Arrogant crusade
International Viewpoint #242 February 1993 will try to resist the attachment of the amendments - whose author Senator Robert Packwood is currently embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal - its efforts are unlikely to be either vigorous or successful.
Clinton's watchwords for labour will be "competitiveness", "flexibility" "cooperation" — all meaning that union leaders must impose new concessions on their members in return for the appearances of "consultation" with the new government. The steelworkers union has already proposed to the basic steel companies a long-term contract including binding arbitration, more cooperation and "workforce restructuring" (job
Bill Clinton's election promise to "focus like a laser beam on this economy" resonated strongly with voters who felt that Bush seemed distracted and bored by domestic
While the Reagan administration came into office actively looking for international confrontations to solidify its political base and Bush left the same way with the renewed bombing of Iraq, Clinton and company would have preferred to avoid such potentially divisive distractions.
Nonetheless, the significant reduction of American militarism has no part in Clinton's agenda, as shown in the appointment to Defense Secretary of Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat who gave the Reagan-Bush administration invaluable aid in pushing through the Star Wars Programme, contra aid and the B-1 bomber.
In any case, Clinton will instantly confront what former President Jimmy Carter describes as "the most difficult international situation inherited by any president in my lifetime". This includes a complex intervention in Somalia, likely to become less popular as Marines begin to be killed, and the prospect of total chaos in the former
Some observers have been tempted by the appearance that George Bush has left behind international crises as booby traps for his unwelcome successor, who so rudely short-circuited his presidency. In essence, however, capitalism itself has mined the US economy and the world arena. The biggest immediate loser is likely to be Bill Clinton's image. The space for pseudo-liberal pretence has vanished before he could occupy it. *
4. Labor Party Advocates: an educational and organizing initiative to build support within the labour movement for the creation of a labour party. It is led by Tony Mazzocchi, an official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers and a longtime left labour activist. LPA is very far from being a mass movement as yet, but it does tap some of the profound political disaffection among workers. The meeting in Detroit, organized by Cleveland and Detroit LPA chapters, was the first regional educational conference of its kind. 6
ON December 9, 1992, fortified by resolution 794 of the United Nations Security Council authorizing intervention by foreign armed forces, American troops disembarked in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu. A French contingent, recruited from a Foreign Legion unit based in Djibouti, soon followed. FRANCOIS PIGUET -January 17, 1993
T HE following day Mogadishu
was quiet as most of the armed bands evacuated the capital. Some literally vanished into the bush. There was even a sudden fall in prices on the local arms market; the price of a Kalishnikov rifle dropped from $160 to $70.
Many fighters have simply got out of the way of the American-French forces. Others have hidden their arms and will bring them out at the first opportunity. Many arms and vehicles have been hidden in the villages and in some Mogadishu neighbourhoods. According to Somali refugees in contact with their families, other armed elements have passed over into Ethiopian territory with their vehicles. In this situation time is working in favour of the robbers who have made small fortunes in hard currency through their dealings with the international agencies.
The media barrage surrounding the Western intervention has tended to give international public opinion an image of a charitable crusade in the Christmas spirit. A Le Monde editorial on December 10 found that this "humanitarian interference" in Somalia would redound considerably to the US' moral credit. The image-obsessed media have skirted round the debate posed by the US' new "Shoot to Feed" foreign intervention strategy.
This doctrine, born out of the debris of the East-West balance, perpetuates the world's premier military-industrial complex. The latter has subordinated the United Nations to its own command structure and passed on the costs of its interventions to the main international fund donors - in the first place Japan and the Gulf oil
The media has long failed to give attention to the unfolding Somali tragedy. Now, the priority given to this one dramatic event and its stage-management are presenting a degrading picture of a Somali people thrust back into the stone age by a savage tribal war. The hordes of journalists arriving in Mogadishu for the big show have brought new inflationary pressures to bear on the fragile fabric of a subsistence economy. The upward spiral of prices of services and consumer goods has reached the point where it is beyond the budgets of many of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who are facing ever increasing problems in dealing with the logistics associated with their work.
While at first almost everyone accepted the intervention as an inevitability, tensions soon appeared. The chain of perverse effects of outside intervention is being felt. A month after the start of the operation, hardly a day goes by without sporadic clashes between armed groups of Somalis and the foreign troops. And outside the zones controlled by the Americans and French the conflicts continue.
When the marines arrived, the militia of General Aydeed from the main Hawiye clan (Habr Gedir) who have been fighting the supporters of interim president Ali Mahdi (Hawiye Abgal) in Mogadishu moved north towards Gaikayu where they have clashed with groups connected to the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) which controls the north east of the country.
To the south, the arrival of the Americans in the port of Kismayu was preceded by the massacre of at least several dozen people attributed to the troops of Colonel Omar Jess, leader of the Ogadeni (Darod) of the south and of the Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM). Finally, the Marehan, the tribe of former dictator Mohamed Syad Barre, led by Barre's nephew General Morgan, remain in firm control of their Gedu stronghold and have recently retaken the Bardera region on the Kenyan frontier from the forces of General Aydeed.
It is a bit late for the Americans to wake up to the complexity of the situation. If we are to believe the American press, some of the proposals being made in the ruling circles would make the South African secret service blush. The International Herald Tribune has been an anthology of American arrogance - on
MADAM
WERE DOING
YOUR
International Viewpoint #242 February 1993
December 4 it offered us one Pentagon official's advice: "You invite those warlords in, bring out an M-1 tank, let it blow one of their armored pickup trucks to pieces and say "Any questions?''
Furthermore, on the first day of their deployment, American military officials closed air space to small planes, grounding the humanitarian organizations and disturbing the trade in khat — a widely used drug flown in from Kenya. While the prohibition has not yet aroused open expres sions of anger, that may soon develop since the guidelines concerning the trade in and possession of khat in the Americancontrolled zones are fluid and sometimes contradictory.
On January 15 an American helicopter-borne detachment descended on a smugglers' airfield 50 kms to the southwest of Mogadishu. This involves the two nerve centres of the war — the traffics in arms and khat. One wonders how the population might react if the American authorities took it into their heads to forbid
The armed groups both in and outside Mogadishu exploit the slightest chink in the foreign military disposition. It is currently risky to travel along the roads, including the highways between the regional capitals, only the crossroads of which are controlled by the intervention forces. "This is an unstable and unhealthy situation that puts us and our employees in danger" according to a representative of an Italian NGO.! The escalation continued in January 1993 and two foreign representatives of humanitarian organizations were killed in the first two weeks of the year.2
Armed bands are carrying out exactions in many regions. Once such bands robbed or ransomed caravans; now they do the same with the humanitarian convoys making deals to ensure their safety. We can estimate total international assistance at about $45m a month - that is $10 for each of 4.5 million people. Some observers believe that "the funds basically serve to feed a war economy which effectively prolongs the suffering" 3
According to assertions in the press, 80% of the humanitarian aid is going astray. While the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has challenged this figure, it admits that this may be true for the World Food Program convoys which only carry dry rations.
Extreme distress and famine have not afflicted the whole country; however, about 30% of the population is affected.
Thanks to food from the CIC's kitchens, some peasant smallholders have been able to sustain agricultural activity. A rainy
November - there were 133 mm of rain
NE
ARMS MAKER
ґ - made it possible for the seed provided by the CICR to be planted. Sorghum, tomatoes, melons and onions have created pockets of food production, endangered though they are by the fighting.
Some big plantations have escaped the pillage and continue to produce at a low level owing to the breakdown of their commercial connections with the outside world. Their produce — in particular bananas — is too expensive to sell easily
Thus, in the Somali fertile crescent between the Wabi Shebelle and Juba rivers the peasants under-exploit their land because their income from the nearby markets is too low to pay the costs of fuel, pesticides and seed grain on the big farms. But most of them suffer from poor supplies of inputs in a situation of instability that makes it impossible to store produce.
The cultivators are often of Bantu stock, former serfs or clients of stockbreeding clans who despise work on the land and they have been the least in danger because they do not belong to any of the Somali clans. However, while they may have been spared the worst of the bloody vendettas that have marked some episodes of the Somali war, they have suffered from repeated extortion which has reduced many to poverty.
Here the assistance provided to combat malnutrition has allowed many to better last out the gap before the next harvest expected to start at the end of February. Such a development is a precondition for any social and economic reconstruction programme.
Plight of Ogaden population
The majority of the population of the
Ogaden region, which is now part of Ethiopia, are Somalis - two to three million strong, the estimate being vague owing to the problem of counting a largely nomadic population. The Ogaden is totally landlocked but is the true heart of the
Somali country of nomadic stockbreeders.
ASSURE YOu EVERYTHING CAN END
SUFFERING
SOMALIA
JANE CEM The Carauaa Sarace Moator This is a region of sanctuary for many of them, mainly the Darod and the Issaks for whom this is the point of access to the Haud to the north.
The region is where the Darod confederation of tribes - the most numerous Somali people — had its origin. For example, the Marehan tribe has traditionally controlled a space straddling the ill-defined border between Ethiopia and Somalia. This frontier has never been enshrined in an international treaty and has been the object of a permanent competition which erupted into open war in 1977-
On the Ethiopian side the black out concerning the Ogaden, a region totally cut off from both Mogadishu and Addis Ababa by inter-tribal and ethnic conflicts means that only a trickle of contradictory information gets out. It seems that the troops of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) only control the urban centres, in particular Harar and Dire Dawa, while bloody clashes have taken place between Oromo militia and the Issa-Gurgura Front. We may note in passing an intervention from Djibouti in the Dire Dawa region by the Isa-Gurgura Liberation Front (FLIG), created by the Djibouti government to give it a means of gaining access to the Somali Issa's representation in the Addis Ababa
Outside the urban centres, the Ethiopian government has little or no presence. The Ethiopian state rests on local ethnic forces. The new Ethiopian authorities of the EPRDF who came to power in Addis Ababa after the fall of the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariamen in May 1991 have faced great difficulties in putting their regionalization policy into practise regime of President Meres Zenawi has
1. J. Helene, Le Monde, December 12, 1992.
2. On January 2, Sean Devereux, the UNICEF representative in Kismayo, was shot down - a scene which was repeated on January 14 in Bardera when the Red Cross representative Kurt Lustenberger died from a bullet wound to the head.
3. Stephen Smith, Libération, November 27, 1992.
----- photo credits and running heads -----
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International Viewpoint #242 February 1993 decided that there should be 14 autonomous regional administrations. Currently, post-Mengistu Ethiopia has to deal with open opposition from the Oromo grouped in the Oromo Liberation Front (ORF).
At the same time, in the midst of the total anarchy, Islam is highly active politically in Somalia. In June 1992, fundamentalist fighters were repulsed by the SSDF when they tried to take control of Bosaso in the north east region of Mijirtin. Subsequently, the Al Ittihad militia has become a weighty player in the Somali conflict. They control the port of Merca, offering protection to the humanitarian agencies in exchange for hard currency and sacks of food. They are, furthermore, present in other ports where they take part in commercial transactions including those affecting the distribution of food aid.
In the Ogaden, the Al Ittihad militants are already involved in large-scale operations. In this forgotten and inaccessible region of famine, Al Ittihad seizes humanitarian aid from the convoys and distributes to "good" Muslims in the refugee camps where hatred for the "egotistical West" is on the rise. It seems that they share with easier for the food aid to get through. However, "progressively deprived of their sources of booty as the foreign troops are deployed, the militias of the various Somali factions are tending to become privatized, definitively escaping their leaders' control".5 Even in Mogadishu insecurity is resuming in the neighbourhoods with the inevitable effects on supplies.
The setting up of a Somali police force, expressly announced in the UN plans, is yet to begin. At a time when everything resembling a public authority seems to be dissolving, Islamic fundamentalist elements supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan have recently made a breakthrough.
Since the foreign intervention two sources have told of women being lynched or stoned for adultery or contact with the white foreigners, the gal. These movements can draw strength from reinforcement of anti-Western sentiment which has been sharpened by the behaviour of the military and civilian invaders who contemptuously ignore the local population while drawing Somali leaders frequently responsible for the suffering and robbery of the population into the diplomatic ballet.
American policy in the Islamic crescent that spreads from east Africa to the Indian sub-continent - taking in the strategically crucial Middle East - takes as its pretext the aim of containing Islamic forces; in this optic the main enemy in the medium term is Iran. From this point of view the Somali intervention may turn out to be perfectly counter-productive, as the foreign presence, their arrogance and the difference in ways of life sharpen hatred of the gal and strengthen the influence of Islamic fundamentalism in a Sunni Muslim population whose religious moderation has often been underlined.
It would seem then that we must look more deeply at the roots of Muslim fundamentalism in the poverty and crying injustices experienced in a country like Somalia which belongs among the group of the 44 least developed countries, according to the classification of international development agencies. *