Somali hostage-takers have become a favorite topic of the business media. The coverage peaked in April, when the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-based container ship, was hijacked and its captain, Richard Phillips, was taken hostage. At the end of the five-day standoff, Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed three Somali hostage takers and freed Phillips. Two days before the Navy SEAL operation, French navy commandos had stormed a hijacked sailboat, killing two Somalis.
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The Somalis had not harmed Phillips. In fact, prior to these killings by France and the United States, not a single person had been killed in any of the hijackings. Former hostages had reported being treated well while in captivity. Nevertheless, the only Somali survivor of the Navy SEAL operation was indicted on May 19 in a New York court on 10 counts, and may face life in prison.
The U.S. mass media reported that the snipers only acted when the hijackers were getting ready to shoot their hostage, a most improbable story. Why would the Somalis want to kill their hostage in plain sight of a U.S. naval destroyer that has the capacity to destroy half of Mogadishu, let alone their small life boat?
More important than the circumstances surrounding this particular incident is to understand the history of Somalia and its current conditions—the historical context that the business media invariably leave out.
Imperialist powers carve out Africa
Somalia is a mostly arid country with a population of 10 million. The east coast of Somalia, with the longest coastline in Africa, is strategically located near the Indian Ocean. Many of the world’s commercial ships, including oil tankers, sail off the coast of Somalia.
With the division of Africa among European capitalist powers in the 19th century following the 1884 Conference of Berlin, Somali-speaking people were divided into five different groups: Italian Somaliland, British Somaliland and French Somaliland, which later became the country of Djibouti. Other ethnic Somalis live in Kenya, a former British colony, and Ethiopia, a former Italian colony.
After World War II, responding to Somali resistance to colonialism and the new world order, Italy and Britain withdrew their military forces and the two areas formerly under their control formed the country of Somalia in 1960.
Legacy of colonialism persists
The major challenges of former colonies cannot be overstated. European colonizers had uprooted the pre-capitalist relations of production. To the extent that any infrastructure was built, it was strictly to enable the extraction and shipment of raw materials to the colonizing country.
After winning independence, with their economies ravaged, formerly colonized countries had no possibility of returning to pre-colonial relations of production. Yet they often lacked the human and financial capital to build viable independent economies, either along socialist or capitalist lines.
In 1969, a left-leaning nationalist group of military officers in Somalia carried out a successful coup. The new government took on the challenge of overcoming the legacy of colonialism and extreme underdevelopment. In 1974, the Somali government issued what was called the Mogadishu Declaration, expressing a commitment to pursue an independent, non-capitalist path and solidarity with anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere.
Mohamed Siad Barre, who became president in 1969, considered himself to be a socialist. Post-colonial Somalia made some progress in developing the infrastructure for agriculture and livestock production.
However, a severe drought in the early 1970s brought about a major crisis. The Soviet Union provided much-needed assistance, including airlifting as many as 90,000 people from areas devastated by the drought. But Somalia’s economic conditions continued to deteriorate.
Another factor that had great impact on Somalia was the sharpening of the class struggle in neighboring Ethiopia. Propped up by Washington, the brutal dictator Haile Selassie had kept Ethiopia in a semi-feudal state. But now, peasant uprisings and land takeovers had become a common occurrence, as well as strikes and demonstrations in the cities by workers and students.
Similar to what had happened in Somalia only a few years earlier, in 1974, the mass uprising in Ethiopia led to the formation of a group of progressive military officers, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam. This group, called the Derg, overthrew Selassie and moved to nationalize banks and implement an extensive land reform.
These attempts at a more equitable distribution of wealth alarmed Washington. Regime change became U.S. policy towards Ethiopia.
Washington pits neighbors against each other
In 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter sent a secret message to Siad Barre, encouraging him to invade Ethiopia. By this time, the drought had ravaged Somalia’s economy. President Siad Barre made a severe shift to the right. The U.S. and Saudi Arabian governments poured $500 million into Somalia—more than twice that country’s gross national product.
Somalia soon invaded Ogaden, the majority Somali-speaking region of Ethiopia . By 1978, the revolutionary government of Ethiopia, aided by Cuba and the Soviet Union, defeated the Somali invasion. But Ethiopia was now confronted with another war in Eritrea, fighting an army formed by landlords backed by the United States.
These wars devastated the already weak economies of both Ethiopia and Somalia. In 1991, the Ethiopian government was overthrown and replaced by a right-wing regime. Somalia’s Siad Barre, who by now had lost his popular base, was overthrown in the same year by a militia headed by Mohammed Farah Aidid. Since 1991, there has been no stable central government in Somalia, leaving the country essentially stateless.
Aidid was not a U.S. client, so he quickly earned U.S. hostility. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush militarily intervened in Somalia, announcing that he saw “no greater role for American troops than simply distributing aid.”
The real motives behind Washington’s “humanitarian mission”
But of course there is no such thing as an imperialist humanitarian aid mission. The U.S. troops deployed were U.S. Rangers and elite Delta Force commandos, hardly the right personnel for delivering food and aid. They were there to remove Aidid and replace him with U.S. puppets.
The “humanitarian” mission continued under Clinton. In July 1993, the U.S. military murdered 50 Somali elders in a bombing of a meeting in Mogadishu.
On Oct. 3, 1993, U.S. Black Hawk helicopters fired on a marketplace in Mogadishu. Resisting the attack, Somali fighters brought down a Black Hawk helicopter and killed 18 Marines who had survived the crash. This incident was the basis of the book and movie called “Black Hawk Down.”
The resolve of the Somali masses convinced Washington that an attempt to control Somalia militarily would be too costly. President Bill Clinton pulled U.S. troops out of Somalia in 1994.
The ensuing years were dominated by internal warfare among rival clan leaders, some of them supported by Washington. Through the years, the CIA armed and funded these warlords inside Somalia, in violation of a U.N.-declared international arms embargo. In 2004, the U.S. government propped up the Transitional Federal Government, a coalition of U.S.-aligned warlords.
But the TFG had no popular support. After years of anarchy, by 2006, an alliance of judges and elders, called the Islamic Courts Union, emerged with growing mass support. The ICU began organizing public services and gained control of more territory as it pushed back the TFG. By June 6, 2006, the TFG was driven out of most of Mogadishu.
U.S. aid to the TFG warlords was not cutting it. Washington now began giving money, arms and advisers to the Ethiopian government to attack Somalia. In July 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia. With a population of about 60 million, Ethiopia is a large recipient of U.S. aid and has one of the strongest militaries in the region. Ethiopia defeated the ICU forces and took Mogadishu.
Ethiopia continued to support and prop up the TFG, but the Somali masses resisted, seeing Ethiopia and the TFG working for U.S. interests. In May 2008, the TFG and the Ethiopian forces reacted with extreme violence to mass uprisings in Mogadishu. The head of the TFG, Abdullahi Yusuf, said that Mogadishu’s civilians would have to choose between fighting the Islamic insurgents or becoming themselves targets of the “war on terror.”
Intense fighting made refugees out of nearly 200,000 Mogadishu residents. Many are now living in make-shift refugee camps west of Mogadishu. As a result of living in extremely poor and unsanitary conditions, cholera and other diseases have afflicted the refugee population.
An estimated 8,000 civilians were killed and approximately 1 million others were internally displaced during the Ethiopian occupation. In addition to using Ethiopia as a proxy army, U.S. forces carried out several aerial bombardments of Somali territory under the guise of attacking al-Qaeda bases. For example, in a January 2007 bombing of the city of Afmadow, the United States killed 70 civilians.
Despite the extreme violence they faced, Somalis fought the imperialist proxy invasion fiercely. By early 2009, high casualty rates forced the Ethiopian military to pull out of Somalia.
Washington continues to call its intervention in Somalia “humanitarian aid.” But the real aim of humanitarian aid slipped out in a statement made by Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Holmes: “I think it’s very important that we engage there. And the foot in the door there, honestly, is humanitarian operations.”
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees considers Somalia to be in more dire need than Darfur, where another “humanitarian” campaign is the pretext for regime change in Sudan. The U.N.’s humanitarian co-coordinator for Somalia, Eric Laroche, stated: “If this happened in Darfur, there would be a major outcry. … Since it is in Somalia, no one cares. Somalia is a forgotten emergency.” According to the U.N. News Service, Somalia’s infant and child mortality rates are among the highest in the world.
The question of the Somali hostage takers can only be understood within the context of the desperate conditions endured by the Somali people as a result of imperialist political and military intervention. It is only by ignoring this history that the business media can depict desperate youth who have found a way to escape extreme poverty by hijacking ships.
Somalia has had to survive through the ravages of European colonialism. Since independence, Somalia has suffered imperialist meddling in its affairs aimed at enabling the neocolonial model of exploitation. Somalia has had to live through direct U.S. military intervention. Somalia has seen the invasion of its land by Ethiopia, operating as a U.S. proxy. Somalis have lost many lives in U.S. bombings of Somali cities. Somalis have witnessed commercial fishing ships illegally fishing off the coast of Somalia, depriving Somalis of one of the few means of survival left to them. And Somalis are suffering the consequences of the dumping of toxic and nuclear wastes off their country’s coast.
As a direct consequence of all these crimes, we have a population living in desperate conditions, dying of extreme poverty, hunger and disease. It is only by covering up this bloody history of atrocities committed against the people of Somalia that imperialists, and their media mouthpieces, can depict themselves as “civilized” while portraying Somalis as “thieves and pirates.”
