US militarisation: The tragedy of Somalia
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By Explo Nani-Kofi
Counterfire
Saturday, May 29, 2010
As the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) force becomes ever more active in
Somalia, questions must be raised as to the intentions of this
militarised organisation, writes Explo Nani-Kofi. Nani-Kofi stresses
that the African continent grows ever more vulnerable to a maturing
breed of neocolonial occupation based on US-led proxy wars.
When Barack Obama was elected president of the US, it was supposed to
be the end of the bad old days of George W. Bush. But in Somalia, the
'war on terror' continues.
March this year saw the start of a new US operation in support of the transitional government in Somalia.
According to the New York Times, American advisors had spent the last
several months training Somali forces to be deployed in the offensive
against factions of the Union of Islamic Courts movement, and the US
had provided ‘covert training to Somali intelligence officers,
logistical support to the peacekeepers, fuel for the maneuvers,
surveillance information about insurgent positions and money for
bullets and guns’.
This was something of a covert operation from the US point of view. A
US official, who told the paper ‘what you’re likely to see is air
strikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out’, said he
was not allowed to speak publicly about it.
The Somali government, however, was happy to boast of US involvement.
General Mohamed Gelle Kahiye, the new chief of staff of the armed
forces, said of a military surveillance plane overhead, ‘It’s the
Americans. They’re helping us.’
On 2 May, explosions in a mosque in Mogadishu’s Bakara market, a
stronghold of the US-targeted Al Shabaab group, killed 45 people and
triggered fighting between a pro-government militia and Al Shabaab and
Hizbal al Islam, both factions of the Union of Islamic Courts movement.
It’s not clear who actually set off the explosions, but it is beginning
to seem that Somalia could be the US Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) first
overt war.
The Obama administration's 2011 budget request for security assistance
programmes in Africa includes $38 million for arms sales to African
states, $21 million for training African officers and $24 million for
anti-terrorism programmes. This is in addition to the 40 tonnes of arms
and ammunition supplied to the Somali transitional government in 2009,
and military aid to Ethiopia, which fronted for the US in the fight
against the Union of Islamic Courts in 2006. AFRICOM has now taken over
US security assistance programmes with Mali, Niger, Chad and Senegal,
and the Defense Department is now considering forming a 1,000-strong
marine rapid deployment force for Africa. Although AFRICOM gives the
impression it is not a combat force, it looks as if this may change.
The justification for US involvement in Somalia is ‘Islamic extremism’.
Al Shabaab is on the US list of terrorist organisations as a supposed
part of al-Qaeda. On 14 March, General William (‘Kip’) Ward, commander
of AFRICOM, singled out Somalia in testimony before the Senate Armed
Services Committee as the east African country most ‘threatened by
terrorists’, while Senator Carl Levin stated that ‘al Qaeda and violent
extremists who share their ideology are not just located in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region but in places like Somalia, Mali, Nigeria
and Niger’. Kip Ward also spoke of support for the Somali government,
which is being fought against by radical Islamist groups, as a
responsibility that the US has to take up. This means that there is no
separation between the US–UK presence in Afghanistan and AFRICOM’s
operations in Somalia and other parts of Africa.
Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on 10 March, the last ambassador
of the United States to Somalia (1994–95), Daniel H. Simpson, posed the
question ‘Why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic
extremism among the Shabaab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia
at this time?’ He provided the answer himself: ‘Part of the reason is
because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from
Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The US Africa
Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of
other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the
headquarters for US troops and fighter bombers in Africa.’
AFRICOM, responsible for US military operations for the whole of the
African continent except Egypt, was established in October 2008, but
the idea goes back to the beginning of the decade, when the US National
Intelligence Council estimated that the US will buy 25 per cent of its
oil from Africa by 2015. Oil and natural gas seems to always sit nicely
with this so-called war on terror.
The case of Somalia epitomises the proxy war situation in Africa and
also smashes some of the myths around why African countries are in the
situation they are. It’s sometimes argued that the different languages
and tribes in many African countries are the cause of their problems.
However, Somalia is one country with one language and one dominant
religion, so by that reasoning it should have more internal harmony
than its neighbours. The explanation for its problems lies in the
history of colonialism and exploitation by Western powers. The
breakdown of national cohesion in Somalia and the civil war in 1988,
since when the country has been ungovernable from Mogadishu, was caused
by its use in the Cold War and specifically by President Siad Barre’s
decision to seek alliances with the US and apartheid South Africa
against Soviet Union-backed Ethiopia. Subsequent international
interventions, like the UN force in 1992 and the Ethiopian US-backed
invasion in 2006 have been more about occupation than mediation.
The US proxy war in Africa is a mechanism to re-colonise the continent
and extend the boundaries of the war on terror. It’s time to mobilise
against it. To support the campaign against AFRICOM and the proxy
situation in Africa, check the Sons and daughters of Africa Movement Facebook page,
coordinated in Europe by Agnes Munyi-Vanselow and Explo Nani-Kofi of
KILOMBO – Campaigning Against Proxy War Situation in Africa and
AFRICOM. The latter is affiliated with the Stop the War Coalition in
the UK.
Counterfire
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