From: Peninsula Peace and Justice Center <ppjc@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.somalia
Date: 23 Dec 92 11:16 PST
Subject: The Arabs, The US and Somalia
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1766500005:000:5681
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!ppjc    Dec 23 11:16:00 1992


[The following is an editorial from "Al-Quds al-Arabi,"
a Jerusalem-based daily Arabic newspaper.  It was reprinted
in the 12/18/92 edition of Middle East International.]

The Arabs, The U.S. and Somalia

by Abd al-Ilah Balqaziz  (12/10/92)

The UN decision to send troops to Somalia to end the
grinding internal conflict there has dangerous
implications and unmistakable consequences.  The
American administration which took the decision is the
same one which has been refusing military intervention
to end the Serbian aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina
and implement the relevant UN resolutions there.  What
has changed to make the US administration reconsider the
principle of military involvement which it effectively
renounced when the Yugoslavs began committing collective
suicide?

Leaving aside the 'humanitarian' motives of the military
deployment to Somalia -- which can scarcely be
believed -- it is apparent that new considerations and
needs have arisen in the Horn of Africa and the southern
entrance to the Red Sea which, as far as Washington is
concerned, are compelling enough to warrant intervention
during the dying days of a Republican administration. 
The most important of these have been the changes in
Sudan and its political orientation, followed by Iran's
intensified activity in the region.

Sudan is becoming a central American concern:  Hassan
al-Turabi's National Islamic Front (NIF) may have been
useful once upon a time in supporting Nimieri's regime
and strengthening the influence of conservative forces
against pan-Arabist and Communist currents.  This was
part of an overall strategy under which the 'religious'
forces were given a significant role to play in the
distribution of regional power.  But this role came to
an abrupt end as soon as many of the currents
representing political Islam began defying their
masters, rebelling against the Saudi 'Sublime Porte' and
making common cause with the strategy of other forces
which had a record of hostility to American policy.  The
Gulf crisis was the test of the degree to which this
section of political Islam was changed:  shifting in its
entirety towards Iraq, and then towards Iran, without
forewarning or preparation.  No party was subjected to
more political vilification and media hostility for
changing its loyalties and international friendships
than the NIF.

The Front and its leader are accused of sponsoring an
'Islamist International,' and of establishing camps to
train armies of mujahedin who would then be sent back to
their own or others countries to await the clarion call
to jihad, similar to that which was sounded in
Afghanistan.

Sudan has on several occasions been subjected to
blackmail from the American-Egyptian-Saudi threesome
because of its leniency towards the Islamist movement. 
Egypt has even started portraying Sudan as a perilous
threat to its national security.  This was sufficient to
encourage the U.S. administration to prepare plans to
intervene in Sudan to 'protect' its minorities and
'promote' democracy there.  There can be no doubt that
the intervention in Somalia is linked to these plans
that have been prepared for Sudan, and to the
independent line it has taken which conflicts with the
general regional tendency towards subservience.

Like Sudan, Iran is the second direct target of the
American intervention in Somalia.  Whatever we -- as
Arabs -- may think of Iran's policy of regional hegemony
over its Arab environs, and of its policy of exporting
'revolution' through sponsoring long-term dissension in
several Arab countries vulnerable to the influence of
the 'Islamic Republic,' the fact remains that Iran is
being targeted by America.  The intense propaganda
against Iran's arms build-up is but the opening shot in
a campaign to prepare the ground politically and
psychologically for a strategic blow against Iran's
growing influence in the Gulf, the Red Sea, the 'Middle
East' and the Maghreb.  It is reminiscent of the
widespread media campaign waged against Iraq and its
arms program three years ago, which prepared the ground
for the aggression against it.

It goes without saying that the American deployment in
Somalia will enhance the U.S.'s ability to monitor
Iranian activity in the Red Sea and in Sudan
particularly, and could serve the purpose of strangling
Iranian commercial activity in the waterway between Bab
al-Mandab and the Suez Canal.

What does the US intervention mean for the Arab world
and its regional order, of which somalia is a part? 
Putting aside the grave security implications which this
new military intervention entails for the southern
approaches of the Arab world, this move proclaims the
demise of the so-called Arab regional order, which
failed to halt the containable conflict.  The scandal is
underlined by the fact that the warring Somali parties
were banking on an Arab solution, while the long-
suffering Somali people who were dying of hunger
received less Arab aid than that provided by certain
Arab parties to London Zoo.

To be fair to that Arab order, one could say that it was
incapable of managing the most serious crisis in its 45-
year history (viz. the Gulf crisis) and that it was
perhaps constrained by the US and its surrogates.  We do
not subscribe to that theory, whose advocates used it to
justify the doctrine of 'imported security' that was
rubber-stamped at the infamous (August 1990) Cairo
summit.  The Somali crisis was capable of being tackled,
and would have provided the Arab League with a rare
opportunity to flex its flaccid diplomatic muscles and
restore some of its credibility.  Regrettably, the
edifice that overlooks Cairo's Liberation Square
declined to act.

Newsgroups: alt.current-events.somalia