Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

If You Wouldn’t Ask Hannibal Lecter to Stop Mass Atrocities, Don’t Ask “The International Community”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
04 Jan 2023
If You Wouldn’t Ask Hannibal Lecter to Stop Mass Atrocities, Don’t Ask “The International Community”

The hope that the U.S. will intervene anywhere in the world for humanitarian reasons is misguided in the extreme. Claims of concern are always a ruse hiding ulterior motives. Imperialist actions are antithetical to human needs.

As someone who spends a lot of time studying African conflict, I often witness and find myself drawn into discussion with groups  demanding that “the international community” do something to stop genocide and mass atrocities in their country. Of course I sympathize with any community under attack because of their racial, ethnic, clan, national, class, or political identity, but why would anyone in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South expect “the international community”—meaning the US-dominated West—to stop genocide and mass atrocities? The US dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan even though the Allies had already won WWII in the Pacific, turned Korea and Vietnam into human barbecue pits during the 50s and 60s, and overthrew or attempted to overthrow 47 governments between 1949 and 2014. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, its post 9/11 War on Terror has killed over 900,000 people, cost eight trillion dollars, and created 38 million refugees and internally displaced persons.

During a 2009 presidential debate, even as the War on Terror’s toll continued to mount, NBC News Anchor Tom Brokaw created a particularly violent upchuck moment by asking Barack Obama whether the US should intervene for humanitarian purpose “even when our national security interests were not at stake.”

Obama rose to the imperial task, making way for the “stopping genocide and mass atrocities” foreign policy that then superseded the War on Terror as the principal excuse for committing genocide and mass atrocities during his presidency:

“Well, we may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake.

“If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in?

“If we could've stopped Rwanda, surely, if we had the ability, that would be something that we would have to strongly consider and act.

“So when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us.”

(For the real US role in the Rwandan Genocide, see “Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, from Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction,” “How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsis,” “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” “Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later,” “Post-Genocide Rwandan Refugees: Why They Refuse to Return ‘Home’: Myths and Realities,” and “Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family's Five-Year Flight Across the Congo.”)

In 2010, shortly after taking office, Obama fulfilled his Orwellian promise by creating the Atrocities Prevention Board.

In 2011, the US and its allies destroyed Libya, the most prosperous nation on the African continent, in the name of stopping genocide and mass atrocities, then started stealing its oil. In 2014, the US and its allies began bombing Syria and supporting jihadists in the name of stopping genocide and mass atrocities, then started stealing its oil.

Africa has plenty of untapped oil and every other resource the industrial world needs, so it presents abundant opportunities for bombing, sanctioning, debt strangling, and otherwise bludgeoning sovereign nations into submission, all in the name of stopping genocide and mass atrocities, then stealing whatever they have.

Or for undermining any nation or nations that dare raise an independent head, as Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia did in 2018, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, and then Somali President Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, aka Farmaajo, signed an agreement to cooperate on trade, security and cultural issues, the Tripartite Alliance more formally known as the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea.

For more than two years, the US and its allies and press have been crying “Tigray Genocide!” to justify their support of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, in hopes of toppling the elected government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, driving a wedge between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and busting up the Tripartite Alliance.

On July 10, 2021, the Globe and Mail, a Canadian security state outlet, accused Somali soldiers of committing atrocities in Tigray and complained about the Tripartite Alliance weakening Western influence at the same time:

“Accounts of atrocities by Somali soldiers in Ethiopia’s Tigray war are casting a spotlight on an emerging military alliance that has reshaped the Horn of Africa, weakening Western influence in a strategically important region.

“The Globe and Mail has obtained eyewitness reports of massacres by Somali troops embedded with Eritrean forces in Tigray in the early months of the war. The new evidence raises disturbing questions about a covert military alliance between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia that has inflicted death and destruction on the rebellious Tigray region in northern Ethiopia.”

With the help of Ilhan Omar, the US managed to have Farmaajo removed from power, at least for now, replacing him with the obedient President Hassan Sheikh Mohammed, who approved the reintroduction of US troops into Somalia, US-based Coastline Exploration operations off the Somali Coast, the continuation of EU NAVFOR, a European Union naval deployment, also off the Somali Coast, and the extension of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), a US commanded peacekeeping force, previously known as AMISOM, which hasn’t been able to establish peace in Somalia since its creation in 2007.

The US and its allies have no honest interest in stopping genocide and mass atrocities in Africa, and their fundamental, paternalistic premise—that the West has to stop African savages from slaughtering one another—is racist to the core.

Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann(at)anngarrison.com.

R2P
Humanitarian Intervention
imperialism
US intervention in Africa
Rwanda
Ethiopia
Eritrea

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Menendez Bribery Scandal: Egypt versus Ethiopia
27 September 2023
Why did Menendez ignore Egypt’s human rights record and attack Ethiopia’s?
Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Getting Ethiopia Dead Wrong
20 September 2023
Rasmus Sonderriis's book is a thorough exposé of the West's destructively deceitful narrative about Ethiopia's two-year Tigray War. 
Regionally Integrating the Horn of Africa and the Nile Basin
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Regionally Integrating the Horn of Africa and the Nile Basin
06 September 2023
BAR Contributing Editor Ann Garrison spoke with Amanuel Biedemariam, author of The History of the USA in Eritrea, about regional integration in
Blue Flag Over Las Anod: A Victory for Somali Nationalists
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Blue Flag Over Las Anod: A Victory for Somali Nationalists
30 August 2023
Somali nationalists claim victory and raise the Somali flag above the city of Las Anod.
Tens of Thousands Pledge to Resist an Imperialist-backed Intervention in Niger
Abayomi Azikiwe
Tens of Thousands Pledge to Resist an Imperialist-backed Intervention in Niger
30 August 2023
The U.S.
Musings from the Margins #2: From Atlanta and Haiti, to Niger, the Western War Against Africans and Collective Humanity Intensifies
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
Musings from the Margins #2: From Atlanta and Haiti, to Niger, the Western War Against Africans and Collective Humanity Intensifies
09 August 2023
The war against Africans intensifies, the puppets and stooges do as they are ordered, while others are satisfied with empty gestures.
Eritrea: A Bright Spot on a Planet near the Edge of Armageddon
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Eritrea: A Bright Spot on a Planet near the Edge of Armageddon
09 August 2023
Last week I attended the Eritrean American Festival in the Seat
Eritrea: The Story You Don't Hear
Eugene Puryear
Eritrea: The Story You Don't Hear
19 July 2023
Eritrea is an African success story.
The UK-Rwanda Pact to Keep Migrants from Crossing the English Channel
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The UK-Rwanda Pact to Keep Migrants from Crossing the English Channel
12 July 2023
The UK is spearheading a European drive to outsource migrants to Rwanda.
Human Suffering Worsens in DRC, the Heart of Africa
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Human Suffering Worsens in DRC, the Heart of Africa
28 June 2023
A million more Congolese people have been displaced to satisfy the resource hunger of the industrialized world.

More Stories


  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Canada, Ukraine, and Nazis
    27 Sep 2023
    The Canadian government turned what should have been an ordinary photo opportunity with Ukraine's president into a political debacle when a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator was honored in parliament. Now…
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    EDITORIAL: Haiti Had Its Sandino, Jean Lamonthe, 1929
    27 Sep 2023
    Remembering Haitian resistance “Caco” fighter Charlemagne Peralte, demonized by the  U.S. occupation forces as a “bandit,” the same label given to Nicaraguan freedom fighter, Augusto Sandino.
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Menendez Bribery Scandal: Egypt versus Ethiopia
    27 Sep 2023
    Why did Menendez ignore Egypt’s human rights record and attack Ethiopia’s?
  • Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Rizvana Bradley’s Book, “Anteaesthetics”
    27 Sep 2023
    This week’s featured author is Rizvana Bradley. Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book is Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and…
  • Why Haiti Must Follow the Current Political Lead of Francophone Africa
    Pascal Robert
    Why Haiti Must Follow the Current Political Lead of Francophone Africa
    27 Sep 2023
    Haiti has suffered under western occupations and interference in its affairs. The people of that nation are struggling to break free from that domination and can look to mass movements in Francophone…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us