Beyond Pirate Rescue: What's Really Happening in Somalia?

Also posted at Daily Kos, where the "Comments" section has a great deal of amplifying material on this subject, and is very much worth perusing.

The dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates made for smash headlines in the U.S. and around the world, but is not the first such dramatic rescue from pirates in these waters. The French had dramatic video footage of one of their captures.

What has not been covered in the news, obsessed with GOP hopes for Obama's first big failure, and Democrats patriotic triumphalism, is that the U.S. has played a big role in plunging Somalia into the chaos that has allowed piracy to take hold there, and that it's an open question how the Obama administration will deal with the bigger picture.

No one wants to see an innocent man be killed or held hostage, so it was with some satisfaction that most heard of the rescue of the sea captain who had offered himself up as hostage for the safety of his crew.

But this kind of small scale human drama is dwarfed by the reality of what has been happening in Somalia for almost two decades now. I don't know why large-scale human drama doesn't play as well in the U.S. media, but I suspect it is because when it serves U.S. interests to exploit a tragedy, headlines are rolled out. When the tragedy, such as the millions of refugees created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, is politically inconvenient, the headlines are mysteriously absent.

An Inconvient Fact: The U.S. Helped Create the Conditions for Piracy

From Times Online (a conservative UK newspaper -- emphases added -- H/T Chris Floyd):

Years of violence, neglect and misguided policies have left Somalia one of the most dangerous countries and a breeding ground for the pirates attacking one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

Today the northeast area of the country, including Puntland, has been carved up by warlords who finance themselves by drug and gun running. This is also the heartland of the pirates, whose main backers are linked to the Western-backed government. Radical Islamists control much of the south, including the key port of Kismayo and the porous border area with Kenya, a staunch Western ally.

This has realised a Western nightmare, which was supposed to have been destroyed by Ethiopia’s American-backed invasion of Somalia two years ago in support of a puppet government created by the international community. That alliance spanned the spectrum from extreme radicals to moderate, devout Muslims. The latter were in charge.

Everyone – except Pentagon planners, it seems – knew that Somalia had never proved fertile territory for Saudi-style radical Islam. However, indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by Ethiopia, Somalia’s historic enemy, with huge casualties, put an end to that. The Islamists were driven out, the moderates went into exile and the hardliners took control of the south with a popular powerbase beyond their wildest dreams.

Approximately 20,000 have died, and almost two million people have been displaced in this senseless civil war, prompted in part by the U.S., and certainly a proxy war with numerous players (the U.S., Ethiopia, various Arab states, Eritrea, even North Korea!, as we shall see).

So while I'm glad this sea captain was rescued, I don't look at the U.S. government as some sort of savior. And I certainly am not angry at Somalians, who did not ask for the rule of warlords, pirates, and hardline Islamists in a fractured state ruling over them. Many have fled for the refugee camps already.

The Huffington Post published an article yesterday by Joanne Offer, IRC information officer in Nairobi, describing the miserable conditions in which a quarter-million Somalian refugees are living in the overcrowded Dadaab camp in eastern Kenya. Dr. Vincent Kahi, the IRC’s health coordinator, described a cholera outbreak: “To date, the number of cases . . . has been small -— just 26 —- and we have managed to contain the outbreak, but resources in the camps remain massively overstretched and provide ideal conditions for diseases like cholera to keep coming back. All [aid] agencies in Dadaab are doing their best, but the sheer number of people in such a small space and in an area with water scarcity is a recipe for future problems.”

While I do not blame Obama -- and please note this, readers who may think I'm trashing Obama -- such facts mute any enthusiasm I have over this latest military show. Again, I'm glad an innocent man was saved, but I'm sick of the U.S. media, who makes a huge thing because it's an American life, but barely makes a peep over what U.S. policy in the region has wrought in past years, and to the miserable suffering of the people in the region.

Convergent Evidence of U.S. Duplicity in Somalia

Those touting the U.S. raid as some sort of Entebbe, i.e., a military action that will make others think twice about messing with the big, bad United States, just don't get it. Even U.S. Naval Forces Central Command chief Vice Adm. Bill Gortney stated after the rescue, "This could escalate violence in this part of the world, no question about it."

Other pirates in the region are quoted as making violent threats, but the real truth is that the pirates already understand that the U.S. will intervene in their region at will, as in the backing the Ethiopian invasion of their country to overthrow their government. Does anyone really think that this one incident will significantly change their consciousness of what the U.S. can do?

A commenter in another diary called Somalia "a pawn of foreign interests and paranoia"? I'd say so. The former includes the United States, and their paranoia is well-earned.

From an article in The Progressive in Dec. 2008:

Alas, there are no good guys in this war. Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi is a nasty piece of work. He has been a darling of the United States ever since the Clinton Administration’s time, when he was hailed as being part of the “African renaissance.” The war on terror has drawn Zenawi, a Christian leader of a religiously mixed but Christian-dominated country, closer to the Bush Administration. African renaissance man or not, he has been ruthless in his exercise of power. For instance, Ethiopian security forces killed nearly fifty people in November 2005 in a crackdown on protests. They also arrested thousands, including politicians, journalists, and activists.

U.S. policy in Somalia is born out of desperation. The United States abandoned Somalia after its failed mission in the early 1990s, and looked the other way as the country was mired in anarchy for the next decade. It was only recently that the Bush Administration, frightened by Islamic fundamentalism, began a dubious policy of handing out cash to Somali warlords as a way to check the Islamist militias....

The human toll of the invasion is increasing day by day. Plus, the U.S. backing for the invasion will add to its unpopularity on the continent and in the Middle East. The African Union and the Arab League have called for Ethiopia to pull out, as have Kenya and Djibouti. The United States should firmly add its voice, and instead of backing military adventures should invest in the Somali peace process as a way of staving off the Islamist threat.

The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia had full U.S. military backing. So you see, the Somalis have already tasted what U.S. military power can do. From coverage in Wired:

Citing the possibility that the Islamic Courts government was harboring terrorists, the Pentagon ordered gunships, fighters and warships to attack targets in Somalia, paving the way for Ethiopian tanks to sweep south, destroying Somalia's first relatively stable government in 15 years. What Somalia was left with is starvation, tribal infighting, a brutal Ethiopian occupation and, ironically, a genuine Islamic insurgency where before there was only a suspicion of one....

Even the European Union warned the U.S. that bombing Somali towns "only escalates violence," as it purportedly goes after Al Qaeda Islamists.

Oh, and here's another example of U.S. duplicity and cynicism in the region that will blow your mind, from the NY Times in April 2007:

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, April 7 — Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country's nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.

Obama and Somalia

What of President Obama's policy towards Somalia? One sea rescue does not make a foreign policy.

When he was running for president, Obama stated that he wanted “a coherent strategy for stabilizing Somalia."

Writing at Foreign Policy in Focus earlier this year, Francis Njubi Nesbitt described the situation for the new Obama administration (emphasis in original):

Among the litany of booby traps left by the Bush administration for the Obama team, Somalia could be one of the most complicated and bizarre....

The Obama administration, if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing is any indication, also views the Horn of Africa in the context of terrorism.

Nevertheless, Obama has also talked of his preference for diplomatic solutions. Somalia would be an ideal place to test his diplomacy.

Nesbitt described the particulars of the Ethiopian invasion, providing readers here with yet another description of the situation, the better for us to form an opinion of what has occurred in that part of the world.

Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December 2006, backed by the United States, sparked an Islamist resistance that led to thousands of civilian deaths, displaced over a million people, and depopulated the capital, Mogadishu. But instead of focusing on the aftermath of this crisis and helping foster a peace process, the United States, European Union, and other international actors are engaged in the more dramatic and media-friendly anti-piracy campaign....

While the pirates attract the lion's share of world attention, the Islamist militias are gaining ground and are sure to control the whole country once Ethiopia withdraws its troops. The conflict has spread to other parts of the region, with suicide bombings in the formerly stable Somaliland and Puntland regions, piracy in international waters, and cross-border kidnappings in Kenya.

U.S. and EU actions and policies since 2001 were supposed to prevent this kind of chaos. By treating Somalia and the region as a battle-zone in the "war on terror," however, the international community has made things worse....

Nesbett describes U.S. policy in the Bush years as "obdurate and counterproductive." The CIA backed the warlords, "setting the stage" for the rise of the "Islamic Courts", which in turn stoked the invasion of Ethiopia, in the name of the "war on terror." As we can see, even the North Koreans got into the act.

What a concoction of cynicism, ignorance, misdealing, and big power politics, with the Somali people the innocent victims! The media talk about piracy and dramatic sea rescues does not change the situation in that part of the world. In fact, if the chaos in Somalia, stirred up by the U.S. and Ethiopia, had not spilled into the world's sea lanes, then we most likely would not be talking about Somalia at all right now.

I can't take much from Obama's sign-off on the rescue of Capt. Phillips. I think the U.S. couldn't afford to let the captain of a U.S.-flagged ship (a rare enough thing in itself) be held hostage or killed. But what now of Somalia? Most likely it will slip off the front pages, and the excited recommended diaries at Daily Kos, and back into its state of forgotten misery, a pawn in the U.S. perpetual war on terror.

Nesbitt ends his article hopefully. I don't share his sense of hope, but will end here, too, because at the moment, even desperate hope may be all we have.

Obama's pledge to change the Bush administration's belligerent and counterproductive policies could have far-reaching consequences for the region as a whole.

Sobriety & the U.S. Presidential Race

No, this is not a post about alcoholism, and the only drunkenness to which it might refer is the manic inebriation that comes with the exercise of great power.

As the U.S. presidential race settles into its pattern of opposing camps supposedly at great odds, especially every four years -- of conservative against liberal, hawk against dove, progressive versus reactionary -- it is good to be reminded that underneath all of the hullaballoo (and I agree it's hard not to be caught up in it, as detestable as Bush's GOP has been these last seven years), that nothing about this race will really change how the U.S. is run, or rather who runs it.

Along those lines, I'd like to refer to a succinct statement of this issue from Chris Floyd, who himself quotes the insightful Gore Vidal. Reading the following, inspired by Floyd's coverage of the U.S. intervention into Somalia and the subsequent human rights disaster that has followed, is like a splash of cold water, of stone cold sobriety regarding both the festivities and inanities of the past two convention weeks.

It's clear that no nation on earth will be allowed to organize its own society as it wishes, or work out its own internal conflicts, if the American elite decides they have some financial or strategic interest in the matter. The only nations immune to this power-mad interventionist philosophy are those who can strike back hard enough to upset the elite's apple cart. And thus we have Bush's "war on terror" -- which is, as we've often noted, simply an escalation of the long-running, bipartisan foreign policy of the "National Security State" that has ruled America for 60 years.

This year marks the anniversary of this coup d'etat: the 1947 "National Security Act." Writing on the 50th anniversary of this supplanting of the Republic, Gore Vidal wrote:

Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders.

Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media.

Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues... we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine..."

Here's another link for the Vidal quote. And for those who forgot what it's all about, here's another link to a time and place we forgot, but never left.

For more on Somalia, see my piece from earlier this year, Worse than Darfur: U.S. Proxy War in Somalia

Worse Than Darfur: U.S. Proxy War in Somalia

According to a new article by Steve Bloomfield in the UK Independent, the U.S. policy of advising Ethiopia in its war with neighboring Somalia has failed. Not surprisingly for the Bush team, it has achieved results entirely the opposite of what it intended. The outcome? UN officials describe it as the "the largest concentration of displaced people anywhere in the world.... the worst humanitarian catastrophe in Africa, eclipsing even Darfur in its sheer horror."

According to Bloomfield, the U.S. believed that Al Qaida had established a presence in the "failed state" that was Somalia at the beginning of this century. The U.S. wanted to strike at the Union of Islamic Courts, a fundamentalist coalition that was ruling over much of central and southern Somalia.

On Christmas Day 2006, Ethiopia invaded its neighbour, Somalia. The aim: to drive out a coalition of Islamists ruling the capital, Mogadishu, and install a fragile interim government that had been confined to a small town in the west. But Ethiopia was not acting alone. The US had given its approval for the operation and provided key intelligence and technical support. CIA agents travelled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations.

But things didn't turn out as the administration experts had hoped. Of course, they tried to play the same old colonial card, turning one sordid group against another.

The CIA's desperation to root out the men on their list saw them turn to some old enemies for help. CIA agents landed at tiny airstrips outside Mogadishu and handed briefcases full of crisp new $100 notes over to the same warlords who had chased the US out of Somalia in 1993. The warlords took the money and used it to take on the Courts. They formed themselves into the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism – before proceeding to do very little to find the supposed terrorists the CIA wanted caught.

The strategy backfired. The leaders of the courts united their militias and defeated the US-backed warlords.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian troops occupied much of Somalia, and like the U.S. and its faux-coalition forces in Iraq, ran smack into an authentic insurgency, complete with hardline Islamic leadership -- just the opposite of what the administration said they wanted in Somalia. Now there are daily gunfights and violence in Mogadishu, leading Ethiopia to plan its own "surge" in Somalia. It's estimated there are 15,000 Ethiopian troops there right now.

The number of armed soldiers may seem smaller than in Iraq, but the refugee problem resembles that created by the U.S. invasion to the north.
More than 600,000 people fled Mogadishu last year. Around 200,000 are now living in squalid impromptu refugee camps along a 15km-stretch of road outside the capital. According to UN officials it is the largest concentration of displaced people anywhere in the world. Those same officials now consider Somalia to be the worst humanitarian catastrophe in Africa, eclipsing even Darfur in its sheer horror.

Bush's Talk of Democracy = Endless War, Millions of Refugees, Untold Dead

Pondering the ruins of Bush's "war on terror" policy from afar, one wonders what the hell Bush, Cheney, and the Pentagon tops were trying to accomplish in their "regime change" wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Chris Floyd, who has been covering the Somalia crisis for some time, has his own take:

Each ["regime change" war ] has radicalized vast swathes of the populations under attack, while driving out moderates, technocrats, professionals: anyone who cannot easily be bought or manipulated – or provoked into some violent action that will "justify" American domination. Indeed, this profitable and politically expedient exacerbation of terror and extremism is such a deep-rooted characteristic of the "regime change" wars that it would take a mighty act of will to believe that it is not deliberate.

It will take a victorious populace, forcing open the secret archives of this country to know just what the rulers of this country is really trying to accomplish. (Somalia's strategic location on the horn of Africa, and proximity to oil reserves may have something important to do with U.S. intentions.) One thing is for certain, Bush and his team have created a greater load of refugees than anyone in this world has seen since at least the great Indian partition of the late 1940s.

I would like to see whether either Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton, one of whom seems certain to become the next U.S. president (and my money's on Obama), have any policy statements to make on Somalia. Thus far, I don't know of any. Obama's stance against the Iraq War is a step in the right direction, but at times he has fed into Bush's fake war on terror rhetoric, and that's a step directly into the maw of the Pentagon's war machine.

Meanwhile, as Somali refugees fan out all over the world, they are having a particularly difficult time, as this report from Norway suggests:

According to most indicators of living standards, Somalis are the refugee group that has poorest ratings. They are more often unemployed than any other groups of first-generation immigrants in Norway. In 2001, 25.8 per cent of Somalis in Norway were employed, as against 38.3 per cent of first-generation Pakistanis and 64.8 per cent of persons without immigrant background. Nineteen per cent of Somali women had work, whereas 31.1 per cent of the men were working.... Many Somalis have great difficulty in finding accommodation; landlords are often reluctant to let to Somali families with many children. In a study of living conditions among immigrants in 1996, half of the Somalis reported that they definitely had been discriminated against when trying to rent or buy an apartment....

Indicators of mental health also point to a worse position for Somalis. In a study of different immigrant groups in Norway, more Somalis than most other refugee groups reported that they had nervous symptoms.... Literature from other Western countries, such as Australia, the UK, Canada and Finland, reveals very much the same picture of the situation for Somali refugees.... Chronic unemployment, poor housing, illiteracy and consequent problems in accessing mainstream social and educational services are typical for Somalis both in the UK and in Norway....

A study of Somali refugees in Canada shows that they encounter considerable difficulties during the initial stages of resettlement. They face social exclusion and multiple forms of disadvantages including high unemployment, underemployment, and overcrowding, as well as frustrations and despair that sometimes result in suicidal behaviour, particularly among the young males.... In a Finnish study, Somalis faced more negative attitudes and experienced more racist crimes than any other immigrant groups Somalis in Norway have been stigmatized by both media and officials as the worst case group of refugees.

While the U.S. cannot be held responsible for every case of civil war and unrest in the world, this government seems to have done its best to worsen matters, and in some very extreme, cynical ways.
The UN World Food Program is trying to help by sending food to over 2 million Somalis. They explain:

Somalia remains in a precarious food security situation, the result of more than 15 years of civil conflict, recurrent drought, crop failures and severe floods. Chronic food shortages and malnutrition persist.

Global acute malnutrition rates are above the emergency level. Poor road conditions and insecurity pose a major challenge in food aid delivery in the south, especially during the rainy season.

If any readers have any good links for donations to refugees in Somalia, please leave them in the comments section. Otherwise, you can go to the UN World Food Program website and make a contribution.