Violence in Somalia has created a humanitarian crisis without equal

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2217601,00.html

A cruelty the world ignores


Violence in Somalia has created a humanitarian crisis without equal, but it is being barely noticed

Sally Healy
Tuesday November 27, 2007
The Guardian


As tens of thousands more frightened and exhausted people fled the terrors of Mogadishu last week, a Somali community leader condemned the international community "for watching the cruelty in Somalia like a film and not bothering to help". He was mistaken. The international community has barely been watching the cruelty in Somalia at all.

Life in Mogadishu has become even more intolerable since Ethiopia intervened last Christmas to install the transitional government of President Abdullahi Yusuf. Ethiopia had been alarmed by the aggressive rhetoric of the Islamic Courts government that had taken over the Somali capital. It had seen off the warlords and brought unprecedented order to Mogadishu. But threats of jihad against its powerful neighbour provoked a muscular response. The US stood by its regional ally, declaring that Somalia must not become a terrorist haven, and mounting a missile attack on the Islamist forces for good measure.

The Ethiopians calculated a lesser risk in having Yusuf in charge. Having installed him, they promised to withdraw quickly, agreeing to remain only while an African peacekeeping force was mounted. Lord Triesman, the minister for Africa, praised Ethiopia for creating conditions for peace and stability. British ministers were pleased to describe the new state of affairs as a window of opportunity for Somalia.

The optimism rested on highly dubious assumptions. It presupposed that the transitional government possessed legitimacy, and had the capacity to govern. It also assumed too easily that an African peacekeeping force would materialise and Ethiopian forces would leave. None of this has come to pass.

The core problem was that Somalis everywhere were appalled to see Ethiopian troops on the streets of their capital. What kind of government, they asked, needed the protection of a foreign force against its own citizens? Opposition to the Ethiopian military presence soon manifested itself and an insurgency was born.







War is already opened on four fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iran.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01082007.html

....

Neoconservatives have called for World War IV against Islam. In Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz called for the cultural genocide of Islamic peoples. The war is already opened on four fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iran.

The Bush administration has used its Ethiopian proxies to overthrow the Somalian Muslims who overthrew the warlords who drove the US from Somalia. The US Navy and US intelligence are actively engaged with the Ethiopian troops in efforts to hunt down and capture or kill the Somalian Muslims. US Embasy spokesman Robert Kerr in Nairobi said that the US has the right to pursue Somalia's Islamists as part of the war on terror.

For at least a year the Bush administration has been fomenting and financing terrorist groups within Iran. Seymour Hersh and former CIA officials have exposed the Bush administration's support of ethnic-minority groups within Iran that are on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Last April US Representative Dennis Kucinich wrote a detailed letter to President Bush about US interference in Iran's internal affairs. He received no reply.





We're At War With Somalia?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1026383

[seemslikeadream]

1. U.S-Instigated War Brings Mass Death to Somalia

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=449&Itemid=1

American foreign policy is the direct cause of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia - the worst in all of Africa, according to United Nations officials. That's why, until recent days, U.S. corporate media said little or nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Somalis - now numbering at least half a million - who face death by starvation and disease because of a war instigated and facilitated by Washington. The corporate press methodically avoid - and thereby, cover up - stories that contradict the mythical American narrative: that the U.S. means to do good in the world, and only does wrong by mistake.

The horrific wrong inflicted on Somalia was absolutely premeditated, an integral aspect of American plans to bring the bogus "war on terror" to Africa, as a cover to dominate the continent and its wealth. Ever since the end of formal European colonialism in Africa, U.S. policy has been to spread chaos wherever Washington failed to impose rule by its own favored strongmen. When Muslim groups early last year subdued the warlords of Somalia - a nation that is 99 percent Muslim - a semblance of peace and at least some hope for the future took root. By all accounts, life was getting back to something like "normal" for a people that had known only brutal warfare since 1991. Such a peace was unacceptable to George Bush's crew, who whipped up an hysteria in the United States, claiming Al Qaida was establishing a base in Somalia, and urged the regime in neighboring Ethiopia, Somalia's historical rival, to attack last December.

"U.S. policy has been to spread chaos wherever Washington failed to impose rule by its own favored strongmen."

The U.S. worked hand in hand with the Ethiopian invaders at every level of the Ethiopian military, while U.S. jets relentlessly wreaked terror from the air. Once the Ethiopians had planted themselves and their puppet Somali "government" in the capital, Mogadishu, the Americans sent their other African proxies, the Ugandan military, to make up most of the puny African "peacekeeping" force in Somalia. The Somali resistance to the Ethiopian invasion consider the African peacekeepers in Mogadishu to be agents of the U.S. - and, regarding the Ugandans, they are right.

If there were ever a formula for bloody and protracted war in Somalia, it is Ethiopian occupation, which is already unifying diverse elements of the Somali population in resistance. The war will also destabilize Ethiopia, which is more than a third Muslim and home to many peoples that oppose the dictatorial regime in Addis Ababa. If the rulers of the United States were searching for a plan that would kill hundreds of thousands of Africans, they have found it. This time, however, as in Iraq, Washington has created more chaos than it can handle.

[DCKit]

2. Didn't they recently find oil there as well, or do we just need the space for some new bases? n/t

[seemslikeadream]

3. The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon's now operational plan to build a

new 'Africa Command to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed 'Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda.'

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768

[seemslikeadream]

4. Oil hunting in Somalia part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvXJGx9LbAo



http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_822.shtml
US covert operations underway in Somalia; resource conflict escalates over Horn of Africa
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor


May 22, 2006


According to a May 16 report in the Washington Post, US analysts of Africa policy and officials of Somalia’s interim government say that the Bush administration is secretly supporting secular Somali warlords, whose groups are battling Islamic groups for control of Mogadishu.

While the Bush administration has continued to dodge questions about what appear to be “classic” covert operations (similar to those taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, etc.), Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari has unequivocally declared “the US government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that. This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war.”

Somalia is considered a "terrorist haven," as well as a potential “hotbed of al Qaeda activity.” It is no surprise that in recent press conferences, new White House spokesman and propaganda mouthpiece (former Fox News pundit) Tony Snow repeatedly referred to “al Qaeda terrorists.”

A senior US intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post article (who asked not to be named) says that Somalia presents “a classic ‘enemy of our enemy’ situation” (but “not an al Qaeda safe haven yet”), while former Clinton administration Africa specialist John Prendergast (now a senior advisor for the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group think tank) notes that “the US relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two" .”

Competing Geostrategic and Energy Interests in Somalia

[sam sarrha]

5. this is china's genocide... NOT it's worst however, China has murdered ~1,250,000 Tibetans thru

starvation, executions, forced labor death camps, destruction of housing in Himalayan winters.

our ships were recently turned away from safe harbor in 40 foot sea's in a terrible Typhoon.. because the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, was honored recently in this country. china and our own country has done a remarkable job hiding the on going genocide in Tibet

Somalia is a particularly wickedly brutal situation used to clear regional populations from oil rich lands for the purpose of selling the oil to china.

however Tibet was also cleared of regional populations directly by the Chinese army. Tibet is a nation the size of western Europe, with unimaginable mineral wealth.. that genocide in Tibet is still going on.

we are next..