The Long and Hidden History of
the U.S in Somalia
by Stephen Zunes
AlterNet, January 21, 2002
http://www.zmag.org/
The East African nation of Somalia is
being mentioned with increasing frequency as the next possible
target in the U.S.-led war against international terrorism. 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 of the rest of the country, U.S. officials believe that cells
of the Al-Qaida terrorist network may have taken advantage of
the absence of governmental authority to set up operation.
Before the United States attacks that
impoverished country, however, it is important to know how Somalia
became a possible haven for the followers of Osama Bin Laden and
what might result if the United States goes to war.
As one of the most homogeneous countries
in Africa, many would have not predicted the chronic instability
and violent divisions which 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 the Ethiopia Dirgue 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 Advisor
under President Jimmy Carter, has since claimed that this conflict
sparked the end of détente with the Soviet Union and the
renewal of the Cold War.
From the late 1970s until just before
Siad Barre's overthrow in early 1991, the U.S. sent hundreds of
millions of dollars of arms to Somalia in return for the use of
military facilities which had been originally constructed for
the Soviets. These bases were to be used to support American military
intervention in the Middle East. The consequences of U.S. military
support for the Barre regime on the Somali people was deemed of
little importance by American policymakers. The U.S. government
ignored warnings throughout the 1980s by Africa specialists, human
rights groups and humanitarian organizations that continued American
aid to the dictatorial government of Siad Barre would eventually
plunge Somalia into chaos.
These predictions proved tragically accurate.
During the nearly fifteen years of support by the United States
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 government persecution. In greatly centralizing
his government's control, Barre severely weakened traditional
structures in Somali society which 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 to come, which in turn would contribute to mass starvation
and spur the ill-fated humanitarian intervention by the United
States in 1992.
Meanwhile, by eliminating all potential
rivals with a national following, a power vacuum was created by
Barre that could not be filled when the U.S.-backed regime was
finally overthrown in January 1991, an event barely noticed outside
the country as world attention was focused on the start of the
Gulf War. With the end of the Cold War and the United States now
granted bases in the Persian Gulf itself, Somalia fell briefly
off the radar screen of U.S. foreign policy.
There is widespread agreement 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 United States poured in more than
$50 million of arms annually to prop up the Barre regime, there
was virtually no assistance offered that would have helped build
a selfsustaining economy which could feed Somalia's people. In
addition, the United States pushed a structural adjustment program
through the International Monetary Fund which 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.
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 which were being intercepted
by armed militias without reaching the civilian population 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 improving gradually. At this point,
the chaos limiting food shipments was limited to a small area;
most areas functioned 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 United States,
large numbers of Somalis saw the American forces as representatives
of the government which served as the major Western supporter
of the hated former dictatorship. Such an overbearing foreign
military presence in a country which had been free from colonial
rule for only a little more than three decades led to growing
resentment, particularly since these elite combat forces were
not trained for such humanitarian missions. (Author and journalist
David Halberstam quotes the U.S. Secretary of Defense 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
their black countrymen.
In addition, the U.S. role escalated to
include attempts at disarming some of the war lords, 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 M16 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 It wasn't
long before the slogan of American forces was "The only good
Somali is a dead Somali." It had become apparent that the
U.S. had badly underestimated the resistance.
The United States passed the mission on
to the United Nations in May the following year, marking the first
time the world body had combined peacekeeping, peace enforcement
and humanitarian assistance. It was also the first time the UN
has intervened without a formal invitation by a host government
(because there wasn't any.) But Somalis had little trust of the
United Nations, either, particularly since the UN Secretary General
at that time was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a major supporter of Barre
when he led Egypt's foreign ministry. U.S. forces, now leading
the UN mission, went on increasingly aggressive forays, including
a major battle in Mogadishu which 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 multi-sided conflict. Largely retreating
to a fixed position, the primary American objective 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 United Nations pulled
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 about 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 United Nations to prevent the genocide in Rwanda
during the spring of 1994. The Somalia intervention was most likely
an ill-advised assertion of well-meaning liberal internationalism,
though 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; 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 possibly 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 additionally angry at the destruction
wrought by direct U.S. military intervention in their country.
In subsequent years, there has been only
marginal progress towards 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-Qaida has established an important network or active cells
within this factious country.
If this is indeed the case, it begs the
question as to how the United States should respond. It is possible
that U.S. forces have access to remarkably accurate intelligence
and would be able to pinpoint and take out the cells without once
again becoming embroiled in the messy urban counter-insurgency
warfare of 1993-94 or relying on air strikes in heavily-populated
areas, which would result in large-scale civilian casualties.
Based on the current methods employed by the Bush administration
to combat terrorism, however, this is rather doubtful. The result
of renewed U.S. military intervention in Somalia, then, could
be yet another debacle which would only encourage the extremist
forces we are trying to destroy.
Stephen Zunes is the Midde East analyst
for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org) and associate professor
in the department of politics at the University of San Francisco.
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