|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
Commentary: Ethiopian invasion to spur anti-US foment Nicola Nasser January 9, 2007 RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The United States' latest foreign policy blundering, orchestrating the recent Ethiopian invasion of yet another Arab League Muslim capital, has created a new hotbed of militant anti-Americanism in the turbulent Horn of Africa. The message sent has been clear: no Arab or Muslim metropolis has impunity unless it falls into step with vital US regional interests. The US-backed December 28 Ethiopian invasion of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, is closely linked in terms of motivation, methods, goals, and consequences, to the bogged-down US blunders in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Sudan - as well as more generally in Iran and Afghanistan - but most of all to US policy as regards the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Mogadishu is the third Arab capital after Jerusalem and Baghdad to fall to US imperialist aggression, directly or indirectly through Israel, Ethiopia, or other proxies, and the fourth such invasion if Israel's temporary 1982 occupation of Beirut is taken into account. America's attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East is reminiscent of the British-French Sykes-Pico colonial dismembering of the region and is similarly certain to give rise to Pan-Arab grassroots opposition, as part of a wider Pan-Islamic unifying force. The US blunder in Somalia could not be more humiliating to Somalis. Washington has delegated to its Ethiopian ally - Mogadishu's historical national enemy - the mission of restoring the rule of law and order to the same country Addis Ababa has incessantly sought to dismember and disintegrate. At the same time, the US has also singled Ethiopia out as the only neighboring country permitted to contribute to the backbone of the US-proposed and UN-adopted multinational foreign force in Somalia after Addis Ababa's invasion, thus setting the stage for a widespread anti-American insurgency. America's manipulation is there for all to see and a new US-led anti-Arab and anti-Muslim regional alliance is already in the works. The US-allied Ethiopian invaders have already taken over Somalia after the withdrawal of the United Islamic Courts (UIC) forces, which rejected an offer of amnesty in return for surrendering their arms, refusing unconditional dialogue with the invaders. The withdrawal of the UIC forces from urban centers is reminiscent to the Iraqi army's retreat and the melting away of Afghanistan's Taliban, heralding a similar bloody aftermath in Somalia with the rise of guerrilla warfare. The UIC leaders who went underground are already promising retaliation, "terrorist" tactics being their expected weapon of choice and American targets likely to be linked to the Ethiopian invaders. It doesn't take much to conclude that US President George W. Bush's policy in the Horn of Africa is threatening American lives as well as regional stability. According to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York: "Because the United States has accused Somalia of harboring Al Qaeda suspects, the Ethiopian-Eritrean proxy conflict increases the opportunities for terrorist infiltration of the Horn and East Africa and for ignition of a larger regional conflict," in which the United States would be deeply embroiled. Eritrea accused the US January 1 of being behind the war in Somalia. "This war is between the Americans and the Somali people," Eritrean information minister Ali Abdu told Reuters. The US administration found no harm in keeping divided Somalia as easy prey for the country's warlords, and punished by bloody tribal disputes since 1991, probably finding another guarantee-by-default for US regional interests in such a status quo. America would have indefinitely accepted the political chaos and humanitarian tragedy in one of the world's poorest countries were it not for the emergence of the indigenous grassroots UIC, which provided some social security and order under the guise of a central government that made some progress toward unifying the country. Preempting intensive Arab-, Muslim-, and European-mediation efforts between the UIC and the transitional government, Washington moved quickly to secure the December 6 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1725. The UNSC resolution recognized the Baidoa government - organized in Kenya by US regional allies and dominated by the warlords - as the legitimate authority in Somalia after sending Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, to Addis Ababa in November for talks with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on bailing out the besieged transitional government by coordinating an Ethiopian military intervention. Resolution 1725 also urged all member states, "in particular those in the region," to refrain from interference in Somalia, but the ink had barely dried on the advisory measure when Washington was already acting in violation by providing training, intelligence, and consultation to at least 8,000 Ethiopian troops who stormed into Baidoa and its vicinity before the major Ethiopian invasion. A fact repeatedly denied by both Washington and Addis Ababa, but confirmed by independent sources. To contain the repercussions, Washington is vainly trying to distance itself from the Ethiopian invasion, with US officials repeatedly denying having used Ethiopia as an American proxy in Somalia. Moreover, the Bush administration is trying to play down the significance of the invasion itself. "The State Department issued internal guidance to staff members, instructing officials to play down the invasion in public statements," read a copy of the guidelines obtained by The New York Times. Mission Accomplished? "Mission Accomplished," Addis Ababa's Daily Monitor announced when the Ethiopian forces blitzed into Mogadishu, heralding a new US regional alliance at the southern approaches to the oil-rich Arab heartland in the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. In 2003, the same phrase had adorned a banner behind President Bush as he declared an end to major combat operations in the US-led invasion of Iraq. All facts on the ground indicate the US mission in Somalia will be as much a failure as that in Iraq, and equally misleading. American foreign policy has therefore sown the seeds of a new violent hotbed of anti-US insurgency in the Arab world, in the heart of what Western strategists call the Middle East, by succeeding in Somalia in what the US failed to achieve in Lebanon a few months ago. Washington was thus able to prevent the UN from imposing a ceasefire in Somalia until the Ethiopian invasion had seized Mogadishu, in contrast to the Israeli-Hezbollah war this past summer when the Lebanese resistance group and national unity prevented Israeli invaders from using the same US green-light to achieve their goals in Beirut. In both cases, Washington used the UN as a fig leaf to cover the Israeli and Ethiopian invasions, repeating the Iraq scenario, and in both cases, initiating military intervention to abort mediation efforts as well as sabotaging dialogues aimed at solving internal conflicts peacefully. In Somalia, as in Iraq, Washington is also trying to delegate the mission of installing a pro-US regime - whose leaders were carried in on the invading tanks - to a multinational force in which Somalia's neighboring countries are not represented. A multinational force that will no doubt later be called upon not to interfere in Somalia's internal affairs, as it has been prevented from doing in the case of Iran and Syria regarding US-occupied Iraq. The Bush administration has expressed sympathy for the security concerns that prompted Ethiopia to intervene in Somalia. Thus, once again, the pretexts of Washington's so-called war on terror have been used to justify the Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu as a preventive self-defense measure, only to create the very counterproductive environment that will certainly increase violence and expand a national dispute into a wider regional conflict. Ethiopia's actual security concerns Regionally, the war on terror pretexts used by Addis Ababa to justify its invasion is likely to be a smokescreen for land-locked Ethiopia's own historical and strategic aspirations for an outlet to the Red Sea, seeing the seizing of Somali territory as the only available solution, after the independence of Eritrea deprived it of the Assab seaport. Agreed upon peaceful arrangements with Somalia and Eritrea is the only other option that would grant Ethiopia sea-access - whether to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Bab Al Mandeb, or the Arabian Sea, and through such routes, to the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. However, this option was trumped by the imperialist dreams of Greater Ethiopia that took drove the regimes of Emperor Hailie Selassie, the military Marxist Mengistu Haile Mariam, and the incumbent US-backed oppression of Meles Zenawi. These Ethiopian regimes were all deluded by the military might of Somalia - the only country resembling a nation state in a region that had disintegrated into the world's poorest, decimated by the tribal strife left over from the British, French, and Italian Western colonialist powers. Hence Ethiopia's wars with Eritrea and Somalia. The Eritrean fear of an Ethiopian invasion of Assab via Somalia is both realistic and legitimate, given that Ethiopia's borders are, like Israel's, still not demarcated, its zeal for strategic sea-access still present, and its interest in militarily achieving such access still ongoing due to the virtual state of war still influencing its Somali and Eritrean relations. Such territorial aspirations on the part of Ethiopia are behind reports on Eritrean intervention in Somalia, denied by Asmara, as well as the regional and international warnings against the possible development of the Ethiopian invasion into a wider regional conflict that could also involve Djibouti and Kenya. Internally in Ethiopia, successive regimes since Selassie have kept the country's demographic structure a top state secret. An official illusion has been created of Ethiopia being the same Christian nation it has been for hundreds of years, while barely succeeding to veil the independent confirmation that at least half the population are now Muslims. A Muslim presence not represented in the makeup of Ethiopia's ruling elite but also a factor behind the oppressive policies of the incumbent US-backed regime. The rising Muslim demographic holds the key to the understanding Ethiopia's ruling elite's fear of the emergence of a unified Somalia, given the impetus it would give to the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), representing the 1.5 million Somali-origin Muslim tribesmen inhabiting the 200,000-square-kilometer (77,220-square-mile) desert region of Addis Ababa. Such fear was what led to the 1977-88 Ethiopia-Somalia war, and remains a festering hotbed of bilateral friction. A united independent Somalia, and a liberated or in revolt ONLF, therefore, would inevitably deprive Ethiopia of its desert-corridor to the coast, giving rise at the very least to adverse effects or an imbalance altogether to Addis Ababa's internal status quo. While it is true that such a development also creates a great potential for Al Qaeda infiltration, it remains too inflated a pretext for Addis Ababa to justify its unconvincing trumpeting of the "Islamic threat" regarding the ascendancy of Somalia's UIC. Indeed, Ethiopia's justification of its Somalia invasion as intended to quell the "Islamist threat" in line with Washington's goals is less than genuine," leading some UIC leaders to declare "jihad" against the "Christian invasion" of their country, thereby helping transform an Ethiopian political miscalculation into a seemingly "Muslim-Christian" war, which in fact has far more provocateurs in Addis Ababa than in Mogadishu. Thus the sectarian inter-Muslim war fomented by the US-led occupation of Iraq as part of a "divide and rule" policy may now be coupled with a "religious war" in the Horn of Africa to protect the US military presence there - supposedly "defending" Arab oil-wealth in the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq - against a threat to its mobility from the south. Such a war could drive a new wedge between Arabs and their neighbors, in a replay of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in tandem with a 60-year-old Israeli strategy of sowing discord between Arabs and their Ethiopian, Iranian, and Turkish geopolitical strategic depth. However, such a US-Israeli strategy is sure to backfire. Somalis will unite against a foreign invasion in a country where Islamism is the essence of nationalism and where Pan-Arabism supports a country too weak and poverty-stricken to be adversely affected by Arab League divides. An overwhelming majority of Somalis are Muslims with no divisive sectarian loyalties and no polarizing neighboring sectarian centers as in the case of Iran for Iraq. The "Christian face" of the Ethiopian invasion would thus serve as a unifying factor, serving as a war-cry against America's neo-imperialist plans, themselves reminiscent of earlier "Christian" European colonialism. Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories |
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||
