A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Like a pyromaniac, the United States threatens to ignite the entire East African region in its campaign to suppress Islamist forces in Somalia. Unable to marshal support for the pitiful puppet regime in Mogadishu, the Americans try to buy ethnic Somali recruits in surrounding countries. A new military offensive is set for late December.
U.S. Sows Seeds of Wider War in East Africa
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The Americans have organized mass recruitment among the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled the fighting to refugee camps in Kenya.”
Somali refugees and ethnic Somali citizens of Kenya are being recruited and trained by the thousands for a U.S.-backed offensive in Somalia, to begin next month. The Associated Press, citing numerous sources among refugees, young men who have deserted from the new militia and their families, local Kenyan officials and foreign diplomats, reports that the offensive against Islamist forces in Somalia is planned for late December, the end of the Somali rainy season. That’s the same seasonal window the Americans took advantage of three years ago, when the U.S. instigated an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that plunged the country into what the United Nations described as the “worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.” That crisis continues, complicated by a severe drought and a U.S. blockade of food aid.
Washingrton supports a puppet government that controls little more than a small corner of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and would immediately collapse where it not for the protection of Rwandan and Burundian troops that guard the airport. Most of central and southern Somalia is controlled by Islamist Shabab fighters. The U.S. is attempting to starve the region into submission by withholding 40 million pounds of food warehoused in Mombasa, Kenya.
With little support inside Somalia, the Americans have organized mass recruitment among the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled the fighting to refugee camps in Kenya – a practice that violates international law. Recruits are also being drawn from ethnic Somalis who are Kenyan citizens, in the northeastern part of the country. The Associated Press has learned of similar recruitment and training in the Somali regions of Ethiopia and Djibouti, where the United States maintains a huge military base.
The recruits are lured into service with promises of $600 a month, but deserters say they are often beaten, ill-fed and unpaid.
“The Americans are fanning the flames of war among Somalia's neighbors – including Kenya.”
The Americans are playing a very dangerous game. In addition to breaking international law and discrediting aid agencies by recruiting among refugees, the U.S. is encouraging a wider conflict in East Africa. Ethnic Somalis dominate in northeastern Kenya, in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and in Djibouti. Ethnic Somalis waged a secessionist war in Kenya in the mid-1960s and continue to resist Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden. According to the Associated Press, recruits in Kenya are deprived of their identification cards and told, “You are not a Kenyan. From this moment, tell yourselves and other people you are a Somali.” Recruiters are apparently doing the same thing among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia and Djibouti.
The Americans, in their zeal to defeat the Islamist Shabab in Somalia, are encouraging Somali nationalism in neighboring countries, and thus planting the seeds of future wars of secession. Although the U.S. may think that it is turning brother Somalis against one another for U.S. foreign policy purposes, in reality the Americans are fanning the flames of war among Somalia's neighbors – including Kenya. These are the fruits of AFRICOM, the U.S. military's African Command. Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama is destabilizing his father's own homeland, and the whole of East Africa.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Comments
I am appaled
Since the elections turmoil of 2007, Kenya has a fractured government hanging on a thread provided with the help of the former UN Secretary General Mr. Kofi Annan. This is the same Kofi Annan who was the head of the UN peace keeping operations when the Rwanda genocide broke in 1994 and did absolutely nothing to either stop the slaughter or raise his voice against the inaction by the community he was a party to, the UN. The UN secretary general at the time was a man by the name Boutros-Boutros Ghali from Egypt, Africa.
In Kenya, however, Annan have been very active in issuing threats to the fractured coalition government in Kenya to implement his agenda or else face the courts at the Hague for the deaths that took place during and after the Kenyan election (2007-2008). The crooks being threatened are more interested in saving their necks than seeing to it that justice for the killing of about 1,500 poor Kenyans and displacement of 35,000 is done.
Under this kind of atmosphere, the crooked Kenyans elites have basically left the running of the Kenyan government to NATO and AFRICOM who know more about the country than these headless African elites.
Most African elites, wherever they are found, are merely security guards taking orders from the former colonial rulers who are still in charge or the wealth and natural resources. These rulers have never bothered to develop the continent for centuries!
The African elites’ major job involves keeping the powerless fellow Africans in check in the man made slums sprawling all over the continent. In the countryside, refugee camps for those poor Africans dislodged from their lands to give room for exploitation of natural resources are now on the increase. The World Food Program is used to keep the Africans in these camps alive. This gives the appearance of humane treatment similar to that of ASPCA! The only problem is that the people providing the food are the same looters of the resources.
The people doing the actual displacement are African elites; they do it on demand/command for some bribe they may have taken at some earlier date from the people issuing command/demand. This is what African so called "leaders" have done religiously before and after "independents". Those brave African leaders who, like Martin Luther King or Malcom X did here in USA, dared to stand their grounds in defense of their territories and peoples have been eliminated through assassination or coups.
If Kenya elites, like the rest of African elites, are willing to allow their Muslim citizens to be organized and forced to go and kill other Africans in their territories or beyond, what is their excuse for not organizing the same Africans to defend the pieces of land and resources being looted by multinational corporations! Why are Africans always eager to kill Africans on command by others? Why are African elites voluntering to be paid Security guards?Why?
By the way, Kofi Annan is being paid real well to hoodwink. He is also corporate appointed African Elder whose opinion is approved.