US vies for foothold in Somalia

Norman Traub

Manoeuvring for a strategic foothold in Somalia, the US is backing Ethiopian forces occupying Somalia in their latest terror campaign against civilians.

It was predictable that the armed resistance against Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia last December with the support of the US would continue. The response of the Ethiopian army and the warlords of the transitional Somali government (TFG) has been to attack the civilian population. They have been engaged in vicious military assaults against the residents of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

Ethiopian tanks and aircraft have indiscriminately attacked civilian targets. Thousands of people have been killed and 340,000, more than a third of the civilian population, have fled in the past three months. “At least half the capital is deserted, slowly turning it into a ghost city” the UN refugee agency said. This is a relentless drive to terrify civilians from whose ranks fighters are recruited to resist the occupation.

Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia followed the takeover of the capital Mogadishu by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) earlier last year. The ICU had restored peace and security to the country for the first time since 1991, - a fact confirmed by every independent agency.

Despite this, last December the US pressured the UN Security Council into passing a resolution linking the ICU to international terrorism. The resolution authorised a peacekeeping force to protect the TFG, and “restore peace and stability”. In effect it contravened the UN charter itself because it made the Security Council the aggressor by turning a peaceful situation into war.

The subsequent invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia and direct US involvement in the war, bombing Somali villages and using US naval forces to prevent resistance fighters from fleeing, was a clear violation of international law.

Violence including kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, prisons and large numbers of “disappeared”, is being unleashed against one of the most impoverished peoples by the world’s only superpower and its client state. Yet there is a deafening silence among the big and not so big powers. As the Royal Institute of International Affairs puts it: “...genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actors-especially Ethiopia and the United States”.

The US has been concerned for some time to obtain a foothold in Somalia because of its strategic importance. The country is adjacent to Djibouti, where the US has a military base and from where it oversees shipping lanes carrying a quarter of the world’s oil cargoes. It was from the Djibouti base that an American Air Force AC-130 jet took off to bomb villages in Somalia.

All Washington’s efforts in this region have been directed at preventing the emergence of an independent government in Somalia. Ethiopia, while clearly under the jurisdiction of the US in the invasion of Somalia, also has its own agenda. It has long nursed ambitions to annex Somalia, in particular because this would provide it with vital access to the sea.

The interior minister of the transitional Somali government was recently quoted as saying “the borders between Somalia and Ethiopia will be eradicated and both countries will be one unified nation with one passport, one army and one economy”. Such an endorsement of Ethiopia’s territorial expansionist plans is anathema to the majority of Somalis.

Articles in newspapers across the African continent as well as in African-American media have been universal in their condemnation of both Ethiopia and the US. They warn that the presence of the Ethiopian troops in Somalia and the US base in Djibouti are further destabilising this region of Africa.

At the World Social Forum in Kenya in January there were demonstrations against Ethiopia’s invasion and occupation of Somalia and the US bombing campaign. The World Social Forum appealed for solidarity with the struggles of the African people against neo-liberalism, imperialist military bases and instigated wars in Africa.