“The leader of the military wing of an Islamist insurgent organization in Somalia has been killed in an overnight air strike.
“Aden Hashi Ayro, al-Shabab’s military commander, died when his home in the central town of Dusamareb was bombed.
“Ten other people, including a senior militant, are also reported dead.”
Only in the fourth sentence, was responsibility ascribed:
“A US military spokesman told the BBC that it had attacked what he called a known al-Qaeda target in Somalia.”
English teachers often illustrate use of the passive form with the
sentence: ‘A man has been arrested.’ The passive is preferable,
students are told, because the active form, ‘The police have arrested a
man,’ contains a redundancy — the agent is already indicated by the
action. There’s no need to actually mention ‘the police.’
Likewise,
the BBC takes for granted that the US is the world’s policeman; no need
to mention it by name. The action of bombing an impoverished Third
World country already indicates the agent. This also helps explain why
no mention was made of the illegality of this act of aggression.
On
the rare occasions when the media mention the conflict in Somalia at
all, the focus tends to fall on US attempts to hunt down al Qaeda, or
on the West’s alleged humanitarian motives. Other priorities were
indicated in 1992 when the US political weekly The Nation referred to
Somalia as “one of the most strategically sensitive spots in the world
today: astride the Horn of Africa, where oil, Islamic fundamentalism
and Israeli, Iranian and Arab ambitions and arms are apt to crash and
collide.” (December 21, 1992)
In December 2006, the US
backed the invasion of Somalia by its close Ethiopian ally to overthrow
the Islamist government, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Christian
Ethiopia is a historic enemy of Somalia, which is made up entirely of
Sunni Muslims.
On December 4 of that year, General John
Abizaid, the commander of US forces from the Middle East through
Afghanistan, travelled to Addis Ababa to meet the Ethiopian prime
minister, Meles Zenawi. Three weeks later,
Ethiopian forces crossed
into Somalia and Washington launched a series of supportive air
strikes. The Guardian quoted a former intelligence officer familiar
with the region:
“The meeting was just the final
handshake.” (Xan Rice and Suzanne Goldenberg, “The American connection:
How US forged an alliance with Ethiopia over invasion,” The Guardian,
January 13, 2007)
Political analyst James Petras commented:
“Somalia . . . was invaded
by mercenaries by Ethiopia, trained, financed, armed and directed by US
military advisers.” (Petras, ‘The Imperial System: Hierarchy, Networks
and Clients: The Case of Somalia,’ Dissident Voice, February 18, 2007)
USA Today reported in January 2007 that the US had “quietly poured
weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia,” which had received nearly
$20 million in US military aid since late 2002. The report added:
“The [Somalia] intervention
is controversial in Ethiopia, where the Meles government has become
increasingly repressive, said Chris Albin-Lackey, an African researcher
at Human Rights Watch.
“The Meles government has limited the power of the opposition in
parliament and arrested thousands. A government inquiry concluded that
security forces fatally shot, beat or strangled 193 people who
protested election fraud in 2005.”
Petras noted that, having driven the last of the warlords from
Mogadishu and most of the countryside, the ICU had established a
government which was welcomed by the great majority of Somalis and
covered over 90% of the population:
“The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord
corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected,
ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed
thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes
moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed
fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians.
Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and
creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation.”
(Petras, op. cit)
Martin Fletcher wrote in the Times of the ICU:
“I am no apologist for the
courts. Their leadership included extremists with dangerous intentions
and connections. But for six months they achieved the near-impossible
feat of restoring order to a country that appeared ungovernable…
“The courts were less repressive than our Saudi Arabian friends. They
publicly executed two murderers (a fraction of the 24 executions in
Texas last year), and discouraged Western dancing, music and films, but
at least people could walk the streets without being robbed or killed.
That trumps most other considerations. Ask any Iraqi.
“The Islamists have now been replaced - with Washington’s connivance -
by a weak, fragile Government that was created long before the courts
won power, that includes the very warlords they defeated and relies for
survival on Somalia’s worst enemy.” (Fletcher, ‘The Islamists were the
one hope for Somalia,’ The Times, January 8, 2007)
It was clear to many commentators that the Ethiopian invasion would
prove disastrous. Three months later, the Daily Telegraph reported:
“A new humanitarian crisis
is rapidly taking shape in the Horn of Africa where eight days of heavy
fighting in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, has forced about 350,000
people to flee.
“Artillery fire has devastated large areas of the city, forcing about
one third of its population to leave. Yesterday Mogadishu’s main
hospital was shelled.
“The plains around Mogadishu are filled with refugees enduring
desperate conditions with little food or shelter. The fighting began
when Somalia’s internationally recognised government, supported by
Ethiopian troops, launched an offensive against insurgents.” (Mike
Pflanz, ‘Fighting brings fresh misery to Somalia,’ Telegraph, April 26,
2007)
The Telegraph cited a British aid worker: “They are bombing anything that moves.”
Catherine Weibel, from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees was also quoted:
“Everyone we are talking to says this is the worst situation they have seen in 16 years since the last government fell.”
The War On Terror . . . And The Real Concern
The
preferred media framework for making sense of US actions closely
parallels cold war mythology. We are to believe the US is passionately,
even blindly, battling ideological enemies in an effort to protect
itself and the West. Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland could be
relied upon to paint this picture of events:
“A fortnight ago the
Ethiopians entered Somalia to topple the Islamist forces who had just
taken Mogadishu. Americans dislike that Islamist movement, fearing it
has the makings of an African Taliban, so they backed the Ethiopians to
take it out. According to Patrick Smith, the editor of Africa
Confidential, the war on terror is fast becoming a cold war for the
21st century, with the US finding proxy allies to fight proxy enemies
in faraway places.” (Freedland, “Like a deluded compulsive gambler,
Bush is fuelling a new cold war,” The Guardian, January 10, 2007)
If this sounds curiously simplistic, even childish, it is. In fact, the
cold war, like the “war on terror”, was far less ideological, far more
prosaic, than journalists like Freedland claim. Historian Howard Zinn
has, for example, commented on the Vietnam war, which the BBC would
have us believe “was America’s attempt to stop Communists from toppling
one country after another in South East Asia”:
“When I read the hundreds of
pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by [military analyst]
Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the
National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast
Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for ‘tin,
rubber, oil.’”
Ethiopia’s invasion coincided with the Pentagon’s goal of creating a
new ‘Africa Command’ to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor
described as: “Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda.” Richard Whittle wrote:
“The creation of the new command will be more than an exercise in
shuffling bureaucratic boxes, experts say. The US government’s motives
include countering Al Qaeda’s known presence in Africa, safeguarding
future oil supplies, and competing with China, which has been courting
African governments in its own quest for petroleum, they suggest.”
(Richard Whittle, ‘Pentagon to train a sharper eye on Africa,’ January
5, 2007)
As Andy Rowell and James Marriott have noted, the key fact is that
“some 30 per cent of America’s oil will come from Africa in the next
ten years”. (Rowell and Marriott, A Game as Old as Empire — The Secret
World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, edited by
Steven Hiatt, Berrett-Koehler, 2007, p.118)
The US has
plans for nearly two-thirds of Somalia’s oil fields to be allocated to
the US oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. The US hopes
Somalia will line up as an ally alongside Ethiopia and Djibouti, where
the US has a military base. This alliance would give America powerful
leverage close to the major energy-producing regions.
Chatham
House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of
International Affairs, commented on US and Ethiopian intervention last
year:
“In an uncomfortably
familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the
reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by
unilateral actions of other international actors — especially Ethiopia
and the United States — following their own foreign policy agendas.
Catastrophic Crisis
This ‘hijacking’ has had truly appalling consequences. More than one
million people have been made internal refugees, and the UN food
security unit warned last week that 3.5 million people, half of
Somalia’s population, are facing famine. Fighting has turned Mogadishu
into a ghost town. About 700,000 people have fled — out of a population
of up to 1.5 million. The International Committee of the Red Cross
describes Somalia’s crisis as “catastrophic.”
Soaring
food prices have driven thousands of protestors onto the streets of the
capital, Mogadishu. On May 5, Professor Abdi Samatar, a professor of
geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota, told the
US radio program Democracy Now:
“Well, what you see in
Mogadishu over the last year and a half or so, since the Ethiopian
invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed
virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population
have built without the government for the last fifteen, sixteen years.”
A kilo of rice, which previously sold at around seventy US cents, now
costs as much as $2.50. The average day’s income for anyone fortunate
enough to have a job is less than a dollar a day. The gap between
incomes and the cost of food primarily imported from overseas means
that millions of people cannot afford to eat.
Last week,
Amnesty International reported that it had obtained scores of accounts
of killings by Ethiopian troops that Somalis have described as
“slaughtering [Somalis] like goats.” In one case, “a young child’s
throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child’s mother.”
Amnesty
reported that during sweeps through neighborhoods, Ethiopian forces
placed snipers on roofs, and civilians were unable to move about for
fear of being shot:
“While some sniper fire
appeared to be directed at suspected members of anti-TFG [Transitional
Federal Government] armed groups, reports indicate that civilians were
also frequently caught in indiscriminate fire. In many cases families
were forced to carry their wounded to medical care in wheelbarrows and
on donkeys because ambulance drivers would not operate their vehicles
due to general insecurity, including sniper fire. As a result, it has
become very difficult for civilians to access medical care.”
The British government has consistently downplayed both the gravity of
the crisis and the murderous behavior of Ethiopian forces. In the
Foreign Office’s latest annual human rights assessment of Somalia there
was no mention of Ethiopia, let alone the conduct of its troops. No
surprise — Ethiopia is one of the largest recipients of UK aid in
Africa and, as discussed, is an important regional ally.
The Media Follow, The Government Leads
Predictably,
the government’s strategic silence is reflected in press reporting. In
the last year, the words ‘Somalia’ and ‘famine’ have appeared in a
grand total of seven British broadsheet newspaper articles discussing
the topic. Of the few references to the latest US attack in the British
press over the last week, only the Independent and the Sunday Times
made briefs references to Somalia’s humanitarian crisis. The
Independent noted that life for Somalia’s nine million residents has
become “unbearable”. The Guardian merely quoted Reuters:
“Western security services
have long seen Somalia as a haven for militants. Warlords overthrew
dictator Siad Barre in 1991, casting the country into chaos.” (Reuters,
“US airstrike kills head of al-Qaida in Somalia,” Guardian
International, May 2, 2008)
The Amnesty report was mentioned in three broadsheet newspapers. Of
these, The Guardian failed to mention the US role at all. Ian Black
commented:
“Ethiopia sent in troops in
December 2006 and ejected them. Since then, Mogadishu has been caught
up in a guerrilla war between the government and its Ethiopian allies
and the Islamist insurgents. Up to 1 million Somalians are internally
displaced.” (Ian Black, ‘Somali refugees speak of horrific war crimes,’
The Guardian, May 7, 2008)
By contrast, a short Independent piece led with the US role:
“Amnesty International has
called for the role of the United States in Somalia to be investigated,
following publication of a report accusing its allies of committing war
crimes.”
Amnesty’s Dave Copeman was cited:
“
There are major countries
that have significant influence. The US, EU and European countries need
to exert that influence to stop these attacks.”
This is the sole reference to Copeman’s comments in the entire national UK press.
Professor Samatar commented on the latest US attack:
“[I]t’s quite befuddling to
Somalis and many other peace-loving people around the world as to why
the United States has chosen to bomb people who are desperate for
assistance and food, and who have been dislocated and traumatized by an
Ethiopian invasion, a country that has its own people under tyranny in
itself.”
The Truth of “Our Leaders”
With our shared responsibility for the catastrophe in Somalia buried out of sight, the Telegraph reported this week:
“Gordon Brown urged the Burmese
authorities to give ‘unfettered access’ to humanitarian agencies. ‘We
now estimate that two million people face famine or disease as a result
of the lack of co-operation of the Burmese authorities. This is
completely unacceptable,’ he said.” (Alan Brown, ‘Burmese officials
“are seizing emergency aid and selling it for profit”,’ Daily
Telegraph, May 13, 2008)
In this week’s segment, we hear about police propaganda designed to make the public fearful and ready to exact severe punishment, regardless of any facts about crime.
Dr. Jemima Pierre is a Black Agenda Report editor and contributor.
Alec Karakatsanis is an attorney with a long history of work as a public defender.
Stop the Raids NYC is hosting an event in Brooklyn, New York, Saturday,
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