Somalia: Ethiopian Occupation Ends, Suffering Continues

Tony Iltis
6 February 2009
Somalia is often cited by Western politicians and journalists as the archetypical “failed state”, with no functioning state since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, and with power contested by warlords, Islamists, clan militias, armed criminal gangs and even pirates.
In this mainstream media narrative, military intervention by the West or Western proxies is justified both to lessen the suffering of the country’s people and prevent neighboring countries from being destabilized. Indeed, the existence of such “failed states” has become one of the main justifications for Western militarism.
However, Somalia’s 18 years of anarchy have been accompanied by direct and indirect Western interventions, each of which has increased the level of death and suffering and prolonged the chaos.
Ethiopia
On January 26, Ethiopia ended its two-year military occupation of central and southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu.
Ethiopian troops invaded in December 2006 to oust the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. The US gave diplomatic, financial and military support to the invasion, using the “war on terrorism” and the threat of Islamist extremism as the rationale.
The stated aim was to bring to power the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), a fractious alliance of exiled politicians and defeated warlords.
Ethiopian forces committed war-crimes including looting, torture and rape. More than 10,000 civilians were killed during the occupation.
Failing to defeat the UIC, the Ethiopians signed a peace agreement under which Sheikh Sharif was sworn in as president on January 31, this time recognized by Ethiopia and the West.
However, the UIC, which in 2006 was making headway in ending the permanent civil conflict, splintered during the Ethiopian occupation. Some factions are now accusing Sharif of treason and have declared war on his government.
Somalia is more fractured than before the invasion.
In the 19th century, Somalia was partitioned with Britain taking the north and Italy the centre and south. Ethiopia annexed the ethnically Somali province of Ogaden.
Britain invaded Italian Somalia during World War II and the united protectorate was granted independence in 1960.
Regaining Ogaden from Ethiopia was an important goal of independent Somalia, particularly during the military regime of Siyad Barre that ruled between 1969 and 1991.
Cold War
The conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia was fuelled by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US-led Western bloc.
Ethiopia was armed by the West and Somalia by the Soviet Union until the anti-monarchy revolution of 1974 took Ethiopia into the Soviet orbit.
The US started giving arms and money to the Somali regime of Siyad Barre and encouraged it to launch an invasion of Ethiopia. The result was a three-year war that brought high casualties and economic devastation to both countries.
The Barre regime did little to economically develop Somalia, preferring to rely on the generosity of its alternating Cold War sponsors. The traditional nomadic livestock-rearing economy of the non-coastal areas of Somalia was undermined by the imposition of borders, the colonial-era expropriation of fertile land for export-oriented agriculture and warfare.
Furthermore, climate change caused by First World industrial pollution has been manifested in north-east Africa by over three decades of drought.
With the end of the Cold War, the US had no reason to continue propping up the Barre regime, which was overthrown by a military rebellion in January 1991. International aid agencies also withdrew at this time.
The generals who had overthrown Barre fell out over dividing up power, while for many Somalis access to arms became the most effective way of securing access to dwindling food stocks. Somalia’s descent into permanent civil war followed.
The traditional units of Somali society — clans and sub-clans — became mutually antagonistic armed entities.
While emergency relief and development aid could have saved Somalia from disintegration, the West preferred to use images of heavily armed, half-starved teenagers raiding food convoys to justify military intervention.
‘Humanitarian intervention’
With the collapse of the Cold War ending the traditional justification, between 1992 and ’95, a US-led UN-mandated multinational force in Somalia invented a new pretext for invading a Third World country: “humanitarian intervention”.
How many people were killed by this “humanitarian intervention” is unknown. Estimates vary between tens and hundreds of thousands.
Allegations of torture and sexual abuse of prisoners and civilians surfaced against soldiers from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia, although no-one was ever convicted.
What is known is that the largest scale killing was through the US deployment of helicopter gunships against densely populated urban areas.
On October 3, 1993, more than 1000 Somalis were killed by US helicopter assaults in one afternoon. However, the shooting down of two US Blackhawk helicopter gunships and killing of 18 marines in these clashes led to the withdrawal of the US troops that comprised more than two thirds of the 35,000-strong UN force.
By 1995 all UN forces had been withdrawn.
Following the departure of the UN, Somalia was again abandoned by international aid agencies. The economic contribution of those remaining was negligible compared to that of remittances from the growing diaspora of Somali refugees.
Between the end of the UN intervention in 1995 and the beginning of the Ethiopian occupation in 2006, there were three distinct processes toward political consolidation in Somalia.
One of these has been entirely fictitious: Western-backed diplomatic moves to form provisional or transitional governments, generally comprised of exiled politicians and defeated warlords or militia leaders.
These governments, of which there have been 14 so far, have no influence or social base inside the country, meeting in neighboring countries or enclaves held by foreign troops.
The second process has been the creation of de facto independent states in the country’s north. One of these, Somaliland, declared independence after Barre’s fall in 1991.
While no country or international agency has recognized its independence, it has all the attributes of a functioning state.
Puntland followed suit in 1998, although rather than declaring independence, it sees itself as an autonomous republic within a federated Somalia.
Pirates
The relative prosperity of these regions in part reflects the absence of the anarchy that pervades the rest of the country but also the booming piracy business.
Such piracy began as attempts by fishing communities to compensate for foreign trawlers depleting their stock, and marine pollution caused by being on the world’s busiest shipping lanes at time when neoliberal globalization has created historic high levels of shipping traffic.
This high volume of shipping has made piracy a highly profitable multinational enterprise. Ships, their crews and cargoes are generally well looked after and exchanged for multimillion dollar ransoms.
From fixers in London to restaraunters in the pirate villages who specialize in foreign food for the captured crews, there are countless beneficiaries from piracy, including the regional administrations.
The third process was the emergence of the UIC. After the UN left, clan-based Islamic courts developed to settle internal disputes. At the same time an Islamist movement known as al-Shabaab (Arabic for “the youth”) emerged as young militia members rebelled against the fratricidal clan loyalties.
While its aim is a rigidly interpreted Islamic state, it first made its mark in Mogadishu by suppressing the armed gangs engaged in highway robbery and kidnapping. By allying with al-Shabaab, the Islamic courts were able to unite across clan divides.
The rule of the UIC in the six months preceding the Ethiopian invasion was relatively popular, providing a degree of peace and security. Traders and business people supported the UIC because it created a legal framework, as well as social conditions, that facilitated commerce.
While al-Shabaab’s puritanical attacks on popular entertainment such as cinema caused some resentment, the pragmatic UIC leadership generally restrained al-Shabaab’s more fundamentalist tendencies.
During this period, Mogadishu and central and south Somalia were closer to being normally governed than at any other time since the fall of Barre.
Ethiopia’s antipathy to the UIC was premised on desire not to see Somalia reunited. Firstly, because a united Somalia would raise the question of Ogaden, and secondly because the Ethiopian regime had developed a number of profitable arrangements with various clan-based armed factions as well as the autonomous Somaliland and Puntland administrations.
The US, which by this stage had a close relationship with Ethiopia, opposed the UIC as part of the Islamophobic “war on terror”, initially funnelling money to the clan militias and warlords and, when this failed, sponsoring the Ethiopian invasion.
Despite US intelligence estimating the number of foreign Islamists in Somalia as negligible, the Ethiopian occupation was accompanied by random US airstrikes, usually announced as targeting individual al-Qaeda-linked militants, but generally killing civilians.
Sheikh Sharif and other UIC leaders formed an alliance with secular anti-Ethiopian groups called the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) based in Eritrea. The burden of resisting the Ethiopians fell to al-Shabaab, who without the restraining influence of the UIC leadership developed in a more fundamentalist and ultraviolent direction.
The stoning to death of a 13-year-old rape victim in an area controlled by al-Shabaab was a grisly indication of their misogynistic and sadistic interpretation of Islamic sharia law, which was not apparent during the UIC’s rule.
With the initiation of peace negotiations, the ARS split. Sheikh Sharif and his supporters left Eritrea for nearby Djibouti, saying that the Eritrean government wished to use them as proxies in its long running conflict with Ethiopia. Those remaining in Eritrea, led by Sheikh Hasan Dahir Aweys, have accused Sheikh Sharif of joining the enemy.
Since the Ethiopian withdrawal, a fourth armed Islamist group has emerged with a group called Ahlu Sunna wa Jamaa clashing with al-Shabaab. This group is based on Sufi clerics who see their brand of Islam as more authentically Somali than that of al-Shabaab.
While the Ethiopian occupation forces have left, Ethiopian troops continue to make cross-border incursions. Furthermore, a 8000-strong Ugandan and Burundian African Union “peacekeeping” force remains.
On February 2 in Mogadishu, after a roadside bomb injured a soldier, Ugandan troops fired into a civilian crowd, killing 36.
Meanwhile, on February 3, Afrique en ligne quoted Oxfam as reporting that 3.5 million Somalis were in danger from famine.
In such a situation, the West are not, and have never been, saviors. Rather, a prerequisite for lasting peace and rebuilding a shattered Somalia involves an end to Western interference, alongside reparations paid for the damage done.
Source: Green Left.com

 

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