[Peace-discuss] US Mideast war: Africa theater

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Bush's Blood-Orgy in Somalia:
	"They Are Slaughtering Somalis Like Goats"
	By Mike Whitney
	07/07/08 ICH

	"Land is not our priority. Our priority is the people's peace,
	dignity and liberty. It is the people that are important to us."
	--Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, Head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU)

While George Bush was busy railing at Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe at the
G-8 summit in Toyako, Japan, his Ethiopian proxy-army in Somalia was grinding
out more carnage on the streets of Mogadishu. More than 40 civilians have been
killed in the last 48 hours. On Sunday, Osman Ali Ahmed, the head of the UN
Development Program in Somalia, was shot gangland style as he left a mosque in
Mogadishu. He died before he reached the hospital with wounds to the head and
chest. Ali Ahmed is just the latest of the peace-keepers who have been killed in
the ongoing battle between Bush's Ethiopian occupiers and Somali guerrillas.

"I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe," Bush announced. "And I am
extremely disappointed in the election which I labeled a sham election."

Right. Bush's newly-discovered empathy for black people was nowhere in sight
during Hurricane Katrina when thousands of African Americans were rounded up at
gunpoint and forced into the Superdome without food, water or medical supplies.
Nor is it visible in Somalia today where millions of Somalis have been forced to
flee their homes and relocate to tent cities in the south because of Bush's
support for the Ethiopian army's invasion. The latest surge in violence has been
the worst in a decade and the security situation continues to deteriorate
despite the arrival of 2,600 troops from the African Union and a tentative truce
that was signed in June between some of the warring factions. It should be no
great surprise that the western media has stubbornly refused to report on the
rising death-toll in Somalia, choosing instead to focus all of their attention
on America's "villain du jour", Robert Mugabe. Mugabe is next on the neocon's
list for regime change. Neocon Godfather Paul Wolfowitz even composed a
postmortem for Zimbabwe's president in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial
"How to Put the Heat on Mugabe".

In 2006, the United States supported an alliance of Somali warlords known as the
Transitional Federal Government (TFG) who established a base of operations in
the western city of Baidoa. With the help of the US-backed Ethiopian army,
western mercenaries, US Navy warships, and AC-130 gunships, the TFG was able to 
capture Mogadishu and force the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and their allies to
retreat to the south. But, much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the resistance has
coalesced into a tenacious guerrilla army which has returned to the capital and
resumed the fight, making it impossible for their Ethiopian rivals to govern. As
the struggle continues, the humanitarian situation gets worse and worse. At
least 2.6 million Somalis are now facing famine due to acute food shortages
spurred by a prolonged drought, violence and high inflation. UN monitors have
warned that the figure could hit exceed 3.5 million by the end of 2008.

The UN Security Council has played its traditional role as facilitator of
American-backed imperial violence by failing to condemn US involvement in
Somalia and by promising to send peacekeepers to mop up after violence subsides.
The UN has shown no interest in stopping the carnage and have become little more
than the glove-hand of the US military, an accomplice to Bush's chronic adventurism.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Salim Lone, a columnist for
the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq
explains the UN's role in providing the "go ahead" for the US invasion:

"The lawlessness of this particular war is astounding; the most lawless war of
our generation. You know, all aggressive wars are illegal. But in this
particular one, there have been violations of the UN Charter and gross
violations of international human rights. But, in addition, there have been very
concrete violations by the United States of two Security Council resolutions.
The first one was the arms embargo imposed on Somalia, which the United States
has been routinely flaunting for many years now. But then the US decided that
that resolution was no longer useful, and they pushed through an appalling
resolution in December, which basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to
invade. They pushed through a resolution which said that the situation in
Somalia was a threat to international peace and security, at a time when every
independent report indicated, and Chatham House’s report on Wednesday also
indicated, that the Islamic Courts Union had brought a high level of peace and
stability that Somalia had not enjoyed in sixteen years.

So here was the UN Security Council going along with the American demand to pass
a blatantly falsified UN resolution. And that resolution actually was a
violation (of the) the UN Charter. You know, the UN Charter is like the American
Constitution and the Security Council is not allowed to pass laws or rules that
violate the Charter. And yet, who is going to correct them?"

The Bush administration has predictably invoked the "terrorist" hobgoblin to
justify its involvement in Somalia, but no one is buying it. The ICU is not an
Al Qaida affiliate or a terrorist organization despite the absurd claims of the
State Dept. It is true that the ICU was trying to enforce Sharia Law, but a much
milder form of Sharia than in Saudi Arabia. The ICU was the first government in
over a decade to restore security and order to Somalia and -- generally
speaking -- the people were supportive of the new regime.

Political analyst James Petras summed it up like this:

“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.”

The real motives behind the invasion were oil and geopolitics. According to most
estimates 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa in the next ten
years. Bush's new warlord-friends in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)
have already indicated a willingness to pass a new oil law that will encourage
foreign oil companies to return to Somalia. The same oil giants that are now
lining up in Iraq will soon be making their way to Somalia as well. The Horn of
Africa is also critical for its deep-water ports and strategic location for
future military bases. It's all part of the Grand Schema for reconfiguring the
region to accommodate America's hegemonic ambitions.

	Humanitarian Catastrophe:
	"The Ethiopian invasion has destroyed all the life-sustaining systems"

Heavy fighting and artillery fire have reduced large parts of Mogadishu to
rubble. More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave the capital with
nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Entire districts have been
evacuated and turned into ghost towns. The main hospital has been bombed and is
no longer taking patients. Ethiopian snipers are perched atop rooftops across
the city. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in the south in tent cities
without sufficient food, clean water or medical supplies. It is without question
the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa today; a man-made Hell entirely
conjured up in Washington. Just weeks ago, Amnesty International reported that
it had heard many accounts that Ethiopian troops were "slaughtering (Somalis)
like goats." In one case, "a young child's throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers
in front of the child's mother.”*

In another Democracy Now interview, Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at
the University of Minnesota, had this to say:

"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 years. And the
militia that are supposed to protect the population have been looting shops. For
instance, the Bakara market, which is the largest market in Mogadishu, has been
looted repeatedly by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal
Government of Somalia, supported by Ethiopian troops. And the new prime minister
of Somalia, Mr. Hassan Nur Hussein, has himself announced in the BBC that it was
his militias who have looted this place. So what you have is a population
that’s hit from both sides -- on one side, by the militias of the so-called
Transitional Federal Government, which is recognized by the United States, and
on the other side, by the Ethiopian invaders who seem to be bent on ensuring
that they break the will of the people to resist as free people in their own
country....

"What you have is really terror in the worst sense of the word, a million people
have been displaced that the Ethiopians have been denying humanitarian aid, and
the United States which seems to just watch and let it happen. It’s like there's
has been a calculated decision made somewhere in the world, maybe in Washington,
maybe in Addis Ababa, maybe in Mogadishu itself, to starve these people until
they submit themselves to the whims of the American military and the Ethiopians,
who are acting on their behalf."

Amnesty International has called for an investigation of the United States role
in Somalia. Regrettably, neither the United Nations nor the corporate media are
at all interested in Bush's war crimes in Africa. What they care about is Mugabe.

Notes

*Somalia: Troops killing people 'like goats' by slitting throats-new Amnesty report

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=17747