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Somalia: Background Documents, Links
Somalia: Background Documents, Links
Date distributed (ymd): 020121
Document reposted by Africa Action
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africaaction.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: East Africa
Issue Areas: +security/peace+ +US policy focus+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
This posting contains a short commentary on "Errors of Fact and
Analysis" and a longer essay on background to U.S. involvement with
Somalia, both from the Foreign Policy in Focus project. It also
includes links to other commentaries and background documents.
These include three critical reviews of the new film "Black Hawk
Down;" links to the original newspaper articles by Mark Bowden
which, in contrast to the film, do offer some background to the
October 1993 battle in Mogadishu; and links to an op-
ed by Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah and a variety of other
sources.
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Somalia: Errors of Fact and Analysis
By Ken Menkhaus
From: The Progressive Response, 18 January 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2
http://www.fpif.org/progresp/volume6/v6n02.html
Among the most common and potentially dangerous errors of fact and
analysis about Somalia include the following:
- Somalia's Islamist movement, al-Ittihad, is synonymous with
al-Qaeda. This is wildly wrong. Al-Ittihad is a small, relatively
weak organization, with a mainly domestic agenda. Some individual
members have had links to al-Qaeda which merit close scrutiny, but
the group as a whole is in no way a subsidiary of al-Qaeda.
- Somalia's Transitional National Government (TNG) is a front for
al-Ittihad. The TNG is not the Somali equivalent of the Taliban
government. It is extremely weak, controlling only half of the city
of Mogadishu, and while it has some al-Ittihad members in its
parliament, it is by no means a front for Islamists. An attack
against the TNG would be a serious error.
- Somalia is home to terrorist bases and camps. This is the
rationale for considering a bombing campaign there. But Somalia's
al-Ittihad movement abandoned the few towns and rural outposts it
once controlled, and has since integrated into local communities as
teachers, health workers, and businessmen. Bombing abandoned
outposts would be a pointless exercise in rearranging rocks.
- Somalia will be a likely safe haven for fleeing al-Qaeda
members. On the surface, this concern has merit. Somalia is a
collapsed state with no functional central government; global
outlaws there could presumably escape the reach of law. In reality,
Somalia is a lousy refuge for non-Somali radicals. Foreigners
cannot operate in secrecy in Somalia; everyone knows who you are
and what you're doing, and the Somalis would be delighted to hand
over a non-Somali.
(Dr. Ken Menkhaus <
kemenkhaus@davidson.edu> is associate professor
of political science at Davidson College, NC. He is a specialist on
the Horn of Africa and has served as a consultant to the UN and the
U.S. government.)
Also see:
Warlordism and the War on Terror
By Ken Menkhaus
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0112quidproquo.html
Somalia as a Military Target
By Stephen Zunes
(Stephen Zunes <stephen@coho.org> is a senior analyst with Foreign
Policy In Focus (online at http://www.fpif.org) and associate
professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies
Program at the University of San Francisco.)
January 11, 2002
The east African nation of Somalia is being mentioned with
increasing frequency as a possible next target in the U.S.-led war
against international terrorism. Somalia is a failed state--with
what passes for the central government controlling little more than
a section of the national capital of Mogadishu, a separatist
government in the north, and rival warlords and clan leaders
controlling most the remainder of the country. U.S. officials
believe that cells of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network may have taken
advantage of the absence of governmental authority to set up
operation.
Before the U.S. attacks that impoverished country, however, it is
important to recognize how Somalia became a possible haven for the
followers of Osama bin Laden and what might result if America goes
to war.
A Cold War Pawn
As one of the most homogeneous countries in Africa, many would have
not predicted the chronic instability and violent divisions that
have gripped Somalia in recent years. During the early 1970s,
Somalia was a client of the Soviet Union, even allowing the Soviets
to establish a naval base at Berbera on the strategic north coast
near the entrance to the Red Sea. Somali dictator Siad Barre
established this relationship in response to the large-scale
American military support of Somalia's historic rival Ethiopia,
then under the rule of the feudal emperor Haile Selassie. When a
military coup by leftist Ethiopian officers toppled the monarchy in
1974 and declared the country a Marxist-Leninist state the
following year, the superpowers switched their allegiances--with
the Soviet Union backing Ethiopia and the United States siding with
the Barre regime in Somalia.
In 1977, Somalia attacked the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in
an effort to incorporate the area's ethnic Somali population. The
Ethiopians were eventually able to repel the attack with
large-scale Soviet military support and 20,000 Cuban troops.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, then-National Security Adviser under President
Jimmy Carter, has since claimed that the conflict in this remote
desert region was what sparked the end of detente with the Soviet
Union and the renewal of the cold war.
From the late 1970s until just before his overthrow in early 1991,
the U.S. sent hundreds of millions of dollars of arms to the Barre
regime in return for the use of military facilities that had been
originally constructed for the Soviets. These bases were to be used
to support U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. The U.S.
government ignored warnings throughout the 1980s by Africa
specialists, human rights groups, and humanitarian organizations
that continued U.S. support of the dictatorial Barre government
would eventually plunge Somalia into chaos.
These predictions proved tragically accurate. During the nearly
fifteen years of support by the U.S. and Italy, thousands of
civilians were massacred at the hands of Barre's increasingly
authoritarian regime. Full-scale civil war erupted in 1988 and the
repression increased still further, with clan leaders in the
northern third of the country declaring independence to escape the
persecution. In greatly centralizing his government's control,
Barre severely weakened traditional structures in Somali society
that had kept civil order for many years. To help maintain his grip
on power, Barre played different Somali clans against each other,
sowing the seeds of the fratricidal chaos and mass starvation to
come.
Meanwhile, by eliminating all potential rivals with a national
following, a power vacuum was created that could not be filled when
the regime was finally overthrown in January 1991, barely noticed
outside the country as world attention was focused upon the start
of the Gulf War. With the end of the cold war and with the U.S.
granted new bases in the Persian Gulf countries, Somalia fell off
the radar screen of U.S. foreign policy.
There is widespread understanding among those familiar with Somalia
that had the U.S. government not supported the Barre regime with
large amounts of military aid, he would have been forced to step
down long before his misrule splintered the country. Prior to the
dictator's downfall, former U.S. Representative Howard Wolpe,
then-chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, called on the
State Department to encourage Barre to step down. His pleas were
rejected. "What you are seeing," observed the congressman and
former professor of African politics, "is a general indifference to
a disaster that we played a role in creating."
A U.S. diplomat who had been stationed in the Somali capital of
Mogadishu acknowledged, "It's easy to blame us for all this." But,
he argued, "This is a sovereign country we're taking about. They
have chosen to spend [U.S. military aid] that way, to hurt people
and destroy their own economy."
As the U.S. poured in more than $50 million of arms annually to
prop up the Barre regime, there was virtually no assistance offered
that could help build a self-sustaining economy that could feed
Somalia's people. In addition, the U.S. pushed a structural
adjustment program through the International Monetary Fund that
severely weakened the local agricultural economy. Combined with the
breakdown of the central government, drought conditions, and rival
militias disrupting food supplies, there was famine on a massive
scale, resulting in the deaths of more than 300,000 Somalis, mostly
children.
Humanitarian Mission Goes Awry
In November 1992, the outgoing Bush administration sent 30,000 U.S.
troops--primarily Marines and Army Rangers--to Somalia, in what was
described as a humanitarian mission to assist in the distribution
of relief supplies that were being intercepted by armed militias
without reaching the civilian populations in need. The United
Nations Security Council endorsed the initiative the following
month.
Many Somalis and some relief organizations were grateful for the
American role. Many others expressed skepticism, noting that the
famine had actually peaked that summer and the security situation
was also gradually improving. As U.S. troops began arriving, the
chaos limiting food shipments was constrained to a small area, with
most other parts of the country functioning as relatively peaceful
fiefdoms. Most food was getting through and the loss from theft was
only slightly higher than elsewhere in Africa. In some cases, U.S.
forces essentially dumped food on local markets, hurting indigenous
farmers and creating greater food shortages over the longer term.
In any case, few Somalis were involved in the decisions during this
crucial period.
Most importantly for the U.S., large numbers of Somalis saw the
American forces as representatives of the government that had been
the major outside supporter of the hated former dictatorship. Such
a foreign presence in a country that had been free from colonial
rule for only a little more than three decades led to growing
resentment. Contributing to these concerns was the fact that the
U.S. troops arriving in Somalia were elite combat forces, and were
not trained for such humanitarian missions. (Author and journalist
David Halberstam quotes the U.S. Defense Secretary telling an
associate, "We're sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going
to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No
one controls them.") Shootings at U.S. military roadblocks became
increasingly commonplace, and Somalis witnessed scenes of mostly
white American forces harassing and shooting black countrymen.
In addition, the U.S. role escalated to include attempts at
disarming some of the warlords, resulting in armed engagements,
often in crowded urban neighborhoods. This "mission creep" resulted
in American casualties, creating growing dissent at home in what
had originally been a widely supported foreign policy initiative.
The thousands of M-16 rifles sent, courtesy of the American
taxpayer, to Barre's armed forces were now in the hands of rival
militiamen who had not only used them to kill their fellow
countrymen and to disrupt the distribution of relief supplies, but
were now using them against American troops. Within the U.S. ranks,
soldiers were heard repeating the slogan, "The only good Somali is
a dead Somali." It had become apparent that the U.S. had badly
underestimated the resistance.
In May 1993, the U.S. transferred the failing mission to the UN.
This was the first time the world body had combined peacekeeping,
peace enforcement, and humanitarian assistance, as well as the
first time the UN had intervened without a formal invitation by a
host government (because there wasn't any.) Within Somalia there
was little trust of the United Nations, particularly since the U
Secretary General at that time was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a major
supporter of Barre when he led Egypt's foreign ministry.
Even though the UN was technically in control, U.S. forces went on
increasingly aggressive forays, including a major battle in
Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 18 Marines and hundreds of
Somali civilians, dramatized in the highly fictionalized thriller
Black Hawk Down. The U.S.-led UN forces had become yet another
faction in the multisided conflict. Largely retreating to fixed
position, the primary American mission soon became protecting its
own forces. With mounting criticism on Capitol Hill from both the
left and the right, President Bill Clinton withdrew American troops
in March 1994. The UN took its last peacekeeping forces out one
year later.
The U.S. intervention in Somalia is now widely considered to have
been a fiasco. It is largely responsible for the subsequent U.S.
hesitation around such so-called humanitarian intervention (outside
of high-altitude bombing.) It was the major factor in the tragic
U.S. refusal to intervene--either unilaterally or through the
UN--to prevent the genocide in Rwanda during the spring of 1994.
The Coming Debacle
Most likely, the Somalia intervention was an another ill-advised
assertion of well-meaning liberal internationalism in U.S. foreign
policy. But there may have been other factors prompting the
American decision to intervene as well: perhaps as a
rationalization for increased military spending despite the end of
the cold war, perhaps as an effort to mollify the Islamic world for
American overkill in the war against Iraq and the inaction against
the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and/or perhaps as a preemptive
operation against possible Islamic extremists rising out of the
chaos. If the latter was the goal, it may have backfired. Islamic
radicals were able to find some willing recruits among the Somalis,
already upset by the U.S. support for Barre, now with additional
anger at the impact of direct U.S. military intervention in their
country.
In subsequent years, there has been only marginal progress toward
establishing any kind of widely recognized national government.
Somalia is still divided into fiefdoms run by clan leaders and
warlords, though there is rarely any serious fighting. Some
officials in the current Bush administration believe that Al-Qaeda
has established an important network or cells within this factious
country.
If this is indeed the case, it begs the question as to how the U.S.
should respond. It is possible that U.S. forces could obtain highly
accurate intelligence that would allow them to pinpoint and take
out the cells without once again becoming embroiled in messy urban
counterinsurgency warfare, like that of 1993-94, or relying on air
strikes in heavily populated areas, resulting in large-scale
civilian casualties. Based on recent history, however, this is
rather doubtful. The result of renewed U.S. military intervention
in Somalia, then, could be yet another debacle that would only
encourage the extremist forces America is trying to destroy.
Somalia: Land in Turmoil
BBC Special Feature (January, 2002)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1747000/1747697.stm
Will Somalia be Next? allAfrica.com Special
http://allafrica.com/specials/somalia
"America, Spare Somalia for God's Sake"
by Nuruddin Farah, January 2, 2002 in the Monitor, Kampala
http://allafrica.com/stories/200201020381.html
[A version of this opinion column by the renowned Somali novelist
also appeared in the New York Times on January 9 under the title
"Somalia is No Hideout for Bin Laden." This is available at:
http://www.netnomad.com/farah-qaeda.html]
"Is Somalia a Safe-haven for Terrorists" by Hussein Ali Soke
from http://www.africanconflict.org (January 7, 2002)
also at
http://allafrica.com/stories/200201090390.html
Critical reviews of movie Black Hawk Down
Aida Mashaka Croal, January 11 on:
http://www.africana.com/Reviews/movies_74.htm
Danny Schechter, January 8 at:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12175
BBC, January 21
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1773000/1773466.stm
Black Hawk Down, newspaper series by Mark Bowden
November-December, 1997
http://www.philly.com/packages/somalia/sitemap.asp
including article with background analysis:
http://www.philly.com/packages/somalia/dec14/analysis14.asp
Somalia Watch
News and Features in English and Somali
http://www.somaliawatch.org
Somalia: Remittances and US Action (November, 2001)
http://www.africafocus.org/docs01/som0111.php>
Somalia: Situation Analysis by Ken Menkhaus
(UNHCR, November, 2000)
http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/2001/som_unhcr_analysis_30nov00.pdf
Somalia Reinvents Itself (April, 2000)
Le Monde Diplomatique
http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/04/13somalia
Somalia: Peace and Development (September, 1999)
http://www.africafocus.org/docs99/som9909.php>
Removing Barricades in Somalia, Options for Peace and
Rehabilitation by Hussein Adam, Richard Ford et al.
(October 1998)
http://www.usip.org/pubs/pworks/pwks24/pwks24.html
N
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by
Africa Action (incorporating the Africa Policy Information
Center, The Africa Fund, and the American Committee on Africa).
Africa Action's information services provide accessible
information and analysis in order to promote U.S. and
international policies toward Africa that advance economic,
political and social justice and the full spectrum of human
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