A call for backup

[N.O.R.F]

A call for backup

Despite not consulting them on its Somalia policy to begin with, America is now calling for the African Union to send in peacekeeping forces.

 

When the United States decided to support Ethiopia in an attack on Somalia and followed this up by mounting its own air attacks on Somalia, it didn't consult the African Union (AU).

 

But now that the bankruptcy of its Somalia policy has been revealed (it has admitted that the "terrorists" it wanted to kill in Somalia were not hit by the air attacks) the US ambassador to Kenya and Somalia, Michael Ranneberger, is in a hurry to get an AU "peacekeeping" force into Somalia yesterday - so to speak.

 

Said Ranneberger: "Deploying an African stabilisation force into Somalia quickly is vitally important to support efforts to achieve stability ... [it] will enable the rapid withdrawal of Ethiopian forces without creating a security vacuum."

 

So the US knew that a "security vacuum" could be created in Somalia and yet it urged Ethiopia to go in. Did it think that Ethiopia could permanently occupy Somalia?

 

No, it didn't. America's idea, all the time, was to go in on the back of the Ethiopians, "take out" the bad guys on America's "war-on-terrorism" list, and then hand the mess - and in Somalia, the US knew from its unhappy experience there in the 1990s that it would be a mess of a spectacular kind - over to the AU to sort out. Preferably without giving the AU any money to do it with.

 

The concept is so cynical and barefaced that one wonders why a man like President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda can't see through it. He is reported to have offered to send over 1,000 Ugandan soldiers to Somalia, as part of an AU peacekeeping force.

 

What Museveni must realise is that the US, under Bush, is not some cautious ally with whom one can concoct subtle diplomatic "offensives" under the cloak of "deniability". With the neocons, US interests reign supreme at all times, no matter who gets embarrassed.

 

Museveni should consider this: Uganda itself has a sizeable Islamic community of its own. What would he think if, as a result of ****** but fiery statements verbalised by some Islamists, the US were to target them as potential Al Qaida recruits? Would he acquiesce if the US wanted to send troops into Uganda to take them out? Or worse still, suppose the US decided that the nominally "Christian" Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) would serve its anti-Islamist agenda better than Museveni's government, and offered support to the LRA?

 

The AU is full of other countries that could fall under a similar scenario. Nigeria, for instance, has a huge Muslim population, many of whom are, as a matter of course, quite "fundamentalist" in outlook and thereby potential Al Qaida sympathisers. What would President Olusegun Obasanjo say if the US were to decide to covertly subvert the more militant of the Islamic states in Northern Nigeria that have adopted Sharia (Islamic Law) as their mode of legal and social practice?

 

Even South Africa, although its Muslim population is far less numerous, could fall into the "war-on-terror" net. The danger to these countries will increase whenever the US, whether acting in Iraq, Somalia, Iran, or Syria, or against the Hizbullah in Lebanon, does not scruple to offend Islamic sensibilities,

 

Now, when the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed in 1963, one of its mottos was "Hands Off Africa!" This was a warning to the combatants in the Cold War - the Americans and their allies on the one hand and the Soviets and theirs on the other - to keep their ideological battles out of Africa. It is time the successor to the OAU, the AU, renewed its faith in the idea of not allowing any superpower to ride roughshod over any part of Africa for its own purposes.

 

CiF

 

Some interesting responses

[Xoogsade]

It is more of their realization that the legitimacy of the tfg in the eyes of the somalis who matter the most depends on Ethiopia's withdrawal or its inclusion in a larger more diverse african troops. The TFG looks more of the sham it always had been from inception. They and their immoral supporters thought riding ethiopian tanks into Muqdisho will be a success forgetting governments are built on trust and on the character of its leadership, with both lacking, the TFG seems to be struggling and begging for acceptance. The more these african troops are delayed, the tougher it will get for the Xabashi stooges to rule the country. Credibility is important and the TFG never had one to begin with.

[N.O.R.F]

Have we even read a non-Somali pro-TFG/Ethio piece yet?