From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2008 - 13:45:33 EDT
MEDIA, WHERE ART THOU: The Forgotten: Somalia's American-Made Road to
Perdition by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 In the absence of media interest and clarification,
both the would-be presidents seem to have made it clear that in their
administrations it will be business as usual for Somalia – the blood-soaked
business of empire.
The on-going, American-backed atrocity continues to rage in Somalia, where
George W. Bush has launched a third "regime change" front in his global
Terror War, with the help of one of his many pet dictators, Meles Zenawi of
Ethiopia.
This week the head of the UN Development Program in Somalia, Osman Ali
Ahmed, was shot dead as he left evening prayers at a mosque near his home in
Mogadishu. The Bush Administration immediately blamed insurgent factions
fighting against the Ethiopian-imposed government; insurgent leaders
immediately denied the charge: "All the Mujahedeen are not behind his
killing and it is not becoming of them to kill important persons who help
the Somali people on whose behalf we are fighting," said a spokesman for one
of the Islamist factions opposed to the Ethiopian-imposed government.
Whoever carried out the killing was obviously trying to foment more chaos in
the shattered land and derail the fraught and fragile peace process, which
has as one of its ultimate goals the withdrawal of Bush's Ethiopian proxy
army.
The brutal conflict in Somalia – which has seen the U.S. bombing of fleeing
civilians, "renditions" of innocent refugees to Ethiopia's torture dens, the
usual "collateral damage" from botched "targeted assassinations" by American
forces and the cheerfully admitted use of American death squads to "mop up"
after covert ops – has been almost entirely ignored by the U.S. media and
political establishments. [For copious links to these and other aspects of
the U.S. involvement in Somalia, see Willing Executioners: America's
Bipartisan Atrocity Deepens in Somalia.] It has not figured in the U.S.
presidential contest at all; neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is in the
least bit troubled by this killing spree on the imperial frontier.
Why should they be? After all, both men have pledged to continue the even
larger Terror War atrocity in Iraq – McCain more forthrightly, Obama by
stealth. The Democratic nominee's pledge to "end the war" is based on a
"withdrawal" plan that could leave a "residual force" of up to 80,000
American troops in the conquered land, training Iraqi security forces,
carrying out "counter-terrorism" operations, and providing "force
protection" for American interests. Obama has also noted that "we've got to
make sure that Iraq is stable" before any large-scale pullout: a stance
which is a virtual guarantee of a long-term, major American military
presence, given the vast societal, cultural and civic ruin the American war
of aggression has wrought in Iraq. Thus we can see that despite all the
partisan rhetoric and heated disputes over this or that detail, there is, at
bottom, a bipartisan consensus in Washington for prolonging the war crime in
Iraq in one form or another. How then can we expect anything different for
the scorned and abandoned people of Somalia – dying by the thousands and
displaced by the millions in a "sideshow" not worth mentioning?
Mike Whitney has an excellent round-up of recent developments in Somalia,
along with relevant background, in a very important article that has
appeared at CounterPunch
<http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney07082008.html>and at one of our
associated websites, Pacific
Free Press <http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2818/1/>. Among many
chilling facts and sharp insights, Whitney notes:
Heavy fighting and artillery fire have reduced large parts of Mogadishu to
rubble. More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave the capital with
nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Entire districts have
been evacuated and turned into ghost towns. The main hospital has been
bombed and is no longer taking patients. Ethiopian snipers are perched atop
rooftops across the city. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in the
south in tent cities without sufficient food, clean water or medical
supplies. It is the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa today; a man-made
Hell entirely conjured up in Washington.
Just weeks ago, Amnesty International reported that it had heard many
accounts that Ethiopian troops were "slaughtering (Somalis) like goats." In
one case, "a young child's throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of
the child's mother."
In another Democracy Now interview, Abdi Samatar, professor of Global
Studies at the University of Minnesota, had this to say:
The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has
destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the
population have built without the government for the last fifteen years. And
the militia that are supposed to protect the population have been looting
shops. For instance, the Bakara market, which is the largest market in
Mogadishu, has been looted repeatedly by the militias of the so-called
Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by Ethiopian troops.
And the new prime minister of Somalia, Mr. Hassan Nur Hussein, has himself
announced in the BBC that it was his militias that—who have looted this
place. So what you have is a population that's hit from both sides: on one
side, by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government,
which is recognized by the United States, and on the other side, by the
Ethiopian invaders who seem to be bent on ensuring that they break the will
of the people to resist as free people in their own country.... What you
have is really terror in the worst sense of the word, a million people have
been displaced that the Ethiopians have been denying humanitarian aid, and
the United States which seems to just watch and let it happen.
It's like there's has been a calculated decision made somewhere in the
world, maybe in Washington, maybe in Addis Ababa, maybe in Mogadishu itself,
to starve these people until they submit themselves to the whims of the
American military and the Ethiopians, who are acting on their behalf.
Calculated decisions have indeed been made to consign the Somali people to
perdition. And they are still being made, in Washington, Addis Ababa – and
in Chicago and Arizona, where the two would-be presidents have made it clear
that in their administrations it will be business as usual for Somalia – the
blood-soaked business of empire.
And that's no-change you can believe in.
------------------------------
[image: photo of Chris Floyd]Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for
more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia
for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford
University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief
editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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