somalia backgrounder

[Hannah Bell]

Somalia is geopolitically important because of its position on the gulf of aden, entry point to the red sea.






1980s-1990s

The US funded/armed their proxy Siad Barre in Somalia as counterweight to the USSR-proxy Dergist gov't in Ethiopia.

(Before the '77 Ogaden War, the Soviets had funded Barre, the US Ethiopia. Today the US funds Ethiopia.)

In 1989-90 the US cut off funds to Barre (in part because the then-floundering Soviet gov't reduced support to Ethiopia).

In 1991, Barre's gov't fell & chaos resulted.

In 1992, Bush 1/UN sent in troups: denounement = "Black Hawk Down".

Clan conflict & civil war ensued & regional powers emerged from the conflicts. One was the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).



2005-present

Bush II got nervous about the UIC & started funding/arming warlords to counter:

"a coalition of secular Mogadishu warlords under the name Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT)....But the operation failed disastrously... and 'the payoffs added to an anarchic situation that led many Somalis to turn to the Islamic Courts for protection' (Washington Post, May 13, 2007)."


The UIC forces took over Mogadishu, which is kind of a dividing flash-point between southern & northern somalia.

In response, Bush supported an invasion by Ethiopia in 2006:

"'CIA agents traveled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations' (the London Independent, February 9, 2008). The United States provided important satellite intelligence and other battleground information from unmanned Predator drones. 'A lot of what we taught them was used to fight that global War on Terror,' observed a U.S. military advisor who had trained Ethiopian soldiers now fighting in Somalia. In terms of weaponry, he noted, 'They got what they needed.'

U.S. Special Forces also conducted periodic operations inside Somali territory, possibly moving out of a rumored CIA base in eastern Ethiopia. The full extent and exact type of activity is not known, but reports of their movements have been confirmed by Somali officials. As TFG Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein explained to reporters in February 2008, 'The presence of the CIA, the presence of troops, is not a big issue. We like that they are here. But right now they don't have a permanent military presence. They come in and out.'

U.S. warships moved into position off the coast of Somalia in anticipation of the invasion. Acting on intelligence from the ground, Washington ordered bombing raids targeting what it believed to be Islamic militants. U.S.-piloted AC-130 gunships and cruise missiles have blasted Somali territory at least a half dozen times since January 2007."

http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/19831


The Ethiopians pushed back the Islamists & thousands of Ethiopian troops remained in the disputed territory around Mogadishu - until January 2009.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7825626.stm


Now we have lots of pirates.

The two main pirate base areas are Puntland in the north & Harardheere in the central area.

Puntland has a coast guard, set up by a British private military company, & an intelligence service, set up by the US. Harardheere is within the sphere of influence of the western-funded Transitional Federal Government. It has an army & police force. They receive UN funding & funds from the west.

Interestingly, there'd been an earlier rash of pirates before the UIC took over Harardheere in 2006, & one of the current pirate leaders headed up the earlier one, too: Abdi Mohamed Afweyne.

"On Monday August 14, according to Mail & Guardian, Middle East Online, Nasdaq and the BBC, the Islamists announced that they had taken over two coastal towns, Eldher and Harardheere, which had been used as pirate bases. As the Islamists moved in, pirates loyal to regional warlord Abdi Mohamed Afweyne moved out."

http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/002804.html


Conflict around Mogadishu has stepped up since the Ethiopians left, & the UN is contemplating sending in peacekeepers:

"April 2009
Somalia

Expected Council Action

The Secretary-General is due to report by 15 April on a possible UN peacekeeping deployment to Somalia as requested by resolution 1863. The Council has signaled that it wants to decide by 1 June whether to authorise such a deployment to replace the AU Mission to Somalia (AMISOM)...

Key Recent Developments

Following two days of intense fighting that reportedly killed more than fifty people in Mogadishu, the Council issued a press statement on 25 February calling on all Somalis to reject violence. It also condemned the 22 February attack on AMISOM, which killed 11 Burundian peacekeepers."


Something else that hasn't got much play, what with all the pirate jingoism:

"On 10 March the Somali cabinet unanimously decided to implement Islamic law. The decision was seen as an attempt to limit the influence of the insurgents. However, the Islamist insurgent group Al-Shabaab seems to have rejected it as hypocritical. The leader of a recently formed insurgent group Hisbi Islam, Omar Iman, said in a statement on 8 March that his group did not recognise the new government and would continue attacks against AMISOM. On 19 March an audio recording published on the internet claiming to be from Usama bin Laden attacked the new president, accusing him of cooperating with the infidels."

http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/site/c.glKWLeMTIsG/b.5053255/k.B8D9/April_2009brSomalia.htm

[Democracyinkind]

1. This is the second excellent thread from you on this subject. I enjoy most of your posts.

Do you think America would have a different take on politics if a majority of Americans would know about this? Or maybe just care?

I wonder what you think.

[Hannah Bell]

2. i think most people support whatever butters their bread.

it's funny to hear the moralists yelling how peasants from one of the poorest countries in the world shouldn't kill or steal when our bankers & government do it literally every day.

[Democracyinkind]

4. Agreed. Especially when our meddling causes the poverty to some extent.

But my question would be a moral one in a sense. What has made the difference for you? What makes you want to know about Somalia, and what makes other people just accept that there are immoral black people that are too stupid to help themselves - as we are told so often.?

How can we be a moral Nation when we don't care about what we do? Better said - since caring is asked allot - how can we have a rational discussion of Somalian piracy when this discussion necessarily takes place within a context where the notion that we constantly meddle with African politics is denied?

How can anything change when the roadblocks to learning that we have more common interests with Somalian peasants than with the Goldman Sachs board of directors are so colossal?

Or let me ask this a bit more polemically: Would a mandatory, fully honest and objective study of American history for all Americans change the way we vote or condone policy in your view?

[Hannah Bell]

8. i guess i *do* feel objective history makes a difference or i wouldn't be posting at DU.

But I also think entrenched power is a great counterweight to objective history.

He who controls the goodies controls not only information, but behavior. How many people work for corps whose actions they secretly disapprove of?

We most of us feed the machine that's killing us.

[Chulanowa]

7. It's okay when rich white people do it

Theft, destruction of property and life, subversion of governments... All this is okay when both the collar and the face are white. But make the people poor and some shade of brown? Then you get pages and pages of hoo-rah when their heads get blown the fuck off.

You get moral admonishments about how "those people" should join the civilized world, or that they should protest wrongs peacefully, or perhaps, and this was not something I saw on DU, turn their country into a tax haven to attract business.

I understand most of these folks saying this stuff, or cheering, or whatever, are simply ignorant, and not actively malicious or racist. The simple fact is, if I were a Somalian, you're fucking right I would be a pirate, and I'm sure others here would be as well. Yes, it's criminal, yes it's murderous, but given the options present in that place? I can't cast a stone.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

3. A brief history of Somalia

Like virtually every modern African state Somalia's history is the history of imperialism itself.

Though long the home of many independent and indigenous nations and cultures, beginning in the 1880s the horn of East Africa, of which Somalia is part, was divided up by France, Britain and Italy. They were also joined in this carving up of what is today Somalia by Ethiopia, an independent African nation which was spared conquest by aping the European imperialists.

France took the port of Djibouti, which today is a separate nation by that same name. Italy seized Mogadishu and the coastal areas around it. The British had earlier taken the port of Berbera, which separates DJibouti and Mogadishu. Ethopia took the inland region of Ogaden.

The proximity to the Suez Canal was the prime motivating factor for the carve-up of Somalia by the imperialists. The lives, history, culture and basic democratic rights of the people inhabiting this region were of no interests to the colonialists.

<snip>

http://www.geocities.com/arcticreds/somalia.html

A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
by John Bellamy Foster


Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil.

Elite opinion in the United States in the decade immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union often decried the absence of a U.S. grand strategy comparable to what George Kennan labeled “containment,” under the mantle of which the United States intervened throughout the Cold War years. The key question, as posed in November 2000 by national-security analyst Richard Haass, was that of determining how the United States should utilize its current “surplus of power” to reshape the world. Haass’s answer, which doubtless contributed to his being hired immediately after as director of policy planning for Colin Powell’s State Department in the new Bush administration, was to promote an “Imperial America” strategy aimed at securing U.S. global dominance for decades to come. Only months before, a similar, if even more nakedly militaristic, grand strategy had been presented by the Project for the New American Century, in a report authored by future top Bush-administration figures Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis Libby, among others.1

This new imperial grand strategy became a reality, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—and was soon officially enshrined in the White House’s National Security Strategy statement of 2002. Summing up the new imperial thrust in Harvard Magazine, Stephen Peter Rosen, director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard and a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, wrote:

A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order. Planning for imperial wars is different from planning for conventional international wars....Imperial wars to restore order are not so constrained . The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly as possible for psychological impact—to demonstrate that the empire cannot be challenged with impunity....mperial strategy focuses on preventing the emergence of powerful, hostile challengers to the empire: by war if necessary, but by imperial assimilation if possible.2

<snip>

http://monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm

THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA

FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEACE IS RESTORED

By MARK FINEMAN
DATELINE: MOGADISHU, Somalia

Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.

That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.

According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.

<snip>

http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/15

[Hannah Bell]

5. Thanks for the info.

[ColbertWatcher]

6. Off to the greatest! n/t

[maryf]

9. K&R

All this interest seems to me to be part of the new marketing strategm to get the "people" used to Somalia, taking advantage of the "battle" with the pirates (already the rallying cries of USA vs. Somalia)! The position is very strategic as you point out, the "risk" game continues, I believe...just south of the UAR isn't it?

[Orwellian_Ghost]

10. Kicking

[ColbertWatcher]

11. Kick. n/t