Somalia, and the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger

“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 exsoldiers 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 selfsufficiency 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 selfdetermination.

“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 the Pentagon-prepared script of “fighting against the warlords.”

As images of U.S. troops in foreign lands again 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 of 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 foodsupply 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.