In the Name of the Cold War: How the West Aided and Abetted the Barre Dictatorship of Somalia
Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi
This chapter does not aim to provide details of the massacres committed by the US-supported Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia. Rather, it attempts to review the Western assistance that enabled Barre to turn Somalia into a killing field for over a decade.
During the height of the Cold War, President Reagan had called the Soviets ‘an evil empire.’ It was true that the Soviets had a repressive regime in their own country, and supported some evil regimes elsewhere. However, granting the United States the moral high ground is untenable, given the US record of propping up its own evil regimes, including Siad Barre’s, and anti-democratic guerrillas, such as Savimbi’s in Angola.1
American and Western complicity
The 1980s was the crucial decade that pushed Somalia over the precipice. During that time Somalia’s role was that of a pawn on the superpower chessboard, a client state whose fascist dictator was useful to Washington in its global tussle with the Soviets.2 It is certainly the case that prior to 1978, the Barre regime was allied with the Soviets, who supplied it with weapons and military training. However, during the period of Soviet-client status, Barre showed little of the beast he would later become under US patronage. In fact, his regime committed its most heinous crimes and massacres during the decade that it was allied with the West, not during the eight years it was allied with the Soviets. The latter period ended in 1978, when two things happened: (1) the Soviet Union decided to swap Barre, a rustic dictator with little knowledge of communist social theories, for Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia and his younger socialist officers, who appeared more inclined to implement communist ideals in their feudal country, notably in the area of land reform;3 (2) Ethiopia, with the help of the Soviet Union, defeated the Somali army and drove it out of Somali-inhabited areas in Ethiopia.
These events, at the time, seemed to sound the death knell for the Barre regime. The public was overwhelmingly of the opinion that Siad Barre’s policies had failed the country both internally and externally.4 At last Somali democrats were showing their faces, hoping the time was right to change the country’s course by sidelining Barre. But Barre, who had a sixth sense for opposition, saw the writing on the wall and frantically tried to find a solution to prolong his reign. Soon the miracle arrived: he was able to align the country with the West, and Washington moved in as the patron of his regime because of the strategic value of Somalia’s northern coastline.5
For a brief period, this realignment of the country with the West took the wind out of the sails of Barre’s critics, who were clamoring for democracy and a return to a free-market economy. People felt that the new alignment with the US, a country perceived as the champion of democracy, would not only force Barre to become more democratic but would also open up new avenues of trade and investment after years of Soviet-style austerity. As one Somali put it at the time, ‘When the Russians were here … they only brought guns but no money. They were a bad people. But the Americans, they have money and will buy in our shops’ (Girardet, 1981).
Taken as a whole, Somalis are a profoundly religious people, and most were happy to see their country extricated from an alliance with the disliked Communist bloc so much that instant celebrations erupted at the country’s main university campus. But these hopes were to be more than dashed. Western assistance would reinforce Barre’s regime further, and spur the dictator to commit massacres and other heinous deeds that most Somalis would never have imagined could be inflicted by their own government.
Ignoring Barre’s political orientation
When the US established its patron–client pact with the Barre regime in 1980, there were hardly any doubts about the true nature of the regime. Barre’s Somalia was an absolute dictatorship, with no independent parliament, judiciary, unions, or media. There were half-a-dozen security agencies and a security court that dispatched political prisoners by firing squad on flimsy charges. It was evident that unless Somalis succeeded in curbing Barre’s power or ousting him as rapidly as possible, he would use any available means to bolster his system, and his exit could only come at the price of bloodshed. In short, Barre’s system was a monster that, if fed, would grow more monstrous still. On the other hand, if it were starved of financial and military resources for a few short years, there seemed little doubt the regime would crumble in the face of pressure from the outside, or domestic challenge.
Still, it could be argued that Somalia, as a nation-state, had legitimate military needs and deserved to be able to arm itself against an outside aggressor. However, it was no secret that, after the 1977–78 war with Ethiopia (itself instigated by the Barre regime), most of Barre’s arms acquisitions from the West and proxy Third World countries were intended for internal repression rather than repulsing the Ethiopian army, itself bogged down in internal wars and hardly capable of invading Somalia. Thus, foreseeing the use to which Barre would put his vast array of weaponry was scarcely difficult. In fact, when Barre obtained eleven British-made Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft from Kuwait, obviously with British knowledge, Professor Robert Rotberg of MIT correctly claimed that they were intended for the suppression of internal dissidence (Rotberg, 1984). Piloted by white Rhodesians and South Africans, these same fighter aircraft would rain death upon refugees fleeing a genocidal campaign in the north in 1988. Unfortunately, despite the brutal nature of the Barre dictatorship, successive US administrations did not insist on any process of internal democratization; nor did they offer assistance to any of the democratic figures and forces in the country. Obviously, what counted for Washington above all was access to Somali ports and airports, and the right to install sophisticated surveillance and monitoring systems on Somali soil.
The rationale for supporting the Barre dictatorship
The US presence in the Horn can be viewed as having had three main objectives: protecting pro-Western governments in the Middle East, meaning essentially autocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; protecting the oil lanes from the Middle East to the Indian Ocean; and safeguarding Western access to Middle East oil (Lefebvre, 1991: 15). All three objectives can be summarized with one word – oil. Access to that single resource seemed to require guarding the ‘maritime choke points’ in the region, and rimming them with pro-Western regimes (Lefebvre, 1991: 20). The emphasis was thus placed on insuring a ‘pro-Western’ orientation among the regimes of the region, regardless of the internal repression or outright terror that those regimes practiced.
It was Somalia’s bad luck to border the Bab-el-Mandeb ‘choke point’ on the Red Sea’s southern entrance, and to be positioned as well within easy reach of the oil wells of the Gulf. The port city of Berbera in the north, where most of Barre’s massacres occurred in the 1980s, lay at the epicenter of the Pentagon’s desires. Berbera has an airport, modernized by the Soviets, with the longest runway in Africa, and a port that the Soviets also modernized as a fleet port when Somalia was in their camp.6
Further bad luck arose from the fact that the US administration would soon come to be headed by President Ronald Reagan and his cohort of gung-ho, Soviet-fighting cold warriors bent on curbing Soviet ‘influence’ in the Third World. The previous Carter administration had indeed signed a bases-for-arms pact with Barre, but was more cautious overall in providing support to his regime. Not so Reagan-Bush:7
Under Ronald Reagan, arms transfers would not be restrained for the sake of restraint. Chester Crocker had argued that the Carter administration’s active but disarmed diplomacy, because of its reluctance to commit resources at a time when African security issues had come to the fore, had resulted in missed opportunities to gain friends in Africa and win the respect of adversaries. Unaffected by the so-called Vietnam syndrome – reluctance to pledge American aid or put U. S. credibility on the line in the Third World – the Reagan administration was ‘quite prepared to send arms to friendly governments.’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 228)
Assistance other than arms was to flow to ‘friendly governments,’ including economic aid as well as moral and propaganda support. The man who, for almost ten years during the Reagan–Bush era, embodied all this assistance – to Somalia and other African countries – was Dr Chester Crocker. Crocker was then Assistant Secretary for African Affairs; today he is a professor of political science at Georgetown University, and a board member of the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), an institution created by Congress to promote democracy and peace worldwide. During his time as a political appointee, however, promoting democracy in Somalia was not Dr Crocker’s priority. Rather, it was to solicit more funds from Congress for the Barre dictatorship, as well as to downplay reports from independent human rights groups about the brutalities of the Barre regime. The organization Africa Watch noted:
In January 1989, the State Department not only failed to condemn flagrant human rights abuses, but instead rebuked Africa Watch for calling for an investigation of the problem. Numerous credible reports by the US and international media in 1988 and 1989 reported that Somalia had received shipments of chemical weapons from Libya. One story, which was aired on January 12, 1989 on NBC News, reported that the Reagan Administration had information eight months earlier that Libyan President Qadafy gave Somalia chemical weapons. The State Department denied the account, but NBC stood by its story when questioned by a Congressional office. When Africa Watch raised concerns about the possible use of chemical weapons against the Isaaks with Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, he rebuked our organization for making such a suggestion and indicated that the State Department was satisfied with the Somali government’s categorical denials, stating that ‘prudence and fairness warrant a heavy burden of proof with respect to charges against willful use of weapons of mass destruction by a government against its own people.’ In view of the Somali government’s campaign of destruction in the north, it is difficult to justify Mr. Crocker’s confidence in the Somali government on this issue. (Africa Watch, 1990: 210–11)
The destruction of the North
The regime whose version of the truth satisfied Dr Crocker had by then amassed a record of numerous massacres since aligning itself with the US, especially in northern Somalia. For example, in December 1984, forty-three men were summarily executed in Burao for no other reason than to cow the northern population and erode resistance to the regime (Africa Watch, 1990: 65). By 1988, the regime had committed a well-documented and genocidal ‘ethnic cleansing’ of large areas of Somalia, though this was a term that would gain currency in the media only later.
During the fateful year of 1988, which is the year that Somalia actually fell apart as a nation, guerrillas of the Somali National Movement (SNM), who had been engaged in hit-and-run attacks on the regime since 1982, decided to risk their lives in their homeland instead of being caught up in a squeeze between the Barre dictatorship and the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, after the two dictators signed a peace treaty between them. (The SNM had rear bases in Ethiopian territory.) The insurgents, with the help of an open rebellion by a northern Somali population aggrieved by years of massacres, torture, ill-treatment, economic plunder, and social neglect, rapidly took control of the main cities and most of the countryside.
Ideologically, the SNM was a Western-leaning movement and ‘one of the most democratic movements in the Horn of Africa,’ even if it maintained a relationship with the Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam (see Dagne, 1992; Prunier, 1990–91). Its leaders were democrats as well: the movement had changed its leadership several times through congresses. The SNM was thus not a threat to the interests of the US or its allies. Its sole aim was to liberate its people from a murderous regime. But that regime’s response was swift and vicious, constituting nothing less than a planned genocide.
Earlier, in 1986, Barre’s viceroy in the north, General Said Hersi, alias General Morgan, or ‘The Butcher of Hargeisa’ (previously the dictator’s bodyguard before marrying one of his daughters), had written a letter to his father-in-law, which subsequently become known as ‘the letter of death.’ In it, Hersi laid the foundations for a ‘campaign of obliteration’ against the northern population (Greenfield, 1987). The full implications of this policy would be felt in northern areas in 1988, as the regime’s army directed its considerable firepower against the civilian population. Jet fighters would take off from Hargeisa airport, the northern capital, only to drop their deadly cargo a few miles away, in residential areas. Artillery units positioned on ridges around the city would direct round after round of shells onto the same residential quarters. Then soldiers would go door-to-door to eliminate any remaining residents and to loot homes. In a matter of days, the two largest cities in the north, Hargeisa and Burao, were reduced to rubble-strewn ghost towns.8
In two months, from May to July 1988, between 50,000 and 100,000 people were massacred by the regime’s forces.9 By then, any surviving urban Isaaks – that is to say, hundreds of thousands of members of the main northern clan community – had fled across the border into Ethiopia. They were pursued along the way by the British-made fighter-bombers piloted by mercenary South African and ex-Rhodesian pilots, paid $2,000 per sortie (see Simmons, 1989; House of Representatives, 1988). But this was a massacre that took place in obscurity – far from television cameras, since the regime refused to allow reporters into the region. Even the International Red Cross was denied the right to bring food and medicine to the civilian population (Brittain, 1988; see also Mather, 1988). The survivors of these genocidal strategies claim today that only the courage of the SNM fighters saved them from outright extermination, when the world stood by silent. In reality, however, it was more than that: every man and woman in the targeted population had become a freedom fighter, with nothing left to lose.
Overall US assistance to Barre
The US was engaged in arming Barre long before 1988, the year of the genocidal massacres. According to some accounts, between 1980 and 1989 the US had provided Barre with about $35 million in lethal military assistance alone, while total military assistance amounted to $187 million from 1980 to 1987 (Beaver, 1992). The peak year was 1985, when military assistance totaled $75.8 million (National Academy of Sciences, 1988). These figures are hardly inconsiderable when it is borne in mind that at the time the Somali population was fewer than 6 million, and they represent a level of military assistance that has few parallels in military aid to African nations. In the first year following the 1988 slaughter, the US granted a further $41 million in military and economic assistance to the Barre regime (Feldman, 1988). The US also spent millions building or upgrading installations such as airports and ports for the benefit of both US forces and those of the Barre regime. Another barometer of the importance that the Reagan–Bush administrations attached to Somalia can be gleaned from the $38 million cost of the new US embassy in Mogadishu, completed in 1989. It was reportedly the most expensive embassy in Africa (Wells, 1992; Piles, 1991).
It is difficult to cite an exact figure for the total amount of US military and economic assistance to the Barre regime from 1979 to 1990. One estimate given for both types of assistance is roughly $1 billion (Hartung, 1993). The true sum is, however, probably far higher, since a large part of the assistance did not come in the form of price-tagged aid packages. For example, military assistance included technical assistance to repair the army’s heavy weaponry, as well as the maintenance of airports and ports for use by US forces and Barre’s army. This kind of assistance did not appear in the official aid packages.
Another way to comprehend the magnitude of the military aid provided to the Barre regime is to compare it with the rest of Africa. Between the years 1980 and 1989, the US supplied the Barre regime with ‘the largest US security-assistance program ever provided to a sub-Saharan African state’ (Menkhaus, 1997; see also Lefebvre, 1991: 199–200). In all of Africa, in fact, only Egypt received greater military assistance during this period.
In addition to the military-related assistance detailed above, the Pentagon provided the Barre army with military training through the IMED (International Military Education) program. Together with Barre’s own highly selective military academy (selective not in the sense of merit, but in the sense of blind obedience to Barre), the regime produced an officer corps that would become the ‘willing executioners’ of the regime (see O’Sullivan, 1993; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1992). It can be rightly said here that American taxpayers’ money was used to pay for the education of would-be torturers and mass killers.
Even economic assistance to Somalia, in the form of food aid that such agencies as CARE provided, in the end contributed to Somalia’s ruin. First, food aid provided the regime with the means to feed a huge standing army. Second, food aid killed off Somali food production – with the market full of food aid, especially cereals, farming did not make economic sense to Somali farmers, who were essentially cereal farmers. Third, by monetizing food aid – that is, selling it in the marketplace – the regime’s top officials and friends grew richer, and saw little incentive to stop the flow of ‘poison aid’ coming into the country.10
Assistance after the outbreak of the war in the north
The US provided critical assistance to Barre’s army throughout the height of the fighting in 1988. This would contribute to prolonging both the war in the north and the regime’s hold on power. For example, US communication specialists repaired the army’s communications equipment during the fighting in Hargeisa, enabling its forces in the field to communicate with central command in Mogadishu. This undoubtedly raised the morale of Barre’s forces and spurred them to further atrocities (Campbell, 1988). Also, a shipment of US weapons and munitions was delivered to the army, which promptly made use of it in the north. According to Colin Campbell, citing congressional sources: ‘[t]he weapons … were of obvious and urgent value to the Siad government, and no one in the US doubted that they would be used to kill people.’11 The shipment consisted of US$1.4 million worth of military equipment, including 1,200 M-16 automatic rifles and 2 million rounds of M-16 ammunition, 300,000 rounds of 30-caliber ammunition, and 500,000 rounds of 50-caliber ammunition (United States Department of the Army, 1993). The US Defense Department also provided a 220-bed field hospital to Barre’s military, which was set up at Berbera in the north and was used to treat only wounded soldiers, not the civilians brutalized by the army. Finally, though we lack firm evidence, US intelligence information about the disposition of SNM troops was probably made available to Barre’s commanding officers.
Assistance from other Western countries
Other Western and pro-Western countries, in step with the United States, supplied arms and aid to the Barre regime. The most notable player was Italy, the former colonial power in the south. From 1978 to 1980, Italy provided about US$124 million in military assistance, consisting of light tanks and other weapons (United States Department of the Army, 1993). Additionally, between 1979 and 1982, the Barre regime bought with cash some $600 million in arms, mainly from Italy (Lefebvre, 1991: 208). The cash likely came from the US-allied Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia – that is, from Third World proxies. There was no way the Somali economy, largely dependent on northern livestock exports, could have generated such resources for the regime in such a short time. Overall, during the crucial decade in question, the Italians spent more than $1 billion on the regime. The money went to armaments, corruption, and white-elephant projects (see Achtner, 1993). Italian cooperation continued until the fall of the regime in January 1991.
Key Third World proxies who provided either military or financial assistance to the Barre dictatorship include, in addition to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, and Libya. The first three countries provided assistance designed to keep the Barre regime firmly in the ‘pro-Western’ camp (United States Department of the Army, 1993). In the case of Egypt, this meant mostly passing along Soviet military hardware, sometimes paid for by the Saudis. These were arms the Egyptians no longer needed in the wake of their alignment with the US. The Egyptians also provided training. The Saudis, for their part, continued their assistance until Barre’s downfall; Saudi assistance was in the form of weapons such as armored and reconnaissance vehicles, small arms, and ammunition, as well as some training. Above all, however, the Saudis deserve special mention for their generous cash handouts to the regime. These included a donation of $70 million handed to Barre during his last month in power – money that went partly into the flight chest of the Barre family. Reportedly, the aim of this final donation was to secure the Barre regime’s support for the war against Iraq (Le Monde, 1990).
Other important assistance, though not military in nature, came from the European Economic Commission (EEC), the IMF and the World Bank, based in the US and subject to US control in large measure, as well as the African Development Bank, subject also to Western shareholder control. Money from these alternative sources would come in handy for both the Barre regime and the top US officials supporting it. When Congress, acting on an initiative of a number of concerned members led by Howard Wolpe (D-Mich., then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa) and Sam Gejdensen (D-Conn.) blocked most of the direct bilateral aid to the Barre regime, the Bush administration supported multilateral aid in the form of a $70 million ‘quick disbursing cash loan’ from the World Bank, as well as $25 million from the African Development Bank (see Africa Watch, 1990: 212; Lefebvre, 1991: 252; Ottoway, 1988; Africa Report, 1990). A young Somali demonstrator outside the offices of the World Bank in Washington exclaimed: ‘It is immoral madness! How can we, who must soon inherit our country’s leadership, be expected to pay interest and back pay on monies that assuredly will be sidetracked to subsidize the murder of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters?’ (Greenfield, 1989: 10).
The attempt to keep assistance flowing to the Barre regime meant that during the Reagan–Bush era, even the rule that forbids US representatives to multilateral financial institutions from approving loans solicited by gross human rights violators (the International Financial Institutions Act) was waived. ‘The Reagan and Bush Administrations ignored the application of this law to Somalia. Indeed, far from opposing loans to Barre, the executive branch … actually promoted Somalia’s cause within the banks’ (Africa Watch, 1990: 213). Not only did these administrations ignore that particular rule, but ‘close consultations between the Administration and Barre’s military leaders continued well into 1989,’ and as a sign of the importance attached to ties with the Barre regime, the US Central Command’s new commander paid a visit to Somalia in March 1989. At a dinner in his honor, the US ambassador to Somalia, Frank Crigler, toasted ‘the health of our distinguished visitor and his companions, as well as the strong ties of military cooperation between the United States and Somalia’ (Africa Watch, 1990: 210).
This vouching for the Barre dictatorship permeated all levels of the Reagan and Bush administrations; it was not limited to Dr Crocker or to ambassadors such as Frank Crigler.12 Refusing to give up on the regime until the very final moment, the Bush administration would trot out General Normal Schwarzkopf, would-be hero of the Gulf War, ‘before the Senate Committee on Appropriations to request continuing military aid’ to the Barre regime, even if by then Barre’s massacres were well known, and open resistance to the regime had spread to the south and to the capital, Mogadishu (Shalom, 1993).
US reactions to the 1988 massacres
As already noted, some concerned members of the US Congress had from an early date opposed aid to the Barre regime. This was even more true after 1988, following the publication of several detailed reports on the massacres and violations committed by the regime (see Amnesty International, 1988; Africa Watch, 1990). For example, Sam Gejdenson wrote: ‘We are concerned about the reported suggestions that US military supplies or equipment service have been used to support the reported slaughter of civilians by Somali government troops’ (Gejdenson, 1988). However, the US administration still wanted ‘to prop up the faltering regime by asking Congress to grant $20 million in aid to Somalia … [after] congressional outcry over human rights abuses … led to the freezing of US funds’ (Africa Report, 1989: 8). One State Department official offered the prevailing view in Washington on the Somali crisis: ‘The sign that you give is that you stick by your friends’ (see Feldman, 1988b). In a similarly laconic comment, a US official when asked about the massacres and destruction in the north, and the displacement of the majority of that region’s population, said: ‘in a situation of intense fighting, it would seem inevitable…. On the situation of human rights generally, we have conveyed our concerns privately from time to time’ (see Feldman, 1988a). At one point, the right-wing Heritage Foundation joined in advocating continued aid to the Barre regime (Press, 1990).
Bush abandons Somalia, then sends in the Marines
Eventually, Barre would be jettisoned by his Cold War sustainers, but only after he was ousted in 1991 from his southern capital by USC guerrillas, and Somalia would be abandoned as a derelict former Cold War pawn, torn apart by the bloodshed Barre had unleashed. After the fall of his dictatorship, the civil war would continue, this time pitting the main southern factions against each other, and a great famine would follow in its wake.
Unluckily for Somalia, big-power rivalry had ceased with the fall of the Soviet Union. Washington saw little use for Somali ports and airports, and thus no need to intervene in Somalia’s factional fighting one way or the other. In fact, the value of Somalia in the eyes of the Bush administration fell so low that even a $20 million proposal to send a UN observer mission was rejected by the US – though this was peanuts compared to how much had been lavished on the Barre regime during the heyday of the Cold War. An editorialist from the Toronto Globe and Mail, noting the event, wrote:
The United States, which supported sending 14,000 peacekeepers to the Balkans at a cost of $500-million, has opposed a UN move to send 500 troops to Somalia at a cost of $20-million. The Bush Administration excused this moral discrepancy by arguing that congress would not support another costly peacekeeping mission in an election. Instead of armed peacekeepers, the UN will send a squad of 47 pencil-toting observers to Somalia … to ‘monitor’ the often-breached ceasefire arranged in March between Mogadishu’s two most powerful warlords. (Globe and Mail, 1992)
A few months later, in November 1992, President Bush – flush from his Gulf War victory over Iraq – would try to correct that ‘moral discrepancy’ by announcing that the US would spearhead an international humanitarian intervention in Somalia, known as Operation Restore Hope. No one knows exactly why a huge contingent of Western troops (over 30,000 soldiers) was sent to Somalia. Some claim that the whole operation was linked to Bush’s desire to improve his image before his departure from the White House (De la Gorge, 1992). Or was the operation designed as a combined PR campaign for Bush and the Pentagon (Brogan, 1992)? Or, better yet, was the departing Republican administration booby-trapping its Democratic successor, the Clinton administration (Simons, 1993)? Regardless of the mission’s objectives, by the time Operation Restore Hope was launched, the worst of the famine (confined to the southwest region around Baidoa) was over. The weakest had already died, while food, through ‘the tenacity of a handful of relief organizations, particularly the International Committee of the Red Cross,’ had reached the survivors (see Perlez, 1992).
The operation, which later would be rebundled as a UN mission (UNOSOM), ended in fiasco mainly because of the arrogance of American leaders of the operation – in particular Admiral Jonathan Howe, previously a key figure in the capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama. Admiral Howe wrongly saw General Aidid, one of Mogadishu’s two main militia leaders, as the mission’s sole enemy and a candidate for a Noriega-style capture.13 The arrogance arose in part from the presumption that African situations were easily solved with a show of might, rather than diplomacy. This mindset was evident in the words of General Lewis Mackenzie, a Canadian and one of the talking heads of the time: ‘Unlike Bosnia, Somalia is a relatively easy military problem to deal with. They [UN] have to make the point … and this is the place to make it’ (Bilski and Mackenzie, 1993).
In the first place, sending large Western contingents was misguided. Neither the thousands of young Western soldiers – whose knowledge of Africa was derived from the Tarzan films of their childhood or the famine documentaries of Western charities – nor the Somalis, a conservative Muslim society, had the cultural preparedness to deal with each other. As could only be expected, the mission soldiers killed and raped a great many Somalis. Subsequently, some Western countries, such as Canada, Belgium and Italy, held inquiries into the behavior of their armed personnel in Somalia. But the United States did not – even though it was the US forces, at the instigation of UNOSOM head Admiral Jonathan Howe, the Pentagon, and its commanders in Somalia, that committed the worst excesses, mostly through bombing raids. They also subsequently suffered the largest casualties, as a result of the 3 October raid that led to the death of eighteen US servicemen, as well as to the deaths of hundreds of Somalis, mostly civilians. Overall, the US-led intervention killed as many as 10,000 Somalis before international forces were withdrawn (see Ankomah, 2002).
Avoiding responsibility for the Somalia mess
Eight years after the fact, the fatal October raid in Mogadishu has been fictionalized, with the help of the Pentagon, as an American war-heroism story in the film Black Hawk Down, whose premiere was attended by the Pentagon’s top brass as well as by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It is a story that neatly eliminates the real context of the events, as well as the massacres committed by mission forces during the intervention, particularly the excesses of the US special forces who indiscriminately mowed down men, women, and children by the hundreds on that October day. In itself, the film symbolizes the US’s ultimate self-exculpation of responsibility for Somalia’s tragedy, and for the deaths of thousands of Somalis, at the hands of either the US-supported dictatorship or the predominantly Western forces that took part in the failed intervention.
Today, the major Western actors that aided and abetted the Barre regime view the current Somali situation as a mess entirely created by Somalis. No nation wants to be associated with what went wrong in Somalia in the 1980s. It is easier and more convenient to present the Somalis as ‘barbarians’ or uncivilized tribal people. Hence, America went to Somalia to do ‘God’s work’ in a nation devastated by ‘clan warfare’ and famine (Monbiot, 2002). There might indeed have been elements of ‘God’s work’ in the intervention, but it followed upon a great deal of ‘Devil’s aid’ to Somalia, which Bush Senior knew all about but would not publicly own up to. Others have been outright dismissive of responsibility for the maintenance of Barre’s regime, as evidenced by the following statement from a US diplomat previously stationed in Mogadishu: ‘It’s easy to blame us for all this…. This is a sovereign country we’re talking about. They have chosen to spend [US military aid] that way, to hurt people and destroy their own economy’ (Zeus, 2002). It apparently never occurred to this source that when the sovereignty of a people has been hijacked by a dictator, it makes no moral sense to prolong that people’s agony by providing the dictator with the means – arms and money – to continue his dictatorship.14
However, while administration and State Department officials of the time are eager to disclaim all guilt for the Somali situation, some law-makers and members of the public in the US have rejected such views:
There is widespread understanding among those familiar with Somalia that had the US 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 US 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.’ (Zeus, 2002)
It is true that no Western leader specifically instructed Barre to use the arms provided to his regime to kill his own people. However, it remains a tenet of conventional jurisprudence that if someone aids and abets a person intent on killing, then that person can be considered an accessory to the crime. There is no doubt that the Barre regime was well known for the summary killing of civilians and for mass murders. With that knowledge, the military and financial support extended by successive US administrations and their allies to the Barre regime must be considered indefensible.
At this point, it is worth asking what, if anything, the West can do to offer redress for Somalia’s fatal encounter with Cold War politics. It is unlikely that we can expect any reparations, or even meaningful apologies, from the great powers. After all, the deaths of Third World peoples are considered to lack ‘political and media value in the West,’ the victims being depicted as ‘unpeople’ (Pilger, 2002). And, as such, Somalis are probably one of the most significant ‘unpeoples’ of our time, as Afghans are today, or the Vietnamese were yesterday. Second, US administrations and their Western allies can always claim that they only helped to maintain the ‘Somali Hitler’ – they did not create him. Nonetheless, there are a number of things that the West, and in particular the US, could do for the sake of redress:
1.Launch an inquiry The US Congress should inquire into the assumptions that led a great democracy to divert taxpayers’ money to a murderous regime such as Barre’s in order that, in the future, the earnings of the working mothers and fathers of America will not be used to bolster a dictatorship that engages in the wholesale murder of its citizens. This would also help avoid the need to send young Americans to die in foreign interventions that would have been unnecessary in the absence of such support for dictatorial figures.
2.Help with mine clearance The north, where the Barre regime planted most of its mines, is Africa’s most heavily mined region, laced with explosive devices from the score of nations that provided assistance to Barre’s regime. International assistance could greatly reduce this enduring scourge (Press, 1993).
3.Lift immediately the inhuman strangulation that the Bush Junior administration has slapped on Somalia’s economy through the freezing of the assets of its major banking enterprise and biggest private employer, Al-Bakarat – for no other reason than Al-Bakarat’s alleged use as a conduit of money for a terror group based in Afghanistan. As is widely known, American banking companies such as Western Union or City Bank may very well have been used for the same purposes – perhaps to an even greater extent, since they have a more substantial worldwide presence than Al-Barakat, a company that caters only to Somalis. Months later, proof of a terrorist link has still not been produced by the US administration. According to a statement by a senior American official, the whole aim of the assault on Al-Barakat and the impoverished Somali economy was to ‘make a splash’ in the US media (Golden, 2002), and hence in the minds of American voters. It did not matter to administration officials that this bank was a lifeline for thousands of destitute Somalis who depended on the remittances of relatives abroad.
4.Bring to trial Somali war criminals, some of whom received officer training in the US, along with the high officials of the Barre regime that currently reside in the United States. This latter group includes Barre’s number two, General Samater, who now leads a cozy life in Virginia. Law-enforcement efforts might better be directed at such figures, rather than towards the arrest and deportation (on misdemeanor or immigration charges) of Somali immigrants working in the US.
5.Erase the billions of dollars in loans that were given to the Barre regime and used either to enrich its officials or to buy weapons to kill innocent Somalis. Should Somali families continue to pay for the bullets and shells that killed their loved ones?
It is hard to believe that any of these demands would be seriously entertained by Western administrations, least of all by the current Bush administration. President Bush and his team appear more concerned with threatening yet another intervention in Somalia, and many other places besides, all in the name of a new ‘colder war’ aimed at fuzzy and sometimes imaginary enemies in, mostly, Muslim countries of the Third World.15 A more realistic idea might be for Somalis to appeal to the public in Western countries to head off another superpower intervention, and to encourage the provision of people-to-people assistance aimed at building, not destroying, a viable infrastructure for Somalis.
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