The “failed state” of Somalia is back in the news as a haven for terrorists. But relentless and ill-informed western interference is making matters worse, argues Mike Phipps, Brent Central CLP.

Somalia has rarely known stability. Civil conflict and warlordism have gripped the country for decades. It’s arguably the worst place in the world to grow up – half the weapons-related injuries in Somalia happen to children under five. After years of chaos, the famine that gripped parts of the country in the 1990s produced a level of human suffering greater than that seen in Ethiopia in 1984.

Its coastline is notorious for piracy. Of the 53 ships hijacked in 2010, 49 were taken by Somali pirates. Such acts cost the global economy around $10 billion a year.
Recent history shows that Somalia’s problems are not wholly of its own making. With its citizens exhausted by the lawlessness that ruled large parts of the country, a movement called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) spread across the country in 2006, bringing a degree of security and stability based on sharia law. It declared piracy to be hostile to the principles of Islam. Punishments were extremely harsh, but for the first time in a generation it was safe to walk the capital’s streets. The roadblocks were dismantled and the airport and seaport were reopened.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the emergence of another state committed to political Islam was the last thing the US wanted to see. It pressured neighbouring Ethiopia into taking military action. Recent Wilileaks documents reveal that this was very much a US-inspired invasion, despite the Bush Administration’s feigned surprise at the time. On Christmas Day 2006, Ethiopian jets bombed the capital. A week later the US bombed the southeast. Civilian casualties were high.

Ethiopia invaded, with strong US backing. Protesters in Mogadishu were shot. “We are back to square one, back to 1991,” said one resident. By 2009, 200,000 people had been displaced from the capital, perhaps two million nationwide. Amnesty International reported that it had obtained scores of accounts of killings by Ethiopian troops. An estimated 20,000 were killed in the conflict. The US dutifully delivered 94 tonnes of arms and ammunition to its new puppet regime in May and June of that year.

The Times reported at the time, “For six months [the UIC] achieved the near-impossible feat of restoring order to a country that appeared ungovernable… The courts were less repressive than our Saudi Arabian friends. They publicly executed two murderers (a fraction of the 24 executions in Texas last year), and discouraged western dancing, music and films, but at least people could walk the streets without being robbed or killed… The Islamists have now been replaced – with Washington’s connivance – by a weak, fragile government that includes the very warlords they defeated.”

In Getting Somalia Wrong, BBC journalist Mary Harper argues that the West’s mistakes in the country have been devastatingly costly. Ever since the Black Hawk Down incident in 1991, the US has tended to view Somalia with hostility, and after 9/11 it fitted neatly into the “war on terror” theme. The polarising approach adopted by the Bush Administration gave extremist Islamic views a profile they would quickly build on.

The overthrow of the UIC in 2007 did not remove the problem of Islamic fundamentalism but radicalised it. It soon returned in a more virulent form – al-Shabaab, now affiliated to al-Qaeda. Like its UIC predecessor, it too brought security to the areas it controlled, but Taliban-style, with no freedoms or entertainment and the strict subordination of women. This movement soon became a magnet for foreign fighters and a base for suicide bombers.

Much of its attraction lay in its superior resources. Some of its fighters have been directly recruited from the government army, because it can pay higher wages. Equally, there are reports of al-Shabaab militants switching sides for the same reason.

Behind the concern about Somalia being a base for Islamist terrorism lies a very real Western interest in the country’s natural resources. Oil extraction was expected to begin in March 2012 in Puntland, north-eastern Somalia. Press reports said the minister responsible was looking to secure BP as a partner.

Canadian firm Africa Oil has already begun drilling. According to The Guardian (25th February), “The company estimates there could be up to 4 billion barrels (about $500 billion worth at today’s prices) in its two drilling plots. Other surveys indicate that Puntland province alone has the potential to yield 10 billion barrels, placing it among the top 20 countries holding oil…Yet it is the extent of oil deposits beneath the Indian Ocean that is most exciting Somali officials. One said the potential was comparable to that of Kuwait, which has more than 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. If true, the deposits would eclipse Nigeria’s reserves – 37.2 billion barrels – and make Somalia the seventh largest oil-rich nation.”

The US-backed transitional government in Somalia, described by the New York Times as “weak, corrupt, divided and disorganised”, is enthusiastic about bringing in the multinationals. Al-Shabaab, which controls significant parts of the country on the ground, is the fly in the ointment.

Last October, US predator drones and French warships attacked al-Shabaab strongholds in the south and Kenyan forces invaded. In two days alone, US drones killed at least 66 people – all illegal under international law, yet little reported in the mainstream media. Military intervention in Africa appears to be a defining feature of the Obama Administration. Besides Libya, the US admits to dispatching 100 military advisers and special forces commandos into four states in Central and East Africa.

Despite all its problems, there is a great deal of optimism in Somalia. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the absence of a central state – on many indicators, Somalia is doing better than many other African countries. In some parts, the economy is booming and Somaliland in the north, the most comprehensively destroyed part of the country in the early 1990s, has made huge strides towards peace and stability. It declared formal independence from the rest of the country in 1991, yet remains largely unrecognised internationally and thus it receives no aid or development support from donors.

The international community prefers to sponsor marathon peace conferences, attended by rival governments whose members often claim to represent parts of Somalia they have never visited. Invariably they achieve nothing. Apart from promoting Britain’s oil companies, the February 2012 initiative sponsored by the Cameron Government in London is unlikely to break that mould. The think tank Foreign Policy in Focus described it as “long on grandstanding but short on new substance”, more about “celebrating the limited military successes against Islamist militants than about building a foundation for peace”.

If anything, British meddling could make things worse. The plan is for a new “caretaker authority” – implicitly recognising that the existing transitional government has failed. This authority would notionally be in charge until a new constitution has been written and endorsed in a referendum, nationwide elections held, and a new president, prime minister and parliament installed. This scenario was described by The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall as “fantasy politics”, bearing no relation to the realities on the ground.
More worrying is the proposal to increase to 18,000 troops the UN-backed peacekeeping force, largely made up from other African Union countries and probably funded by the EU. The new mandate of this force would expand from defensive peacekeeping to peace enforcement – attacking al-Shabaab – and would involve the re-hatting of Kenyan troops in the south, thus legitimising last year’s invasion.

The US response has been to launch more remote-controlled predator drones into rebel-held areas. On 13th March, several missiles were launched into the Dayniile district of south Mogadishu. At least 30 people were killed and a dozen injured.

The West’s renewed interest in Somalia has much to do with the country’s bountiful natural resources. However, neither a military solution nor the construction of a state apparatus from the top down will overcome Somalia’s problems.

Inmates continue to languish in Guantánamo Bay after a decade behind bars, with no prospect of release or even a trial, reports Aisha Maniar, London Guantánamo Campaign.

Later this year, US electors will go to the polls in presidential elections. Barack Obama, who will seek to retain the presidency, decided to ring in the new year by signing into law an Act which comprehensively undoes one of his key election pledges from last time: to close Guantánamo Bay.

He instead marked the start of 2012 and the tenth year of illegal arbitrary detention at Guantánamo Bay by signing the National Defense Authorization Act, legalising the arbitrary and military detention of prisoners and, for the first time, including US citizens. It also gives preference to military detention and trials, marking a complete U-turn on Obama’s pledge to end military tribunals. By saying “no, I can’t” to this pledge, he has ensured that the regime as it stands can continue in perpetuity.

Aside from daily protests at Capitol Hill and around Washington last month, the tenth anniversary of the arbitrary detention of more than 170 men went pretty much unnoticed – it was business as usual for the Obama Administration and at Guantánamo Bay itself. Protests were held around the world and, according to one of their lawyers, the prisoners themselves protested with a hunger strike.

Guantánamo Bay and the treatment of prisoners at this and other similar prisons, however, are unlikely to feature in any election literature or campaign this year. A regime Barack Obama had once called a “misguided experiment” is now state policy. Indeed, for the handful of prisoners facing prosecution, tribunals have either been set back until after the election or will continue to stall or proceed at a snail’s pace.

The campaign to seek their release and justice for the remaining prisoners will continue regardless. Most of the 171 prisoners have been held without charge or trial for over a decade now, including British residents Shaker Aamer and Ahmed Belbacha. Their situation is as uncertain now as it has ever been. What is equally unclear is what purpose keeping Guantánamo Bay open serves for the Obama Administration.

Guantánamo Bay has long been seen as an unfortunate chapter of the Bush era and Obama’s now broken promise to close it was once seen as a key way of breaking with that legacy, as was his pledge on ending military commissions. However, Obama has remained silent on other issues, such as extraordinary rendition. Under his presidency, prisoner capacity at the Bagram base in Afghanistan has more than quadrupled.

Elsewhere, from Pakistan to Yemen and the Horn of Africa, the current US president, constitutional lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made another unaccountable, non-transparent, extra-legal method of  dealing with the “enemy” his own: targeted unmanned drone strikes. Like a computer game, live targets are picked off with military precision by soldiers thousands of miles away, whose mission is to seek out and destroy suspected militants. Although there are no official statistics on the number of attacks or casualties, the number of drone sorties and attacks is known to have risen hugely over the past few years. Targets have included weddings and funerals and passers-by. The damage done is immense and their use is proliferating.
In spite of cosmetic changes in US foreign policy, little has changed at all over the past four years. Relatively few prisoners have been released from Guantánamo Bay, there has been no accountability whatsoever, secrecy continues to shroud extraordinary rendition and drone attacks are presented as a legitimate and efficient form of warfare.

There is still no interest whatsoever in justice or addressing the actual issues. The men still held at Guantánamo Bay are more than prisoners: they are long-term hostages in a political game from which the rule of law and due process are excluded.  The political expediency of the issue may have expired some time ago for Barack Obama, but for campaigners on this issue, all over the world, the struggle for justice will continue.

• In February, the London Guantánamo Campaign marked five years of its monthly “Shut Guantánamo!” demonstration outside the US Embassy. The March demonstration outside the Embassy, on Thursday, 1st March, at 12-2pm will be a special demonstration in solidarity with victims of drone attacks worldwide. You are welcome to join us. See www.londonguantanamocamapign.blogspot.com for more information.

The regime’s brutality is undeniable, but arming the resistance will be counterproductive, argues Glen Rangwala

Across Syria’s eastern border, travelling along the banks of Euphrates River, one reaches the Iraqi city of Fallujah. There, in April 2004 and again seven months later, the US military launched intensive bombardments in the name of fighting the terrorists who sought to overthrow the new US-installed order – but killing, by the most conservative estimate, around 3,000 people and damaging or destroying over half the buildings in the entire city. The only differences in tactics between the US assaults on Fallujah and the Syrian crushing of Homs today is that the Syrian regime is allowing civilian refugees to leave the city, something that the US refused – and the Syrians have yet to use chemical weapons, unlike the US, heavy users of white phosphorus.

The difference in international response to the two situations is vast. Whereas calling for the arming of the rebel Free Syrian Army has now become mainstream in the British press, an equivalent appeal in the case of Fallujah would have been likely to result in detention under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first group are called protestors, the second were labelled insurgents and their supporters. In the case of Iraq, the resistance turned out to be a crucial factor in sending the US army back home. In the case of Syria, their army has no other home to go back to. A decision to leave Fallujah alone would not under any circumstances have resulted in George W. Bush’s body being dragged through the streets by his jubilant opponents. In Syria, allowing the resistance a safe base from which to spread would almost certainly set in place a course of events that would culminate in Bashar al-Assad’s gruesome demise.

This is not to deny the justified nature of the opposition to the Ba’th regime in Syria, which has over the past 40 years operated an order that comes as close to totalitarianism as any. The problem comes in recognising what will restrain that regime. The idea that UN resolutions calling for a handover of power would be respected is absurd. Portraying the Russian and Chinese veto in February as facilitating the repression makes little sense either: the Syrian regime will do what it can to grind down its opponents regardless of what the UN agrees. Sending weapons to the Free Syrian Army will result in a more drawn out battle in Homs, but it is a battle that realistically can have only one outcome.

Interventionists point to how aerial attacks and help to the Transitional Council succeeded in removing the Gaddafi regime in Libya. The difference between the two is huge. Libya’s population lives almost entirely along a thin coastal strip: stopping the eastward movement of Libyan forces towards Benghazi required the defence of a single road. The cities of Syria that have been at the centre of the rebellion cannot be protected by the defence of single points. The Libyan Transitional Council had senior defectors from the regime, including some of Gaddafi’s formerly closest allies. The senior echelons of both the military and the Ba’th Party in Syria have remained relatively untroubled by splits: the only senior military official to defect, General Mustafa al-Sheikh, served in analysis rather than command, and has since set up a rival group to the Free Syrian Army, the main body of deserting army personnel. The Syrian opposition, with new offices in the Gulf States, is now being taken seriously by the UK and US – but the scale of what would need to happen before they could attempt to oust the Ba’th party from its rule in Damascus is enormous.

Attempts to draw parallels with Libya also ignore the very real problems that remain in creating a viable constitutional and political order in that country. Libya remains divided between dozens of militias who rule separately the towns and cities of the country (many of whom have bluntly refused the transitional government orders to disarm). Human rights abuses including torture are rife, and rebellions, although at present isolated, remain real possibilities. Even if the Ba’th in Syria were somehow to be ousted with the help of western powers, there would still be major parts of the country in which any new political order would be fiercely resisted.

Syria has not been a country in which sectarian difference has taken a central role until now, but the uprising since early 2011 has increasingly taken on a divisive character. The regime accuses the opposition of being organised by adherents of militant Sunni Islam, whilst the opposition portrays the regime as supported only by the small Alawite sect of which the Assads are part. Both characterisations are untrue, but their effect on polarising opinion within Syria is real. It is likely that any future government that came to office forcibly through external sponsorship and military assistance would prompt a rebellion that would take on a sectarian character. The urge to repress such rebellions to protect the new order would follow. And that is where the parallel with Fallujah will once again begin to resound.

This year’s headlines so far suggest a turn for the worse, reports Mike Phipps

You know things are not going well when even the puppet Government installed by the occupying US forces criticises its masters. In January, President Hamid Karzai publicly accused the US military of torture and arbitrary detention at Bagram Air Base, the largest US-run prison in Afghanistan.

While the allegations of beatings, sensory deprivation and exposure to freezing conditions are entirely credible, Karzai’s professed concern seems highly cynical, given his regime’s appalling human rights abuses. His outburst may be a response to the fear of being sidelined, as the Obama Administration looks to pursue peace negotiations with sections of the Taliban. This in itself is an admission of how far the occupying forces are from achieving their goals in the country.

Video evidence of US soldiers urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans won’t have helped the US win hearts and minds. Despite the usual damage limitation from the US Defense Department, these scenes are part of a broader policy of systematic humiliation of captives. It led to the piling up and abuse of naked detainees in Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the smearing of menstrual blood on a Guantanamo detainee.

The headlines alone from Afghanistan make grim reading:

• “US-led forces kill five Afghan civilians” – 18th January;
• “Two British soldiers arrested over allegations of sex abuse with 10-year-old children” – 19th January.
• “NATO bombing kills eight Afghan children” – 11th Februar

The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose in 2011 for the fifth year in a row. Over one sixth of these – 410 deaths – were at the hands of US-led forces and nearly half of these were by NATO air strikes.

“The Obama Administration’s surge in Afghanistan has failed on virtually every front,” reports the US-based website Antiwar.com. It is difficult to disagree. In February, Reuters reported that only 1% of Afghan police and soldiers are capable of operating independently, according to a leading US commander.

The US may have plans to reduce their forces in Afghanistan to a “mere” quarter of a million, but they are currently adding to their 450 military bases. Much of the new construction is for special operations forces and hi-tech bases that can expand the use of Predator Drones, one of the major causes of civilian death.