by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
While nearly half the population of Somalia teeters at the edge of starvation, the U.S. is preventing the United Nations from delivering desperately needed food. According to documents obtained by theNew York Times, the Americans demand that aid agencies guarantee that no fees are paid “at roadblocks, ports, warehouses, airfields or other transit points'' controlled by Shabab resistance fighters. Since the Shabab and other militias control more than half of the area in conflict, United Nations compliance with U.S. conditions would mean starvation for about three million people.Indeed, if international aid were restricted to areas controlled by the U.S.-backed puppet regime, only a few neighborhoods in Mogadishu, the capital, would be fed.
America’s Somali puppets are incapable of even defending themselves, much less maintaining a functioning government and infrastructure. Five thousand African Union (AU) soldiers – comprised mainly of Ugandans, the U.S.’s shock troops in Africa – keep control of the airport, the regime’s main link to the outside world. According to the United Nations, AU soldiers engage in “indiscriminate shelling” of civilians.
As the Americans’ Somali puppets’ position becomes more untenable, the U.S. squeezes the UN’s food delivery system, in effect punishing the entire Somali people. U.S. food relief to the UN’s Somali operations in 2009 was only half that of 2008. In 2007, United Nations officials declared Somalia the “worst humanitarian crisis in Africa…worse than Darfur,” as a result of the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion in late 2006. Thus, the United States has been waging continuous war against the people of Somalia, directly or by proxy, for over three years under the guise of the “war on terror.”
The United Nations official in charge of humanitarian operations in Somalia, Mark Bowden, says Washington’s charge that Shabab militants are siphoning off UN aid are “ungrounded.” A White House spokesman claimed that it’s not the U.S., but the Shabab that are denying Somalis access to food aid through their war against the Mogadishu “government.” It’s a macabre variation on the excuse Americans routinely offer when they massacre civilians: that the “insurgents” use civilians as “human shields,” forcing the Americans to kill them.
