by John Pilger
The severity of the drought in Somalia was known to the US and other Western governments as long ago as mid-1991, when satellite evidence left no doubt about what was coming. They, and the international organisations they effectively control, did nothing until, as with Ethiopia in the 1980s, disturbing television images exposed their culpable inaction. Until then, according to the Congressional watchdog, the General Accounting Office, the US government had allowed its client regime in Somalia, the murderous dictatorship of Mohammed Siad Barre, to steal American-donated food and divert it from the starving to the army and profiteers. Once Barre had fled Mogadishu, the US, according to the last American ambassador, ‘turned out the light, closed the door and forgot about Somalia’.59
Not quite. The Bush administration ran a ‘rat line’ for the war criminals of Siad Barre’s regime. According to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report, Washington dispensed tourist visas and easy passages to Canada for Somali officers who had trained at Fort Leavenworth in the mid-1980s, including one who allegedly ordered the execution of 120 villagers.
At the same time, Bush administration officials vigorously discouraged donors from helping Somalia, regardless of reports that up to 2,000 Somalis were dying every day. In 1992, Bush withheld American food aid for two straight months – right to August 13 when, as the underdog in a presidential election campaign, he mounted the podium at the Republican Party convention and announced to his prime-time audience that ‘starvation in Somalia is a major human tragedy’ and he, George Bush, would ensure that the US ‘overcame the obstacles’ in getting food to ‘those who desperately need it’.60
Within weeks of a US food airlift getting underway, most of its cargo planes were grounded after the wing of one of them was hit by a bullet: a relatively minor occupational hazard that did not deter private donors. In any case, it was now September 18; the last phase of the presidential campaign was underway and, to no one’s surprise, the ‘major human tragedy’ in Somalia was no longer an issue. Somalis could go on starving until it was time to use them again.
When the time came, just before Christmas, the media images of Operation Restore Hope were almost perfect. The marines were greeted by massed television cameras and satellite dishes and looked every bit like the cavalry coming to the rescue. They were, as one American TV commentator put it, ‘a sight for sore eyes back home’. This was also true in this country, notably among liberal opinion. The American intervention, argued an editorial in the New Statesman, had ‘proved remarkably successful . . . for once, the US did not permit either free-market prejudices or “strategic” interests to determine its foreign policy.’61 Thus, the ‘good guys’ and their ‘new world order’ were back on the road to redemption, regardless of the historical truth of every American intervention in the developing world this century.
In Somalia, the marines and the media have no ideal enemy. Like the British in pith helmets, they are facing amorphous ‘gangs’ of natives led by ‘warlords’. On the television screen, Somalis are dehumanised. There are no good Somalis, no wise Somalis, no professional and organised Somalis. There are only those ‘warlords’ and their ‘gunmen’ and their pathetic victims.
There have been few serious attempts to explain that the divisions and hatred between Somalis are largely the product of European colonialism and of the Cold War battlefield imposed on Somalia by the superpowers. Somalis share a common language and religion and have much more in common than most peoples of Africa. In the nineteenth century, they were divided between British Somaliland, Italian Somalia, French Djibouti and Ethiopian Ogaden. Others were incorporated into the British colony of Kenya. Tens of thousands of people were handed from one power to another. ‘They may be made’, wrote a British colonial official, ‘to hate each other and thereby good governance is ensured.’62 Siad Barre was the beneficiary of this, playing one group against another with the backing first of the Soviet Union, then of the United States, which flooded the country with modern weapons.
Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, formerly of the human rights organisation Africa Watch, wrote recently in the Guardian: ‘US military intervention in Somalia has followed a gross misrepresentation of the situation in the country.’ They reported that ‘three-quarters of the country is relatively peaceful, with civil structures in place’, and the famine confined to scattered rural pockets. ‘Most of the food is not looted,’ they wrote. ‘Save the Children Fund has distributed 4,000 tons in Mogadishu without losing a single bag. Other agencies that work closely with Somalia suffer rates of 2–10 per cent, because they consult closely with Somali elders and humanitarian workers.’63
Omaar and de Waal wrote that where there was a major problem with starvation is Bardera, which the forces of General Mohammed Siad Hersi Morgan controlled. Morgan is the son-in-law of Siad Barre. His forces are armed and trained by Kenya, another US client. Had Bush been serious about getting supplies through, he had only to intervene with Daniel Arap Moi in Nairobi. ‘There has been nothing in the way of attempts to negotiate settlements in comparison with, say, Yugoslavia,’ wrote Omaar and de Waal. ‘The one serious attempt – by the former UN special envoy Mohammed Sahnoun – was meeting with remarkable success. Sahnoun was forced to resign in October because of his outspoken criticism of the UN’s dismal failure in Somalia.’64
As for Operation Restore Hope, reported Mark Hubard in the Guardian, no American food has arrived ‘to date’ and ORH ‘is a farce which has cost the American taxpayer $400 million’, and requires ‘media complicity’ in order to ‘replace the Somali nightmare with a new array of fantasies to keep reality at bay’.65
Last week the Economic Commission on Africa reported on the reality. The growing impoverishment of Africans was of only ‘marginal interest’ to the West, said the report; and African countries still gave more hard currency to the West, in debt service, than they received in aid.66
In the meantime, the stated justification for the United States remaining in Somalia is the pursuit of General Mohammed Farah Aidid, the ‘warlord’ elevated to international demon status. (Previous such demons include Noriega, Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.) ‘A man may smile and be a villain,’ offered the Observer, in a profile of Aidid. ‘Soft-spoken, courteous, balding, with greying hair and a pot belly, Aidid looks and sounds more like a successful businessman than the man the United Nations accuses of crimes against humanity.’ According to the Observer, this demon ‘is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, through murder or as a result of the famine he helped to create’.67
The wonderful thing about accredited demons is that you can say virtually anything about them and it is unlikely you will hear from Sue, Grabbit and Run. Inexplicably, Aidid’s unique ‘war crimes’ were not mentioned in March 1992 when, in Addis Ababa, he signed a UN-sponsored plan for peace and the reconstruction of Somalia. He was then merely ‘one of the leaders of Somalia’s fifteen factions’. Why is he now being singled out for disarmament and trial before the world? And what is to become of the other ‘warlords’? Will they also be pursued by American ‘gunships’ firing missiles at hospitals and spraying 18,000 rounds a minute at ungrateful natives, including women and children?
Almost certainly not. Demonology is made for one at a time. And spreading the blame can only make difficult the task of the public relations managers. Facts may emerge that those ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ died for reasons other than the crimes of General Aidid – such as the actions of the imperial power, already outlined, and its hold over the United Nations.
There was a glimpse of this recently when a British aid worker in Somalia, Susan Quick, described how the UN had pushed aside the voluntary workers, in ‘blatant violation of all the principles of relief assistance’. She wrote: ‘The UN has distributed food in only a handful of sites in a manner likely to increase tension.’ She also pointed out that most Somalis being disarmed by the UN were those guarding aid agencies and food supplies.68
Of course George Bush’s ‘hum
anitarian intervention’ has a significance that goes far beyond a media stunt and is in keeping with radical policy and organisational changes at the United Nations that have seen the Security Council become an instrument of American power since the end of the Cold War. The term ‘humanitarian intervention’ is merely the latest, preferred euphemism for foreign intervention, without regard to the fact that the UN Charter specifically forbids any violation of national sovereignty. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who is Washington-approved, has allowed the White House to dictate the reorganisation of the world body down to the appointment of its most senior executives. He appointed Ronald Reagan’s attorney-general, Richard Thornburgh, as head of administration. It was Thornburgh who gave the US the ‘legal right’ to kidnap foreign nationals and who is in charge of a programme of ‘reform’ at the UN, inspired by the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation. Thus, it now matters not what the UN Charter says, but what Augustus in Washington wants.
The bloody coup ending democracy in Haiti in 1991 demonstrated this. In the Security Council, the French argued that Haiti deserved ‘humanitarian intervention’ by the UN. They won considerable support, though not from the US. ‘The nature of the discussion’, wrote the UN specialist Phyllis Bennis, ‘made clear that potential targets were more likely to be those already demonised by the west: Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, etc. The coup in Haiti was not on the agenda.’69 So the US would decide.
The French later proposed a multinational command for the UN’s Military Staff Committee, who would carry out future ‘humanitarian interventions’. They were told firmly that US forces, when playing a major part, would be answerable only to the Pentagon. The point had been made dramatically at the start of the Gulf War. When the bombing of Baghdad began on January 16, 1991, members of the Security Council emerged from the chamber unaware of what had been unleashed in their name.
Elsewhere in the developing world, there is an unmistakable pattern of American intervention, legitimised by the UN. In Cambodia, the UN’s biggest operation, described as a ‘model for the world’, the US has reimposed its will on Indo-China, using the Khmer Rouge and its US-funded allies as a means of creating an acceptable regime and continuing to destabilise Vietnam, despite lifting the trade embargo.
In Angola, UN-monitored elections produced the ‘wrong’ winner in the MPLA, which is not forgiven for its ties with the former communist bloc. The MPLA won in spite of American and tacit UN support for Jonas Savimbi, Washington’s oldest Cold War client in Africa, who lost the election. Now, Washington is withholding diplomatic recognition, while Boutros-Ghali pressures the democratically elected former rebel leader José Eduardo dos Santos to accommodate Savimbi and Unita in his government. Described by US officials as ‘power sharing’ and an ‘acceptable solution’, this is the equivalent of Clinton being forced to bring Bush into his cabinet.70 Perhaps it is a glimpse of future events in South Africa, should the African National Congress win outright power at the ballot box. Watch as ‘power sharing’ with the Nationalists and Inkatha is promoted as the only ‘acceptable solution’ following elections that do not bring instant ‘peace’ to the country.
Europe is quite a different matter. The United States has minimal interest in a small, weak Balkan state like Bosnia, whose birth it did not attend or approve. Secretary of State Eagleburger’s call for a UN tribunal to punish Serbia’s ‘war criminals’ should be set against its silence on the punishment of Pol Pot and his fellow genocidists, who have enjoyed UN (and US) protection.
A rare dissenting voice from within the UN was heard recently when Erskine Childers visited London. Until his retirement in 1989, Childers was senior adviser to the director-general for development and economic co-operation. He described ‘the dishonesty, the intimidation and the horrifying military force used against Iraq’. In calling for ‘an end to the double standards and hypocrisy with which powerful governments have invoked UN principles’, he said it was ‘beyond tolerance to allow Israel to invade, annex, carry out mass deportations, violate Geneva conventions and refuse to comply with hundreds of UN resolutions without even a threat of sanctions’.71
Not surprisingly, none of this has provoked official or media interest. Parliament has held only one debate on the United Nations in twenty years; and in the public ‘debate’ about ‘humanitarian intervention’ the facts about the American takeover at the UN are beyond the pale.
President Clinton has been quick to make use of the Americanised United Nations that Bush left him. His first bold foreign policy decision was to ignore the UN charter and break international law by denying thousands of Haitians free passage on the open seas. Instead, US ships will return them to a vicious regime that, having overthrown democracy, is about to get £50 million from Washington. The victims are those who took to their boats only after Clinton promised in his election campaign to help and protect them. Clinton now says his decision to send them back is to prevent a ‘humanitarian tragedy’ – a term that comes from the same Orwellian glossary as ‘humanitarian intervention’.72
Clinton also wants to ‘institutionalise’ the UN’s success in the Gulf War. He says he likes the idea, for example, of a ‘UN rapid deployment force, that could be used for purposes beyond traditional peacekeeping, such as standing guard at the borders of countries threatened by aggression, preventing attacks on civilians, providing humanitarian relief’.73
It was this last category of ‘humanitarian relief’ that moved Henry Kissinger to write some remarkable words recently, which the Guardian published. The ‘objective’ in Somalia is ‘noble’, he began. ‘In fact, moral purpose has motivated every American war this century . . . The new approach [in Somalia] claims an extension in the reach of morality . . . “Humanitarian intervention” asserts that moral and humane concerns are so much a part of American life that not only treasure but lives must be risked to vindicate them; in their absence, American life would have lost some meaning. No other nation has ever put forward such a set of propositions . . .’74
The author of this tripe was responsible for the ‘secret bombing’ of Cambodia during which American pilots falsified their logs in order to fly B52 bombers, in defiance of Congress, over a small, neutral peasant country and drop the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of modern bombardment. Between 1969 and 1975, three-quarters of a million people were killed. Kissinger was also deeply involved in the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile.
That Kissinger’s views should have been sought at all demonstrates the extent to which the hagiographers of the old imperialism and the apologists of the new retain credibility, using and twisting the words of life, words like ‘morality’ and ‘humanitarianism’. Just as there is now virtually no mainstream debate of difference between ‘democracy’ and the ‘free market’, there may be soon no debate of difference between ‘intervention’, whatever its semantic mask, and imperialism, a non-word in today’s vocabulary of control.
In the Observer last week, Michael Ignatieff introduced his readers to what he called ‘liberal intervention’. ‘We are moving towards a new world,’ he wrote, ‘in which the international community engages itself to protect minorities from majorities, to feed the starving and to enforce peace in case of civil strife.’75
This is the same American-driven and bribed ‘international community’ that oversaw the slaughter of some 200,000 people in Iraq, of whom many, if not most, were the very minorities whom the interventionists claimed they were ‘helping’. That aside, the ‘we’ is important here, for it assumes and emphasises the artificial division in humanity that was always and remains the essence of imperialism, and the antithesis of true internationalism.
January – August 1993
VI
EAST TIMOR
BORN IN TEARS
AT STANFORDS IN London’s Covent Garden, reputedly the best map shop in the world, I asked for a map of the island of Timor. �
�Timor?’ said a hesitant sales assistant. ‘Would you please come with me?’ We crossed the floor and stood staring at shelves marked ‘South East Asia’. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘where exactly is it?’
‘Just north of Australia.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ After a search, all he could find was an aeronautical map with large blank areas stamped ‘Relief Data Incomplete’. More apologies. ‘I have never been asked for Timor,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that extraordinary?’
Such is the depth of the silence that has enveloped Timor, or specifically East Timor, the part of the island under an illegal Indonesian occupation since 1975. Other places on the planet may seem more remote; none has been as defiled and abused by murderous forces or as abandoned by the ‘international community’, whose principals are complicit in one of the great, unrecognised crimes of the twentieth century. I write that carefully; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator, Suharto, and his fellow generals have killed in East Timor.
James Dunn, the former Australian consul in East Timor and adviser to the Australian Parliament, has made a study of census statistics since the Indonesians invaded. ‘Before the invasion,’ he told me, ‘East Timor had a population of 688,000, which was growing at just on 2 per cent per annum. Assuming it didn’t grow any faster, the population today ought to be 980,000 or more, almost a million people. If you look at the recent Indonesian census, the Timorese population is probably 650,000. That means it’s actually less than it was eighteen years ago. I don’t think there is any case in post-World War Two history where such a decline of population has occurred in these circumstances. It’s quite incredible; it’s worse than Cambodia and Ethiopia.’1