| A Look Back @ the U.S. Intervention in Somalia |
Below is the text of a speech given by Adam Ritscher at a recent Socialist Action forum on the U.S. intervention in Somalia.
How many here saw the recent Hollywood movie Black
Hawk Down? Some of you . . . For those who didn't get
to see it, the plot, or that which passed for one, was
pretty much your standard GI Joe type flick. It takes
place in 1993 famine stricken Somalia, and the
soldiers are there to provide humanitarian relief and
catch some bad guys. Some of the soldiers believe
wholeheartedly in the mission, and some say they're
just there to kill, or because they really dig being
around other soldiers. In any event, the mission goes
haywire, and 19 U.S. soldiers get killed, along with
at least 1,000 Somalis.
The movie paints the U.S. intervention in Somalia as a
humanitarian one, but one that unfortunately, proved
unsuccessful because the Somalian people were, at
best, prevented from benefiting from this benevolence
due to the interference of Somalian warlords, or, at
worst, were just too plain stupid and belligerent to
resist looking a gift horse in the mouth. As a result
the U.S. pulled out of Somalia.
But Hollywood has been known to distort things in the
past. Is that really what happened. Well, if you
were to look at the mainstream press coverage you
would indeed fine a picture painted quite similar to
that in Black Hawk Down. According to the press in
the early 1990s the East African country of Somalia
was indeed gripped by a terrible famine. The famine
was the result of a bitter civil war which had
destroyed the nations economy and displaced hundreds
of thousands of people. In early 1993 the U.S. led a
United Nations military intervention into the country.
Why did we intervene? According to the press, and the
White House press conferences the first and foremost
reason was to end the famine, to prevent starvation,
to save the emaciated, near-dead children who were
literally dying by the thousands, hopelessly caught in
the middle of a civil war fought by drug-crazed
teenagers and power-hungry warlords.
Hmmm. In that case, sad outcome aside, if we are to
believe the makers of Black Hawk Down, the mainstream
media and Washington, we should look in the mirror and
smile because we live in a country whose foreign
policy is based on justice and mercy; we live in a
country that fortunately is willing to play the much
needed role of the benevolent, but fast-shooting
cowboy, the Lone Ranger so to speak, protecting the
innocent with our flashing guns and shining silver
missiles. Truly, white horse not included, we will now
ride the planet bringing the benefits of our advanced
civilization to all.
Never mind that our gun-toting humanitarian
interventions seem to be somewhat selective. The civil
wars in Ethiopia, and the Sudan, for example, which
promoted similar famines, not to mention the similar
tragedies of earlier decades in Bangledesh and
Nigeria were apparently not brought to our intention.
Likewise, we apparently have not been able to confirm
that worldwide starvation and malnutrition is
afflicting more than 35 percent of the earth's
inhabitants.
Well folks, I do indeed look in the mirror every
morning when I get up, but I'm afraid I simply do not
believe what Dan Rather, Hollywood or what any
president we've ever had has ever said. Call me
cyncial, but I'm untrusting of any of those sources,
and when they all say the same thing, my instict is to
reach for my gun and my wallet. If they all same
humanitarianism, then I say it has to be something
else.
We in Socialist Action and YSA decided to put on this
forum tonight largely in response to the movie Black
Hawk Down and the way it portrayed the events in 1993.
We intend to take on the claim that the U.S.
intervened in Somalia for humanitarian reasons. We
also decided to put on this forum because in the wake
of September 11, and Pres. Bush's subsequent so called
war on terrorism, Somalia has been mentioned more than
once as a haven for terrorists, suggesting that a new
intervention into that country may be in the works.
This, and the INS attacks on Somali immigrants and
institutions in this country, including in the Twin
Cities, led us to decide that it was important to talk
about what really happened in this country, and what
the U.S.'s real interests there are.
Lets begin with 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
seperate nation by that same name. Italy seized
Mogadishu and the coastal areas around it. The British
had earlier taken the port of Berbera, which seperates
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, culuture and basic
democratic rights of the people inhabiting this region
were of no interests to the colonialists.
It is interesting to note though, that despite the
obvious military superiority that the European
imperialists had at their disposal, their colonizing
efforts did not go unopposed. In 1899, a tribal
leader, nicknamed the 'Mad Mullah,' for example,
mobilized the tribes and clans into a fighting force
that harassed the British for over 20 years." He was
called "Mad," of course, because he the idea that he
could unite his nation against the combined forces of
the imperialist occupiers. The rebels were finally
defeated in 1920 through terror bombing by the British
Royal Air Force.
In the last 1950s and early 1960s, as a result of the
rising tide of the African liberation movement, many
European nations began granting formal independence to
their African colonies, choosing to exploit them
through more subtle means than they had felt free to
employ in the past. Somalia was granted independence
in 1960. It was a nation created by imperialism
though, reflecting the former borders of the British
and Italian colonies, not the actual geographical
spread of the Somali people, many of whom were left
outside of Somalia's borders, particularly in the
Ogaden region still ruled by Ethopia.
Somalis living in the Ogaden region responded by
forming the Somalia Liberation Front to fight for
their freedom and incorporation into Somalia proper.
They were initially aided in this effort by the USSR.
In return for its assitance to the Ogaden liberation
struggle, Somalia granted the USSR military bases
along its Red Sea coast.
Things got complicated though in 1974. In that year a
revolution unseated the long ruling Emperor
Haile Selassie of Ethopia. A pro-Soviet radical
nationalist regime came to power. This military-led
regime falsely called itself socialist, like most
states on the African continent at that time. The use
of this terminology however was no accident. For many
African government to achieve any semblance of
credibility in the eyes of the people, it was critical
to dissociate itself from any and all capitalist
labels, since it was known to all that capitalism and
imperialism were the the terms most clearly
associated with the European colonizers.
The Russians decided to drop their Somali allies for a
close relationship with the new regime in Ethopia,
which was determined not to relinquish its control of
the Somali populated Ogaden region. This left the
Ogaden Somali rebels in the lurch. Militarily,
despite direct assitance from the Somalian military,
the tide shifted and they suffered a terrible defeat.
A forced mass exodus of more than one million people
into Somalia soon followed.
With the Soviet departure from Somalia, the U.S.
entered the picture, offering arms and aid to Somalia.
They aligned themself with the Somali dictator
Mohammed Siad Barre in return for military
bases. The U.S. was also interested in the suspected
oil reserves believed to lay underneath the country's
soil and off its shores. A U.S./Somalia agreement was
signed in 1981 and hundreds of millions of
dollars were pumped into Somalia to finance Siad
Barre's dictatorship.
Siad Barre had come to power in 1969 after
assassinating the Somalian president Shermarke. He
immediately dissolved the Parliament and banned all
political parties and public organizations.
Following the Ethopia's defeat of Somalia in the
Ogaden in 1978, conflict broke out in Somalia proper.
A number of tribes and clans opposed the dictatorial
rule of the now U.S.-backed Siad Barre regime rose up.
The U.S. State Department had to admit that only
wholesale atrocities and massacres kept Siad Barre in
power for the rest of the decade. Thousands of
civilians and whole cities were wiped out. Siad
Barre's weapons were now sold to him by U.S. arms
manufacturers. During the 80s he received almost a
billion dollars in so-called aid for such purchases.
Siad Barre was a bloody dictator, but as Teddy
Roosevelt used to say about Somoza in Nicaragua in the
1930s, "our son of a bitch". Jimmy Carter even
welcomed him to the White House when he visited the
United States, gleefully shaking his blood-stained
hands.
The Somalian people on the other hand, continued to
organize to rid themselves of the Siad Barre
dictatorship. The Somalian National Movement in the
northern part of the country declared an independent
state and the United Somali Congress ousted Siad
Barre himself in 1991.
But the central leaders of the opposition to Siad
Barre could not agree on a division of power.
Occasional socialist rhetoric notwithstanding, these
military leaders are more closely associated with the
leading capitalist interests, usually foreign. They
proceeded to engage in a bloody conflict which took
the lives of 4000 and wounded 10,000 others. The main
factions led by the two warring generals, Ali Mahli
Mohammid and Mohammid Farrah Aideed divided the
bleeding city of Mogadishu into two military enclaves
with virtually no civil administration.
It was under these conditions that the famine
developed. In this respect, it is not far from the
truth to say that the famine the U.S. intervened to
stop, was itself created by the United States, since
it was a direct result of the fight against the U.S.
backed dictator Siad Barre.
Now at this point in the talk I want to take a few
minutes to talk about famines in general, and what
causes them.
What produces famines?
During the time of the Somalian famine in the January
I5, 1993 issue of the NYT, News of the Week in Review,
Sylvia Nasar reported the following:
"According to economists who study famine in Africa,
Asia and Europe, the kind of famine which struck in
Somalia, a famine created by clan warfare, not by crop
shortages, or endemic poverty, is the rule, not the
exception."
Nasar refers to Harvard economist, Amartya Sen, author
of Poverty and Famine as follows: "World food
production has kept well ahead of population
growth. Drought or flood do often precede famines, but
declines in food production rarely account for them.
Sen's book changed the way many scholars analyze
hunger, according to the Times. Typically, as
thousands die, there's enough food in the country to
go around, or enough money to import it.
"Disaster strikes because the poorest, most
downtrodden members of society suddenly can no longer
afford to buy food, usually because of sudden
unemployment or a surge in food prices.
"Death Amidst Plenty" is the sub-heading leading to
Nasar's next paragraph:
"In Eastern and sub-Saharan Africa for example, there
has been on average, twice as much food available per
person as in other flood or drought-prone
countries that managed to avoid mass deaths.
"One of the worst recent famines--Bangledesh's in
I974, took place in a year of universally high rice
production."
As Martin Ravillion, a World Bank economist who
specializes in poverty in Asia, described it: "Severe
flooding disrupted rice planting and threw landless
rural laborers out of work. Then, false fears of
shortages doubled rice prices in a few weeks. For the
poor who spend more than three-quarters of their wages
on food, the blow was catastrophic.
"But the famine, which was largely over even before
the rice crop was harvested, was hardly inevitable.
"'Almost everything the government did made things
worse,' said Mr.. Ravallion. Bangledesh's
authoritarian rulers sent the army out to 'bash
hoarders' convincing people that it had lost control
and fueling the price surge."
And finally: "The United States contributed by
announcing that it would withhold food aid to punish
Bangledesh for, of all things, selling jute to
Cuba."
U.S.-created famine
Already, having looked at what causes famine, lets
look more closely at what happened in Somalia, and
what role the U.S. may have had in creating it in the
first place.
The giant food conglomerates in the U.S. and in other
imperialist nations engage in dumping huge amounts of
grain around the world even when there is no famine.
This has the same effect as the cheap food which has
been dumped on the market in Somalia. With so much
food suddenly available, the price of a 110-pound bag
of rice, for example, has quickly dropped to $7.00.
What this means is that the Somalian peasants who have
begun to grow crops again cannot compete with the low
price of the agribusiness dumpings. This in turn tends
to drive more peasants off the land in addition to
making it harder for those who had left during the
famine and civil war to find work. Finally, when
market supplies eventually decline, leading to
higher prices, the poor will again be without means to
buy food. In countries like Somalia, more than
two-thirds of peasant income often goes for food
alone.
In the United States, as with other imperialist
countries, the grain dumped on Somalian and other
Third World markets, sells at prices below the cost
of local production. This is not only due to the
advantage of advanced agricultural techniques, but to
the policy of extending government-financed
export subsidies to the corporate grain monopolies.
Thus, the need for advanced capitalist nations to find
new markets for its "surplus" grains effectively leads
to the destruction of not only the manufacturing, but
the agricultural economies of poor nations.
Production of cereals more than doubled in the last 30
years, disproving Malthusian theories that world food
supply cannot keep up with population growth.
Countries like Brazil, China and India have registered
giant increases in grain production. These increases
though have been very uneven and have not taken place
in a manner that has resulted in any kind of even or
just distribution of food.
Now, at this point, having heard all this stuff about
Somalia's history, about famine and about
agribusiness, you might be saying to yourself, okay,
so the U.S. screwed up and was to a large extent
responsible for the Somalian civil war and the famine.
And maybe even U.S. agribusinesses did indeed take
advantage of the situation to increase its market
share and get a bit of an advantage over its
competitors. That's wrong, and should be opposed.
But maybe that's why our government sent in the
Marines, to try and fix up what we did wrong? Wasn't
it a good thing that they tried to stop the famine,
regardless of how it started? Why else would they go
to all that expense and trouble to send in the
Marines?
Well, there are some basic facts that cast doubt on
the argument that the intervention was some kind of
attempt to fix what we caused. One thing thing that
raises eyebrows is that during the intervention the
press reported how U.S. soldiers were compelled to, or
better, had been directed to, operate in collaboration
with the same clan leaders who were causing the
famine. This includes paying a healthy percentage of
25 percent or more to the clans for their cooperation
in food distribution. The Non-Governmental
Organizations, or relief agencies, in effect did the
same thing. The Red Cross reports that 20-30 percent
of its relief aid was stolen, a factor which it had to
regularly factor into its business calculations.
Perhaps this was necessary to get the job done, but
when we add to this the hundreds of millions of
dollars spent on the military operation, it is clear
that providing food with troops was incredibly
inefficient. If indeed the problem in the country was
food scarcity, the problem could have been solved by
flooding the country with food, not imperialist
troops. Working as closely with agribussiness and
other corporations as Washington is apt to do, one
would think they knew a bit about how to distribute
food a bit more efficiently.
Add to this the fact that the food arrived only after
the worst effects of the famine were over. Reporters
on the scene wrote of seeing U.S. soldiers
arriving in some areas to find vast land areas with
crops in abundance and no famine in sight.
These are embarrassing facts to point out to those who
insist that the U.S. intervention was benevolent in
nature. Embarrassing because it was not designed
after all to stop a famine, or to clean up a mess
agribussiness or our previous foriegn policies had
created. The U.S. ruling class had other motives in
mind. In fact, it had oil on its mind.
During the U.S. intervention in Somalia, a very
embarrassing expose waspublished in the Los Angeles
Times about the relationship of oil to the Somalia
events. CBS News and the San Francisco Chronicle
also confirmed that prior to the outbreak of the civil
war, when Somalia was ruled by the U.S.-backed Siad
Barre dictatorship, four major U.S. oil corporations
were granted and purchased oil leases to explore
Somalia's newly-discovered oil resources. Nearly
two-thirds of Somalia's land surface was granted to
Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Philips Petroleum.
According to the SF Chronicle: "Industry sources said
that 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 multi-million investments there.
"Officially, the administration and the State
Department insist that the U.S. military mission in
Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry
spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense"
allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa
analysts and several prominent Somalis that President
Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in
Somalia, at least in part by the U.S. corporate oil
stake.
"But corporate and scientific documents disclose that
the American oil companies are well-positioned to
pursue Somalia's most promising oil reserves the
moment the nation is pacified." [I marvel at the ease
with which this reporter uses the word "pacified.']
"And State Department and U.S. military officials
acknowledge that one of those oil companies has done
more than sit back and hope for peace.
"Conoco even permitted its Mogadishu corporate
compound to be transformed into a de facto American
embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in
the capital."
Now those are some very interesting revelations,
revelations that become even more revealing when you
put them into perspective by looking at the history
oil has played in U.S. foreign policy.
Oil and imperialism
In the 1970s, the world's oil industry was highly
centralized, with 70 percent of production and 50
percent of refinery capacity in the hands of
seven corporations. Today the number has been reduced
to six. Five of these were U.S.-owned; the other two
were jointly held by the British government and
private capital (British Petroleum) and by British and
Dutch Corporations (Royal Dutch Shell).
Ranked in terms of assets, Standard Oil of New Jersey
in 1971 was the largest U.S. corporation; Texaco,
third; Gulf, fifth; Mobil, seventh; and Standard Oil
of California , tenth. These multinational
corporations owned most of the oil in the Middle East.
The result was the unimpeded extraction of billions of
dollars in profits from oppressed nations in favor of
U.S. capital.
Two of the most powerful ruling class families in the
world, the Rockefellers and the Mellons, stand at the
top of the world's oil pyramid. By 1971 the
Rockefellers, in addition to their controlling
interest in such corporations as the Chase Manhatten
Bank and the lesser oil concerns, controlled three of
the five major U.S. oil concerns. The Mellons owned
the controlling interest in Gulf Oil.
The influence of the oil families in U.S. politics and
foreign policy is directly related to their financial
power. Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,
for example, under both Democratic and Republican
administrations, was the chief architect of U.S.
military, economic and political policy in the Middle
East. He and his brother Allen were partners in the
Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, the
major attorneys for Standard Oil of New Jersey. Allen
Dulles was the director of the CIA.
The politics of oil has not changed much since the
Dulles brothers. They too were adept at pretexts for
U.S. military interventions, most often promoting the
myth of an expansionist communism led by the Stalinist
bureaucracy in the former USSR. Absent the "communist
threat" lesser lights have come to the fore to play
the role of world "bogeyman."
Look for example at how we used the Iranian revolution
of 1979 and the subsequent coming to power by the
Ayotollah Khomeni to interefere in Middle East
politics, playing a key role in maintaining the
devastating eight year war between Iraq and Iran -
which divided the Middle East, and provided numerous
pretexts for U.S. troops to intervene.
Look at how the U.S. used Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in
1991. Kuwait, it should be pointed out was an
artificially created monarchy, that historically was
part of Iraq. It was created by the British to make
it easier to control the oil there. When Kuwait
began illegally slant drilling oil under the Iraqi
border it was invaded. The U.S. told Saddam before
hand it didn't care. When it happened though
Washington rushed in the troops. Why? Just look at
the Middle East today as a result. U.S. troops are
still stationed there protecting the Saudi oil fields.
The potentially radical Arab states are divided
against each other, and scared shitless haven seen the
power of the U.S. military might when it was unleased
upon Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands.
Look at how the U.S. has supported Isreal, further
dividing the Middle East, dividing the Arabs against
themselves by trying to get so called moderate Arab
states to recongize the extermination of the
Palestinian nation, while ostracizing the Arab states
which condemn Isreal and Zionism.
It's all about pretexts my friends. Oil is crucial to
the running of today's capitalist economy. This makes
the Middle East of crucial importance to the U.S. It
makes the Horn of Africa strategic, both because of
its proximity to the oil, its possible oil reserves,
and its location along the oil tanker routes through
both the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
These are the real reasons the U.S. intervened in
Somalia. They wanted to protect the investments and
hoped for profits of American oil companies. And
also, because these are times marked by ever
increasing inter-imperialist economic rivalry,
Washington needs to be free to pursue the dollar with
the bomb, without restriction, in order to back up our
corporations, and our interests. McDonalds needs
McDonnell Douglas to stay on top of the money making
game, and nothing helps keep competitors in check than
some good old fashioned muscle flexing and bomb
dropping. That's why the U.S. continues to do what it
is doing to Iraq, that's why we went to war with
Afghanistan, that's why we're intervening today in
Columbia and the Philippines, and that's why we
intervened in Somalia in the early 1990s.
Now what does all this mean, and what can we do about
it. Truly we live a world of incredible
contradictions: Having achieved the highest levels of
technology in the history of humanity the reality is
that 2 billion of the earth's 5.5 billion inhabitants
still face hunger and malnutrition. Oppression and
exploitation is on the rise, in the Middle East, in
East Africa, in Columbia all the way to right here in
the upper-Midwest.
Fidel Castro, speaking at the United Nations during
the time of the Somalian invasion highlighted the
situation by saying the following:
"And in the United Nations, all 15 members of the
Security Council without exception, voted for the
intervention in Somalia, since it was a solid
pretext---the pictures of emaciated people, of people
starving to death.
And so the aircraft carriers arrived, arrived along
with the battleships, helicopters, tanks, all kinds of
things, and the boots, which in some pictures could be
seen on the backs of Somali citizens.
"In other words, they went in to take food through
gunfire, to take food there through gunfire. And, in
another part of the world, they have a blockade
against a country like Cuba, trying to make Cuba die
of starvation and disease. That's the logic, those are
the morals of the American empire."
Our job is to fight against that American empire, from
within the belly of the beast. We need to challenge
the lies put out by Hollywood, the mainstream press
and Washington, we need to oppose their war moves, and
all of their foreign interventions. We need to fight
for a world where people, not profits come first. In
conclusion, I believe what we need to do is fight for
a world without borders, without the corrupting forces
of the marker, and where no person is allowed to
exploit another. That kind of world is called
socialism, and I invite you to join us in fighting for
it. Thank you.
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