn of Africa with crocodile eyes. During the 1984 Ethiopian 
famine, the World Food Program deliberately scaled down estimates 
of emergency food needs and, during the Sudan famine, the UN took 
no action for three years. The one UNICEF program helping 
voluntary agencies to fly supplies into the stricken area was 
actually CLOSED DOWN as the starvation approached its height. 
Caring for civilians was left to the International Committee of 
the Red Cross, the U.S. International Medical Corps, Save the 
Children, and France's Doctors Without Borders.

In mid February the UN supposedly arranged a ceasfire--which 
didn't work, of course--and then proceeded to insist that before 
the supposed forerunner of a world government sent medicines or 
distributed any food, the ceasefires must be shown to be holding. 
This even though, on the ground in Somalia, nobody cares about 
the ceasefires--they assume that will take care of itself. What's 
needed is some kind of well-planned distribution system to get 
the food out through as many ports as possible. The gangs use the 
food as a commodity, as something of value they must be hired to 
protect or steal; once there is a great deal of food in the 
countryside, it will lose its value, and the political situation 
will ease.

WHY THE WEST LIKES PICTURES OF STARVING PEOPLE

Famine, as I have repeatedly argued, opens the door to enormous 
aid programs aimed ostensibly at "humanitarian" goals but really 
at reorganzing local economies and hooking national production 
into a global system. When our main enemy was communism, Agency 
for International Development policies were targeted to compete 
against socialist ventures--collective farms and cooperatives, 
for example--in favor of private enterprise. Today, as the chief 
provider of economic and humanitarian assistance to Africa, the 
U.S. will be able to set the terms of economic development across 
the continent.

They can do that not only through the International Monetary Fund 
and World Bank but, more importantly, by distributiong food--for 
food aid brings a change in the way people live. Egypt is one 
often cited example. It was once self-sufficient in grains, but 
with American aid its grain imports have increased and domestic 
production fallen off. Most of the imported grain goes to feed 
animals--in fact, most of the domestic production feeds animals 
as well. The meat is grown for foreign consumption. The 
government uses what's left of the aid imports to provide 
staples, then heavily taxes farmers who grow graihn and uses 
subsidies to further encourage the production of meat. It is now 
a regular and appropirately thankful market for American grain 
supplies.

This elaborate Western history of ecnomic assistance to 
struggling nations around the world to develop markets for 
American goods is intimately tied to the traditions of 
colonialism. Remember that modern mechanized agriculture was 
developed at the end of the 19th century to feed not only 
ourselves but th eimperial pwers of Europe. With the end of World 
War II, we supported the creation of a self-sufficient European 
agricutlture, and sought in stead new markets in the newly 
independent former European colonies. We've never sought to make 
THEM self-sufficient in food.

We've been taught the world has a shortage of food, when in fact 
is has a vast abundance. There's enough wheat, rice, and other 
grains produced to provide every human being with 3600 calories a 
day---enough food to make everyone fat. As the Institute for Food 
and Development Policy long has pointed out, "Virtually every 
`hungry' country produced enough food for all its people. 
Redistribution of a tiny fraction of each country's food supply 
would wipe out hunger. For example, in Indonesia, with the 
second-greatest number of undernourished people in the world, 
redistributing a mere 2 percent of the available food would make 
a healthy life possible for everyone."

In Somalia, Africa Watch writes, "in normal times, Mogadisu and 
the adjoining areas of the country are at the hub of a complete 
food system," with food coming from small farms and large 
irrigated spreads outside the city. Some towns concentrate on 
fishing; meat, often camel meat (camels are Somali's largest 
export), domes from the interior. Somalia traditionally has also 
imported some food from neigboring countries and from the rest of 
Africa. Somalia has beome the country most dependent on imported 
food in sub-Saharan Africa, although it was self-sufficient in 
food grains up to the ealry 1970s and has enough arable land to 
grow food for everyone. 

The civil war takes the lion's share of the blame for the 
disruption, but Somali farmers already had to deal with dropping 
food prices, tight credit, high taxes, and the dumping of U.S. 
and European Community commodities on their market. The there's 
the World Bank and its big Bardheere Dam project, which will 
displace thousands of families while providing cheap irrigation 
for export agricutlture.

"Famine takes root when farmers lose their means of production," 
writes Gayle Smith in MIDDLE EAST REPORT. In Africa, grain yields 
and overall harvests have declined over the last decade. Food 
production is down by 15 percent from 1981. One out of every five 
Africans now depends on food aid. The famine has depleted Africa 
of more of its population than in any period since the slave 
trade.

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

Operation Restore Hope also represents a continuance of a broad 
new program for the United Nations, which of late has preferred 
to leave economic matters in the hands of those captives of the 
multinationals, the IMF and World Bank, and concentrate instead 
on new kinds of peacekeeping.

The basic idea is to strip the United Nations of economic 
activities that tend toward redressing the balance betwen the 
industrial North and the underdeveloped South. At the same time, 
the reformers aim to widen the influence of internationl 
coporations within the UN.

"I am not all that concerned about financial or technical 
assistance to the Third World," Secretary General Boutros 
Boutros-Ghali has said. "For the South, what matters is that the 
North pay attention, on a political level, to events there. That 
is more important than financial and technical aid."

Before Somalia there were about 40,000 UN troops deployed in 
countreis around the world---from El Salvador, where they are 
monitoring a ceasefire, to Yugoslavia, where they try to separate 
Serbs and Croats and protect Bosnian food relief shipments, to 
Cmabodia, where they will end up administering an entire country. 
The UN charter says the organization can use peacekeeping forces 
only to resist outside aggression, but increasingly the UN is 
plunging into internal conflicts to stop widespread violence. The 
peacekeeping operations---not including Somalia---cost $2.7 
billion last year, more than twice the regular budget of the UN.

But as the current issue fo FOREIGN POLICY points out, what's 
involved here is redefining the nature of sovereighnty. What 
America wants is a new definition that allows for both expert 
assistance to struggling nations and, in the case of places like 
Somalia or Bosnia, the establishment of outright trusteeships 
under the aegis of the United Nations.

The Bush administration and the United Nations have by now 
dithered so long that a military mission long ago became 
inevitable, but if the past is prologue---Grenada, Panama, 
Nicaragua, even the Kurds---Operation Restore Hope could easily 
turn into a dreadful quagmire of lost hopes. It can never work 
unless the U.S., either on its own or through the UN, mounts an 
extensive political and economic relief operation aimed at the 
entire region, a sort of Peace Corps with muscles earmarked for 
the Horn. You can't just take the guns away from 16-year-old 
boys, as if you were pacifying South Central L.A. That will have 
to accompanied by some sort of massive vocational training 
program.

(Additonal reporting by Tiarra Mukherjee)
---------------------------------------------
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