By Jay Janson
14 October, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
Equivalent shock for Kenyans as 9/11 was for Americans. Background of these two massacres are pathetically similar. Both were blowback on US genocidal foreign policy. Osama bin Laden in his 2002 Letter to Americans, included “attacks on Muslims in Somalia” in his list of reasons for the al Qaeda 9/11 attack. Synopsis, chronology of US genocide in Somalia given. Every American should consider his or her possible involvement.
For Kenya, with a population about the same as California, the September shopping mall massacre must have been nearly an equivalent shock for Kenyans as the much deadlier 9/11 terrorist attack was for the much larger American population. The background of these two massacres are pathetically similar. They were both blowback on US genocidal foreign policy. In fact Osama bin Laden in his 2002 Letter to Americans, included “attacks on Muslims in Somalia” in his list of reasons for the al Qaeda 9/11 attack. This article will seek to explain, how most Americans and citizens of other NATO nations have some degree of involvement in the genocidal origin of this beastly, insane, barbaric, unforgivable, murderous blowback terror within a Nairobi shopping mall.
Also, why this massacre terror attack reprisal for Kenya’s deadly invasion of Somalia has received a hundred times more US media cartel news coverage than the daily and often larger massacres going on in Iraq every month for years that receive only passing mention. The massacres of Shiites in Iran’s neighbor Iraq’s Shiite government serve the same colonial interests as the US backed opposition massacring to topple the Shiite government of Syria, whereas terror attacks against US allies in reprisal for colonially sponsored state terror are to be more widely condemned as grist for the heralded euphemistic “War on Terror.” Wall Street’s CIA has used the al Qaeda it helped create and fund more often than the al Qaeda has attacked the US or the US has had al Qaeda bombed.[1]
Somalia being from where most of the Kenyan Shopping Mall murderers came from, we begin with an overlook chronology of early US crimes against peace in Somalia, and a chronology of subsequent years of genocidal crimes, that have resulted in a million of Somali men, women and children losing their lives for the interests of capital accumulation by neo-colonialist predatory speculative investment banking.
A synopsis of American and European genocidal policies and actions in Somalia:
– When Fascist Italy invaded Somalia in 1935, the ‘fair minded’ peace guardian white Colonial Powers run League of Nations embargoed all arms shipments to both sides, which of course was no brake on well arms stocked Italy, but made it impossible for Somalia to buy arms to defend against Italian genocide.
Somali lives by uncounted thousands were sacrificed as their country after independence was allowed, as Somalia was used as a back-and-forth pawn during the ‘cold’ war between the capitalist colonial powers and communist party run socialist USSR.[2]
During the 1980s, the US backed a brutal dictatorship without regard to great starvation. 300,000 Somalis, mostly children died. [3]
In 1992 US Marines and Rangers killed many Somalis before being pulled out of danger after a lost battle since propagated as another case of American good guys in the movie Blackhawk Down .[4]
Over the next seven years, the US government attempts overtly and covertly with funding and arming and ‘diplomatic’ maneuvering to keep the warlord most cooperative for US investment banking interests in power, or at least in power enough to prevent a non-cooperative Somali-for-Somali-interests government from forming (standard US foreign policy and that of all colonial and neo-colonial powers) – life costing internecine wars between warlords – some of the very warlords that targeted US forces in 1992-93.
– 1991-1999, After the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, a system of sharia-based Islamic courts had become the main judicial system, funded through fees paid by litigants. Over time the courts began to offer other services such as education and health care. The courts also acted as local police forces, being paid by local businesses to reduce crime. The Islamic courts took on the responsibility for halting robberies and drug-dealing, as well as stopping the showing of what pornographic films in local movie houses. Somalia is almost entirely Muslim, and these institutions initially had wide public support. They soon saw the sense in working together through a joint committee to promote security. In 1999 the group began to assert its authority. The courts in Somalia formed a union of Islamic courts, partly to consolidate resources and power and partly to aid in handing down decisions across, rather than within, clan lines. The judges of the various courts of clans represented a wide spread of factions within Islamic scholarship from Liberal to Salafist, Salfi’i and Sufi. [ ICU, Wikipedia ]
In 2000, a group of businessmen in Mogadishu having enough of deadly violence, social degradation and the economy’s disruption, formed the Islamic Courts Government Movement, to bring the law down on the chaotic situation often sought by powerful criminal overseas investors by funding Somali warlords. Supporters of the Islamic courts and other institutions united to form the ICUP, an armed militia. In April they took control of the main market in Mogadishu and, in July, captured the road from Mogadishu to Afgoi. Their system of government, controlled by judges, is known as a krytocracy. Christian Science Monitor, 7/13/1999, “The bandits who presided over the treacherous road from Mogadishu to Afgoi were gone. The pick-up trucks packed with gun-brandishing youths who manned some 50 roadblocks along the 20-mile stretch were nonexistent. The combined militia forces of five Islamic courts had cleared the road. [http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0713/p1s2.html] [5]
2002, December, The United States establishes an ‘anti-terrorism task force’ in neighboring Djibouti, with 1,600 U.S. troops.
2003-2005, Increased US funding and support for the warlords being defeated by new and immensely popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government.
– 2004, Under US guidance a unity warlord government, the Transitional Federal Government is formed in neighboring Kenya. It did not convene on Somali soil until February 2006, when it met in a converted grain warehouse in the western city of Baidoa because security concerns kept the legislature from entering Mogadishu
– 2005 – As the courts begin to assert themselves as the dispensers of justice, they come into conflict with the foreign backed secular warlords who control most of the city. In reaction to the growing power of the ICU, a group of Mogadishu warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), so named to seek Western backing. This was a major change, as these warlords had been fighting each other for many years.
February 2006, Agence France Presse:
“A group of powerful warlords controlling the Somali capital on Tuesday held secret talks with US agents in a provincial town. The talks between the warlords, who recently formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), and the US agents were held in Jowhar, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu. The delegates arrived in Jowhar, the seat of Somali transitional government, in two planes — one carrying the warlords and the other carrying the US agents.”
By 2006 this merchant supported moderate Islamic Courts Union, had quickly become extremely popular in the overwhelmingly Islamic population throughout Somalis, and had all but defeated the US backed warlords and were expected and awaited by the long violence suffering inhabitants of Somalia’s capital city Mogadishu, the last remaining part of Somalia not under its rule.
2006 February 18 begins battle for Mogadishu. The alliance loses battle after battle. ICU forces defeat the ARPCT and gain control of Mogadishu by June 5. Somali Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said on Radio Shabelle, the violence was started by the people who have proclaimed themselves to be fighters against terrorism. Some warlords flee to Ethiopia.
2006, May 17, Washington Post admits, ‘U.S. Secretly Backing Warlords in Somalia’ “More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia’s interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu. [author: same warlords that drove them out of the war-torn Horn of Africa nation a decade ago.]
Clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.
2 JUNE 2006, Large Rally Against United States Staged in Mogadishu
Thousands of people from all different districts in Banadir Region participate chanting Anti American slogans and “we don’t need those in Dollar interest, we don’t refuse our religion”
On 5 June 2006, Warlords not captured have fled the city, abandoning most of their weapons, with the majority fleeing to Jowhar, which would be taken by the ICU militia on 14 June in spite of US involvement. This brought the ICU in control of much of the weaponry in the country, which made a resurgence by the warlords difficult without outside support. London’s Guardian Unlimited said the Bush administration funneled $100,000 to $150,000 a month to “proxies” based at a CIA-controlled base in Nairobi, Kenya. The International Crisis Group reported that the money was funneled through the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Task Force. Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, chair of the African Union for 2006, also criticized the support given by the U.S. to the warlords, following his meeting with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
June 8, New York Times , Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia ? “A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.”
June 13, 2006, Aljazeera , A leading member of the US-backed Somali commanders alliance, Abdi Hassan Awale Qeidid, on advice of elders from his Sa’ad sub-clan, in order to avoid further bloodshed, defects to the Islamic courts, dealing a blow to the weakened coalition that was routed from the capital Mogadishu.
July 15, the Islamic Courts reopened Mogadishu International Airport, which had been closed since the withdrawal of the international forces in 1995. The first airplane chartered by the Arab League flew from the airport for the first time in 11 years picking up Islamic Courts delegates to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.[
June 15, Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a news conference on June 15, “it was wrong for the United States government to support warlords in Somalia.”
[http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_2716.shtml]
June 16, 10,000 people demonstrate against a proposed peacekeeping mission to Somalia.. Photo: AP
[author: Colonial powers can always resort to using the UN which it created, to enforce colonialism.] Africa News described the Alliance (of warlords) as disappearing, their regions over-run by the Islamic Courts Union.
July 20, The ICU organize a clean-up campaign for the streets of Mogadishu. This was the first time litter and rubbish is collected in the entire city since it collapsed into chaos over a decade earlier.
On August 24, 2006, the ICU capture Harardhere, some 500 km northeast of Mogadishu, which had become a safe haven for pirates, who had forced shipping firms and international organizations to pay large ransoms for the release of vessels and crews.
On August 25, 2006 the Islamic Courts reopen historic Mogadishu seaport, which had been one of the busiest in East Africa, shut down for ten years. These successes of the Islamic Courts government were achieved in spite of the US crimes against humanity described even by as Wall Street loyal a source as the New York Times owned Washington Post:
When the popular Islamic Courts Union government forces finally defeated the warlords despite foreign troops and US helping the warlords, the US trained Ethiopian Army and Air Force invaded and murderously temporarily defeated the Somalian Islamic Courts in turn. [6]
Ethiopian troops had moved into Somalian territory on July 20, 2006 and pushed northward into the semi-autonomous state of Puntland. Several Ethiopian armored convoys heading to Baidoa are destroyed in sophisticated ambushes.
December 22, 2006: 20 T-55 Ethiopian tanks, four attack helicopters in Baidoa.
December 23, Ethiopian tanks and further reinforcements arrived in Daynuunay, 30 kilometres east of Baidoa; prompting ICU forces to vow all-out war despite a commitment to an EU-brokered peace. [author: Sending in the Ethiopian Army is the white imperial way of brokering peace.
December, 2006, Open, conventional warfare breaks out between the Islamic Courts and Ethiopian forces seeking to reinstate the TFG towards the end of December. Fighting is intense, with hundreds of casualties on both sides. After several days of deadlock around Baidoa, Ethiopian armored columns, backed by air and artillery support, punch through and take Mogadishu, The Ethiopians then pivot their columns and headed south. By New Years Day, the Islamic Courts abandoned Kismayo, the strategic southern port city and final stronghold of the ICU. The Ethiopians are reported to have executed foreign prisoners in the field and the ICU is said to have taken thousands of casualties. Stripped of almost all their territory, the ICU will pursue guerrilla-style warfare against the government.
Warlords return to fight against the ICU, resuming their places in Mogadishu following its fall to the and Ethiopian forces in December 2006. Wikipedia
On December 31, 2006, Sharif Sheik Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, along with other senior ICU officials in the port city of Kismayu about 500 km (310 mi) south of Mogadishu, urge Islamist supporters across the country to initiate an insurgency, to wage guerrilla war, against the Ethiopian troops. Ahmed issued the statement after the Muslim Eid prayers on Saturday: “I call on the Islamic Courts fighters, supporters and every true Muslim to start an insurgency against the Ethiopian troops in Somalia. We are telling the Ethiopians in Somalia that they will never succeed in their mission. By Allah, they will fail… We will not allow the Ethiopian troops to stay peacefully in Somalia.”
January 2007, The Islamic Courts indicate they will conduct an insurgency, and many of their fighters and all of their leaders are still unaccounted for. Kenya has closed the southern border, the United States Navy is blockading the Somali coast and Ethiopian forces are conducting operations along the Kenyan border. Al Shabaab militant youth wing of the Islamic Courts rises to leadership role. Besides al Shabaab, other hardline Islamists broke ranks with the ICU and formed other militant groups like Hizbul Islam, to continue the war against the the Ethiopian reinstalled government of warlords amenable to US investment interests. Wikipedia
The dis and misinforming ploy used in investor owned media coverage up to now is that the Islamic Courts Union government would hide Islamists wanted by US for questioning about US Embassy attacks will be hyped up to justify the next round of carnage by intervention organized and militarily supported by the US.
January 3, 2007 – Ethiopian, U.S. airstrikes force ICU withdrawal from Kismayo. Jan. 4, Ethiopian aircraft and attack helicopters struck the town of Doble near the Kenyan border. January 5–12, 2007 CNN; even six Kenyan herders killed by Ethiopian aircraft. US airstrike hits Badmadow Island; series of Ethiopian airstrikes January 10, chief of staff to the Somali president: ”US airstrikes killed 31 civilians.” More AC-130 airstrikes were hit Ras Kamboni. CNN . US warplanes from aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in strikes ( AP ); AC-130 plane rained gunfire down on the southern village of Hayo – “many dead bodies and animals.”
January 15, British SAS team at the Kenyan border reportedly looking for the fleeing Al Qaeda suspects. Reuters [or anyone opposing invasion]
2007, January 19, The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is created by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council upon urging by the UN Security Council on US initiative to support the Federal Government of Somalia’s (Warlord dominated) forces in their battle against Al-Shabaab militants. January 22, Christianized Malawi agrees to send 400 to 1,200 troops
January 24, U.S. airstrike; Nigeria pledges 770 to 1,100 troops. Reuteres
On January 31, Popular Resistance Movement releases a video warning African Union peacekeepers to avoid coming to Somalia, claiming “Somalia is not a place where you will earn a salary – it is a place where you will die.” AP
February 1, Burundi pledges 1,000 troops BBC
On February 9, 800 Somali demonstrators in Mogadishu, burn U.S., Ethiopian, and Ugandan flags. Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi and Burundi had committed troops to the ‘peacekeeping mission’,Uganda had pledged 1,400 troops and some armored vehicles for a mission. BBC
By the end of March, the fighting intensified in Mogadishu – more than a thousand people, mostly civilians killed.
Ethiopian helicopters attack rebel positions, while the insurgents were calling on the people of the city over the mosque loudspeakers to resist the Ethiopians. 15 Ethiopian soldiers and civilians killed.
March 30, 2007, Islamic insurgents shoot down Ethiopian Mi-24 military helicopter.
April 4, 2007, [‘evenhandedly fair’ as all colonial based organizations] Amnesty International demands Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, ensure their forces abide by international humanitarian law [both the invaded defenders and the invaders that is]
September 2007, The Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) created, when members of the Islamic Courts Union and Somali opposition leaders met in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and united to oppose Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and its Ethiopian allies.
On March 3, 2008, the United States air strike on Dhoble kills the leader of Al-Shabab Aden Hashi Eyrow; does nothing to slow down the Insurgency.
April 20, 2008, Al-Hidaya Mosque massacre: Ethiopian soldiers storm a mosque, 11 bodies found, some with their throat slit, others shot to death. Of the 11 dead victims, nine were regular congregants. Tabliiq official, “Ethiopians “slaughtered” clerics. Sheikh Said Yahya, Imam, killed as he opened the mosque door after soldiers knocked.
April 25, 2007, FOX. Missile hits hospital ward packed with civilians;
May 1, 2008, BBC American plane drops three large bombs on a house in the Dhuusamarreeb region in central Somalia. kills up 30 people.
On 9 June 2008. Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia split into two between those based in Eritrea, aligned with former ICU leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who are adamantly opposed to cooperation with the TFG or Ethiopia, and those who were based in Djibouti, aligned with former ICU leader Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who were open to reconciliation in spite of the Ethiopian and UN sponsored African Union invasions.
THE WORM TURNS
July 1, 2008, Battle of Beledweyne Somali opposition fighters ambush Ethiopian army convoy leaving 47 Ethiopian soldiers and 235 Islamist fighters dead.
August 22, 2008, Al-Shabaab retakes Kismayo, IRIN News (Islamic Courts Union, had been driven out of Kismayo in January 2007 when Ethiopian forces rolled into Somalia to take control of much of central and southern Somalia.)
The Islamic Courts’ Youth Wing, al Shabaab (Shabaab = ‘youth’ in Arabic), with great cost in deaths and casualties to themselves heroically pushed the heavily weaponized Ethiopians back out of cities, though UN authorized African Union ‘Peace Keeping’ forces invaded as well to protect the remnants of a revamped warlord coalition,
In early December 2008, Ethiopia announced it would withdraw its troops after first securing the withdrawal of the AMISOM peacekeepers from Burundi and Uganda. Withdrawal of the AMISOM peacekeepers puts pressure on the UN to provide troops.
January 25, 2009 [oft defeated] Ethiopian troops completely pulled out of Somalia.
Situation in Somalia in February 2009, following the second Ethiopian withdrawal
Al-Shabab captured Baidoa, where the TFG parliament was based, on January 26. Following the collapse and end of the TFG, moderate Islamist leader of Islamic Courts, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was elected to become the new President of a United Somali government including the warlords. Al-Shabab declares war on him and pledges to continue attacks on TFG.
March 25, 2009, Five TFG soldiers shot execution style in a Mogadishu district known for rogue soldiers stealing from civilians and local shops, setting up illegal toll blocks.
2009-01-27–explosions and gunfire heard as government soldiers fight among themselves over control of the city, following the departure of Ethiopians. Police, local militia looting the presidential palace and parliament building as well as police stations; police who have splintered into clan groups. Mareeg.com-
January 5, 2010, CNN, More than 1 million in Somalia going hungry, aid agency says
10 March 2010, Up to half the food aid in Somalia is diverted to corrupt contractors, local UN workers and Islamist militants, a leaked UN report says. It says WFP contracts are awarded to a few powerful individuals who operate cartels that sell the food illegally. US funding cut. The UN document says food aid is diverted to a web of distributors, transporters and armed groups, with some local UN workers also taking a cut in the profits, and transporters have to navigate roadblocks manned by various militias and bandits. BBC
“In May (2010), the fighting intensifies in Mogadishu; 270,000 displaced; internally displaced persons 1.5 million ” UNHCR website.
July 6, 2010, (CNN) — Anti-government demonstrators, including women dressed in full hijabs brandishing AK-47 automatic rifles, march through the streets of Somalia’s violence-torn capital accuse African Union Mission of killing people. “AMISOM killed my mummy” and “AMISOM get out of our country” said two signs. e and it will happen in Bujumbura [the Burundi capital] too.” [7]
12 JULY 2010, The Somali Islamist group al-Shabab has said it was behind Kampala Uganda blasts that killed 74 people, one American.
Somali militants recruit Americans Video CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e59GUaGYnaQ
10 June 2011, Somali Interior Minister killed by Niece, BBC
Three more regions of Somalia struck by famine, including the capital, Mogadishu, UN
28 Oct, US launches drones from Ethiopia BBC
19 November 2011, Ethiopia troops ‘enter Somalia’ Ethiopian troops cross border into Somalia in significant numbers, eyewitnesses say. At least 20 vehicles carrying Ethiopian troops. BBC
Kenya’s intervention in southern Somalia in October 2011 had been planned for at least two years. The release of WikiLeaks cables in 2010 documented the plans and the role of the State Department.
The UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon arrived in Somalia fresh from the UN-US-NATO re-conquest of Libya for the West, and the assassination of the its revolutionary leader and Chairman of the African Union. “We are now at a critical juncture — a moment of fresh opportunities for the future of Somali people,” Mr. Ban said. The reader might Step back a moment an consider how commonplace a UN ruthless and inhumane military attack has been over the sixty odd years of the UN’s existence: [see Korean Traitor US Stooge UN ‘Terror Council’ Sec. Gen. in Somalia
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Korean-Traitor-US-Stooge-U-by-Jay-Janson-111210-798.html
(In addition to U.S. NATO and the UN involvement in Somalia and Kenya, the state of Israel has close ties with the government in Nairobi and has contracts to train the Ethiopian Armed Forces.)
Aug.14, Rights group says all sides guilty of crime Human Rights Watch has said all sides in Somalia’s are guilty of serious violations of international law. BBC [author notes: invaders and invaded receiving equal condemnation!
Jul.12, 2011, CNN, CIA aiding Somalia suspect interrogations Jul.20, U.N. declares famine in southern Somalia
August 2011, the United Nations, African Union’s AMISOM ,United States, and the TFG battling Al Shabaab claim control of Mogadishu.
Aug. 3, Somalia’s famine reaches into Mogadishu , three more regions. UN
Aug.12, U.N .: Not enough money to fight famine
Aug.17, UK minister visits Mogadishu
Oct.17, Somali militants al-Shabab threaten Kenya retaliation, BBC
January 13, 2012 (CNN) — Distribution of food, seed and medical relief intended for drought victims suspended, International Red Cross announces. Aid for up to 1.1 million people held up because local authorities block distribution of ICRC food and seed relief in the Middle Shabelle and Galgaduud regions in central and southern Somalia, according to Red Cross.
7 January 2012, BBC Kenyan troops, air strikes, ‘kill 60 al-Shabab fighters’ in Somalia
January 20, African Union forces launch offensive against Al-Shabaab positions on the northern outskirts of Mogadishu.[2]
January 24, Al-Shabaab suicide attack against an Ethiopian military base in Beledweyne.
10 March 2012, Somalia Islamists, al-Shabab ambush Ethiopia troops
Al-Shabab claimed to have killed 73 Ethiopians, most intense fighting since Ethiopian troops entered Somalia last November.
May 29, Kenyan naval forces shell Kismayo. Al-Shabaab insurgents open fire on Kenyan patrol vessels off Somalian coast. Garowa on line
July 24 Christian Science Monitor “ corrupt TFG had foreigners defeat Islamic Courts [8]
August 16, Kenyan Forces stationed in Southern Somalia engage in combat with as many as a thousand Al-Shabaab militants attempting to assault Kenyan garrison in Fafadhun.
September 4, offensive by AMISOM, the Kenyan navy shells the Islamist stronghold of Kismayo. Kenyan fighter jets bomb city. Aljazeera
January 11, 2013, Al-Shabaab fighters kill French soldiers trying to rescue agent Allex, taken hostage in 2009 while training Somali government troops. In exchange for his release, Al-Shabaab had demanded cessation of French involvement and complete withdrawal of AMISOM forces.
June 19, The UN’s Development Program offices in Mogadishu attacked by Islamist militants. Four from Great Britain and South Africa dead.
July 4, UN WHO reports massive clashes in Kismayo. Raskamboni movement and Barre Adan Shire Hiiraale militia battling for control of city. Somali government blames Kenyan troops for covertly supporting rival militias opposed to the government
UN Security Council votes to increase the AU force. Kenyan soldiers fighting al-Shabab in Somalia to be integrated into the Amisom force.
Decent people everywhere are not on the side of US imperialism, but when Somalian and foreign al Qaeda praised the Islamic Courts when it was attacked by the US and began fighting alongside al Shabaab facing down the Ethiopians, Western war mongering media could easily bolster the pretext of fighting al Qaeda, the pretext the US uses elsewhere to prevent independent governments from existing in the Arab world. And as elsewhere this US use of ‘legalized’ terror has brought ‘illegal’ terror blowback. In Somalia’s case, because an American genocidal foreign policy of destroying Somalia’s popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government with continuous warfare since 2000, which brought quite naturally its more radical Youth Wing al Shabaab lead the fight against Western genocidal neo-colonialism. [9] [10]
Al-Shabaab with other militants had taken back cities conquered by the Ethiopians and the hard pressed Ethiopians withdrew when more the UN authorized African Union Force troops arrived. When again the forces of colonialism were on the verge of defeat, US proxy Kenyan Armed Forces were added into the soup of death, to accomplish what the Ethiopians had begun.
Kenyan armed forces entered Somalia two years ago, with US attack aircraft support, to combat al-Shabaab (‘Youths’ in Arabic language), who had taken up leading the fight against US supported warlords, when the popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government of their elders was overthrown by the deadly and brutal US proxy Ethiopian Army and Air Force invasion, which brought back those defeated US backed warlords.
RESULT: More death, maiming, destruction and more importantly creating
STARVATION [Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia… ” Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures” Oxfam . [11] In Somalia’s case, because the US of genocide destroyed Somalia’s chosen government, which is normal colonial procedure. During all these above decades famine relief has taken second priority to Western exploitive business interests in Somalia with genocidal consequences. [12]
al-Qaeda has entered the fight against the US with more suicide bombings and in the last week of September came the Kenya Shopping Mall terror massacre. The reader is invited to check his or her possible involvement in the horrific neo-colonial events that have surely produced this shopping mall massacre.
The adolescent Great White Father, now quite globalized, has let the Somalian people know over and over again, through merciless gunfire, missiles and drone assassinations, that they are prohibited from choosing their own government. This of course is, again, is standard operating procedure for predatory speculative investment US imperialism: Greeks, Koreans, Guatemalans, Iranians, Congolese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Dominicans, Salvadorians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Haitians and at one time or another, almost every other nation in Latin America, Iraqis Libyans, Afghanis have though calculated genocide, not been allowed to choose their own government. (An in depth investigation would show that Americans are also not allowed to choose their own government.) The Nazis did the same, but then its Wehrmacht was built by a crash investment and joint venture with America’s top fifty corporations which all made a killing during WW II and the Holocaust, and made the United States the single super Colonial Power, capable of dictating a lot more than just who governs where.
Those US victim countries will have their day in court and compensation for wrongful death in the millions, injuries in the billions, destruction of property and theft of natural resources. In the meantime mayhem that divides and destroys whichever side of any commodity, or nation worth plundering, can be made to be profitable for speculative investment bankers skilled in selling short.
Again: Reader, check your possible involvement! Have you believed in silly but vicious fairy tells of colonial powers being democratic and seeking democracy’s spread? North America was stolen from its indigenous natives, Africans enslaved for their labor, half of Mexico raped away, a million Filipinos butchered for their land? Democratically?
With US genocide still ongoing, progressive neo-colonialist journalism slaps the hands of Somali warlords in an example of back-handed support for silly but vicious fairy tales:
8/20/2012, Christian Science Monitor : “Somalia’s rulers must make the crucial step, going from being an unelected interim authority toward creating a more lasting government.”
Smooth commentating?
FOOTNOTES
1
It was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be President Jimmy Carter, who, in mid 1979, first encouraged and used Islamic fundamentalist terror by ordering the secret funding, arming and training of non-Pashtun Afghani warlord armies of fundamentalist men fearful of the new popular women-liberating Socialist government in Kabul, which was providing unwanted schooling for their daughters and wives. (The most infamous warlord the US funded was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known for spraying acid on unveiled women while still a university student.) [2]”-
It is well known that the CIA funded al Qaeda during its beginning through payments to Osama bin Laden, who, along with thousands of Arabs of the strict Saudi Wahabi sect, had been invited into that part of Afghanistan controlled by the CIA, after the Soviets had entered Afghanistan to protect its ally in Kabul. There is an amazing video of Presidential Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking to newly arrived, CIA imported, Arab fighters, calling for jihad against the Soviet army and the Kabul government.[3]
Thereafter, it was the US Holocaust in Iraq that produced the greatest growth of al Qaeda, which entered and further sprang up in that country to fight Americans, who again were mercilessly invading another Muslin nation that had been friendly to the US. In the case of Iraq, even merciless to the point of CIA having helped Saddam Hussein to power and later partnering with Saddam during his horrific million death invasion of Iran, that had so gratified President Reagan and his Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.[4]
Subsequently, the criminal speculative investment banking conspiracy, which rules most of the world from Wall Street, had its outright owned US government[5], hire battle seasoned al Qaeda recruits to fake a revolt in wealthy and prosperous Libya, which had been the poorest nation in Africa under oil plundering British and French colonial domination, only to become the 53rd highest quality of life nation in the world (higher than nine European nations, according to the 2010 UN Index), under its Arab Socialist government. For nine weeks the captive CNN world satellite audience heard obviously tough looking hombres in heavy weapons laden pick-up trucks hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ ‘from all walks of life.’
For two years now the CIA has been running another faked ‘spontaneous’ revolt in yet another previously well run, sophisticated nation in the cradle of civilization, with, as in the case of Iraq and Libya, fine free health care and education through PhD for all its citizens. (America has liberated sixty million from such benefits). With all the unnecessary gall in a world watching CIA fed CNN,
US officials proclaim their CIA’s right to hire, arm and train whomsoever to overthrow the proven popular government of Syria, no matter that al Qaeda within America’s “freedom fighter’ opposition armies executes civilians, even teenagers, and is now famous for the video of an opposition leader cutting out and eating the heart of a Syrian soldier.
As in the case of Libya, without a single really corroborating video or photo, the angel of death President of the US has the confidence to lie that President Assad (as the year before, that Revolutionary Leader Gadaffi) “is killing his own people.” Al Qaeda, a now world wide amorphous movement, can be used to butcher or as an excuse to bomb, depending on what is profitable.
After twelve years of genocidal Western occupation, the al Qaeda that the US brought into Persian speaking Afghanistan is still the excuse for the white armies to continue to turkey shoot members and adherents of Taliban, the former recognized government of what was left of Afghanistan after the US backed and armed warlords saw to infighting that brought the nation to unimaginable violent chaos, with widespread raping of women and complete lawlessness, until defeated by national-salvation minded religious Taliban (‘Taliban’ means ‘students’ in Pashun language). In spite of the tragic toll taken on these Afghani battling invaders with by superior weaponry, Taliban has remained in power throughout most of the countryside of Afghanistan.
US drone missiles continue to turn al Qaeda and whomever happens to be nearby into ‘bugsplats’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Do Americans, English and citizens of other white nation members of collaborating NATO and beyond, bite their tongue when reading of the US use of al Qaeda first in Afghanistan, then in Libya, now in Syria and most probably in Iraq?
Finally the super gruesome daily suicide bombings in Iraq of as many victims as ninety in a single day, going on now for a year or more, bears mention in regard to US involvement in al Qaeda.
What would the heartless automaton bankers of profitable genocide working for total globalized US hegemony not do to keep 65% Shiite Iraq from a normal and to be expected political rapprochement and cooperation with 95% Shiite Iran. (Please, don’t any reader fall for that sap about of ‘sectarian violence’ between Sunni and Shiite, who have intermarried everywhere over the last thousand years.) Notice that there are no serious US plans to help the Shiite majority Iraq government save its citizens from being slaughtered, and notice that US media which ran the story of the sixty lives lost Kenya shopping mall massacre for two weeks, devotes prime time news to no more than reporting the daily number of dead in Iraq massacres.
It is exceedingly probable that the US is somehow covertly heavily involved in the al Qaeda and other Sunni suicide attacks on Shiites in Iraq. Even if somehow were not, Washington certainly would have the power through its satellite Saudi Arabia to mitigate this stupid, astounding loss of precious life for ordinary, read wonderful, men, women and children.
What is not being sufficiently often pointed out is these overt US atrocities, and this decades ongoing American produced genocide will only come to an end, either when there is planetary destruction, or when powerful speculative private investors calculating profit, are forced to enter a factor of possible imprisonment and seizure of assets to compensate wrongful deaths, injuries, destruction of property and theft of natural resources (as explained on the educational and stimulus to action website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now, endorsed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and containing the pertinent laws, exhortations by Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs and others and featuring a country-by-country history of US crimes in nineteen (and counting) nations – and a link to the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Atrocity Wars and Covert Genocide on Three Continents for Predatory Investments International Awareness Campaign. source:
? Russian TV Asked Shouldn’t Public Sleep Better After CIA FBI Manhunt Success? VIDEO? Wall Street’s CIA has used the al Qaeda it helped create and fund more often than the US Air Force has bombed it. An awakened public will make war unprofitable by law.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Russian-TV-Asked-Shouldn-t-by-Jay-Janson-Government-sponsored-Terrorism_International-Funding-Terrorism_State-Terrorism_Terrorism-Funding-131010-196.html
2
1974, US encouraged, heavily armed and aided a bloody Somalian invasion of Ethiopia when a military coup by leftist officers topples the Ethiopian monarchy and declares the country a Marxist-Leninist state.
1976, in a reversal, US covertly supplied arms and support to all foreign based attempts to violently overthrow the 1976 founded revolutionary socialist government in Somalia for its receiving aid from the USSR; large-scale American military support of Somalia’s historic rival Ethiopia, then under the rule of the feudal emperor Haile Selassie.
3
the 1980s, despite warnings by Africa specialists, human rights groups and humanitarian organizations that continued American aid to the dictatorial government of Siad Barre would eventually plunge Somalia into chaos. US poured in more than $50 million of arms annually to prop up this disastrous Barre dictatorship while offering virtually no assistance that would have helped build a self-sustaining economy which could feed Somalia’s people. In addition, the United States pushed a structural adjustment program through the International Monetary Fund severely weakening the local agricultural economy. Combined with the breakdown of the central government, drought conditions and rival militias disrupting food supplies, there was famine on a massive scale, resulting in the deaths of more than 300,000 Somalis, mostly children.
Just before dictator Siad Barre’s overthrow in early 1991, the U.S. sends hundreds of millions of dollars of arms to Somalia in return for the use of military facilities which had been originally constructed for the Soviets. (These bases will to be used to support American military intervention in the Middle East.)
4
1992, November, outgoing Bush administration sent 30,000 U.S. troops, primarily Marines and Army Rangers, to Somalia in what was described as a humanitarian mission to assist in the distribution of relief supplies. In some cases, U.S. forces essentially dumped food on local markets, hurting indigenous farmers and creating greater food shortages over the longer term – few Somalis were involved in the decisions during this crucial period.
Such an overbearing foreign military presence in a country which had been free from colonial rule for only a little more than three decades leads to growing resentment, particularly since these elite combat forces were not trained for such humanitarian missions. U.S. Secretary of Defense is reported to quip to an associate, “We’re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them.” Shootings at U.S. military roadblocks became commonplace and Somalis witnessed scenes of mostly white American forces harassing and shooting their black countrymen. [Stephen Zunes, The Long and Hidden History of the U.S in Somalia]
1992, US attempts to control Somalian politics through US Armed Forces brought in under the pretext of protecting the distribution of food aid. US arming financial backing of Mogadishu warlords, who are willing to rule favoring US unjust predatory investments.
We might pick the so called Blackhawk Down incident as a point in history when of US crimes against peace, wherein weapons are supplied, their use encouraged and weapons supplied to others to attack Somalia, to Americans themselves committing crimes against humanity in Somalia that become genocidal.
In Mogadishu on October of 1993, shortly after a Blackhawk attack helicopter, seen firing down into the roof of a closed market attempting to assassinate a designated enemy Somali clan leader, is shot down by Somail militia along with a second Blackhawk. Enraged Somalis drag the bodies of American airmen through their dirt streets. The battle resulted in 18 US deaths, 80 wounded. American sources estimate between 1,500 and 3,000 Somali casualties, including civilians.
The high casualties of this Battle of Mogadishu more commonly referred to as Black Hawk Down or, locally, as the Day of the Rangers, and other painful incidents for the US Armed Forces in Somalia,, caused President Clinton to order 5,300 additional Troops to Somalia “to protect our troops and to complete our mission and bring all American combat forces home by March 31.”
5
http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0713/p1s2.html
Islamic clerics combat lawlessness in Somalia
By Lara Santoro, Special to The Christian Science Monitor / July 13, 1999
MOGADISHU, SOMALIA
A few weeks ago, an odd thing happened in the utter anarchy of Somalia.
The bandits who presided over the treacherous road from Mogadishu to Afgoi were gone. The pick-up trucks packed with gun-brandishing youths who manned some 50 roadblocks along the 20-mile stretch were nonexistent.
The combined militia forces of five Islamic courts cleared the road. It was the second time the courts – that view Islamic law as the only antidote to Somalia’s chaos – acted together. In April, they took control of the Bukhara market in Mogadishu. This second action reveals a unity of purpose largely unseen in the capital since the collapse of the Somali state in 1991.
“Islamic law is the only thing that will save this country,” says Sheikh Hassan Sheikh Mohammed Adde, a cleric who merged and presides over the Joint Islamic Courts.
Sheikh Hassan is clear about his political ambition and his determination to impose Islamic law over Somalia. Although it is close to stricter forms of Islam, Somalia has held fast to a tradition of Sunni religious moderation for nearly a millennium.
But beyond Sheikh Hassan’s ambitions, analysts say the issue is whether the courts will act as conduits for Islamic fundamentalism – or merely help bring about an organized state, and then compete fairly for power.
Somalia devolved into a state of near anarchy nearly a decade ago. The guns of different warlords have kept it at the bottom of the United Nations index of human development. Life expectancy is 43 years, infant mortality one of the highest in Africa, with 1 out of every 4 children likely to die before the age of five. In a country where nearly everyone is armed, crime is rampant.
Yet as recently as 1992, Somalia was at the center of the world’s attention. A colossal relief operation to feed victims of famine saved the lives of thousands, but soon became embroiled in factional warfare for the control of Mogadishu. In October 1993, 18 US Marines were killed in a gunfight by militiamen loyal to warlord Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid. That prompted the first military intervention mounted by the UN for humanitarian purposes to haul down its flag and leave Somalia to itself.
Predictably, Somalia’s warlords prospered. But years of constant fighting and unregulated economic activity have finally taken their toll. The prolonged closure of Mogadishu’s main port and airport, the languishing banana trade, and a drop in the export of livestock have drained resources. The warlords became financially weak and increasingly vulnerable to the emerging power of the courts.
Whether the courts will succeed in challenging the factional rule of the warlords will depend largely on Somalia’s businessmen, observers say. Exasperated by the cost of lawlessness, business owners have thrown their financial weight behind the courts, providing sufficient means for them to acquire guns and set up their own militia.
Each of the five courts claims to have between 200 and 250 gunmen and an unspecified number of “technicals,” pickup trucks with machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on them, and armored personnel carriers.
The gunmen – who dress in the same torn clothes as the previous warlords – patrol the areas in which the courts operate. They round up thieves, rapists, and murderers, and deliver them to the first detention centers set up in Mogadishu since 1991.
The courts have won the loyalty of the gunmen with the guarantee of two meals a day and 30,000 Somali shillings ($30) a month. The businessmen pick up the tab.
“Without the businessmen, the courts would not exist,” says a Western observer. “The businessmen don’t care whether it’s Islamic law or Napoleonic law or Common law. Any law will do.”
That, however, is not the way others see it. According to a Middle Eastern Muslim diplomat in Mogadishu, a growing number of Islamic countries and organizations – including Somalia’s own homegrown fundamentalist At-Ittihad al-Islam group – are contributing money in the hope of seeing Somalia evolve into an Islamic state.
Somalia, though, has a history of ingratitude, as well as what appears to be a natural resistance to fundamentalism.
The court’s own interpretation of Islamic law is perhaps the most accurate measure of the sort of innate religious moderation that has made it difficult for fundamentalism to gain ground here. None of the five courts has dared resort to amputation for fear of becoming unpopular. There have been public executions of felons convicted of murder, 37 over the past 14 months.
“We don’t cut people’s hands off because they don’t like it,” Sheikh Hassan says.
The courts also have been careful to operate within the confines of Somalia’s clan structure, limiting their jurisdiction to members of the clan. The court set up by the Murosade clan, for example, is unable to prosecute members of the Suleiman or Ayr tribe, both notorious for their violence, and both with newly instituted Islamic courts of their own.
“Very simply, even though there is an Islamic component, the courts are clan-based organizations which are imposing discipline among themselves” says Mohamed Nur Gutale, Somalia’s former ambassador to the US.
Analysts say that if the courts succeed in taking over Mogadishu’s main port and airport as they have vowed to do, the era of the warlords will most likely come to an end.
[author j janson: Fat chance in a world still owned by the genocidal, amoral,criminally usurious speculative investment banking conspiracy of the brutally barbaric, colonial, now neo-colonial powers.
6 On February 23, 2007, the New York Times reported that the US government had been secretly training Ethiopian soldiers for several years, in camps near the Ethiopia-Somalia border. Support for Ethiopia’s invasion began after a failed CIA effort to arm and finance Somali “warlords.”
7 February 03, 2009, Hiraan Online, Fishermen who fish on the Shore of the Indian Ocean near Mogadishu complain UNISOM troops often fire on them.
8 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2012/0724/If-all-goes-well-Somalia-soon-may-have-a-government?International Crisis Group, “After more than 20 years of internal conflict, it is perhaps remarkable that Somalia has a government at all, even a weak one. The current Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed is the fourteenth attempt to create a government after the fall of President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, and it spent its first three years operating in the neighboring country of Kenya. When the TFG finally finally moved to Mogadishu in 2007, following several defeats of a fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union, it did little to impress Somalis or foreign diplomats. Friendly diplomats and even government supporters call the TFG “corrupt.”
9 The Taliban (Pashto: ??????? ?aliban “students”), fundamentalist youth group rose to save Afghanistan from the murderous chaos of US backed waring factions after the Soviet withdrawal and defeat of the Socialist women liberating Kabul government two years later. Taliban had formed a government, ruling as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from September 1996 until December 2001, with Kandahar as the capital. It gained diplomatic recognition from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Mohammed Omar has been serving as the spiritual leader of the Taliban since 1994.[
10 According to the National Counterterrorism Center, the outfit’s rank-and-file members hail from disparate local groups, sometimes recruited by force.[24] Unlike most of the organization’s top leaders, its foot soldiers are primarily concerned with nationalist and clan-related affairs as opposed to the global jihad. Schaefer,, Ahren; Andrew Black. “Clan and Conflict in Somalia: Al-Shabaab and the Myth of “Transcending Clan Politics””]. Jamestown Foundation.
11 http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/world/africa/somalia-famine/index.html
Somalia famine killed close to 260,000 people, report says
Mogadishu, Somalia (CNN) — Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia -The study, which covered the period from October 2010 to April 2012, suggests that an estimated 4.6% of the total population and 10% of children younger than 5 died in southern and central Somalia…
International humanitarian organization Oxfam said Thursday, “Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures,” it said in a statement.2, 2013
World leaders meeting in London next week to discuss the situation in Somalia, investing in long-term development, creating jobs, supporting farmers and pastoralists, and ensuring properly trained security forces. [author: by ‘world leaders’ one should understand ‘the same colonial powers which less than a century ago owned and plundered every inch of Africa and every African, by savage white terror of course.]
12 The UN definition of genocide (recognized by 142 states) is:
“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The US has committed these acts many times over and in many different countries. Some people object that this is some watered down version of genocide that risks diluting the significance of this “ultimate crime”. However, bear in mind that the victims of US armed violence are not usually combatants and even if they are they are not engaged in some sort of contested combat that gives them some ability to defend themselves or to kill or be killed. They are helpless as they die of incineration, asphyxiation, dismemberment, cancer, starvation, disease. People of all ages die in terror unable to protect themselves from the machinery of death. Make no mistake, that is what it is: a large complex co-ordinated machinery of mass killing. There is nothing watered down about the horrors of the genocides committed by the US, and their victims number many millions. The violence is mostly impersonal, implacable, arbitrary and industrial
The United States of Genocide
Putting the US on trial for genocide against the peoples of Korea, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere.
http://ongenocide.wordpress.com/
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; Ta Kung Bao; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign : (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.