By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, May 2009.
Sending the Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers Sazanami and Samidare 12,000 kilometres from Japanese shores to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia clearly marks a further dimunition of Japan’s postwar pacifism. While it has been suggested that China’s decision to send some of its fleet to the region was the catalyst for Tokyo to join the international naval operation, the predominant motive is more likely to have been Japan’s eagerness to flex its substantial but as yet unused military muscle on the world stage.
Japan’s antipiracy mission in the Gulf of Aden appears to enjoy popular support, according to a government survey carried out in January. More than 60 percent of those polled thought the SDF should be involved, with the number of those in favour rising to over 70 percent among men in their 20s. The latter figure raises doubts about the motives behind the apparent enthusiasm for Japan’s newfound global policing role. Unless young males are significantly more concerned about the security of international shipping than the rest of the population, it seems to suggest a recognition that the Somali pirates are yet another convenient pretext on the road to a more assertive Japanese military.
Given its controversial militaristic past, any Japanese attempts to expand the military’s global role are best advanced under the guise of “peacekeeping.” Thus, in an op-ed in The Mainichi Daily News on March 23, 2009, Iokibe Makoto, President of the National Defense Academy stated: “While defending Japan against attacks from foreign enemies is its ultimate duty, in an age where regional conflicts and instability carry global implications, peacekeeping operations with the purpose of building peace and maintaining stability have also become a major SDF duty.”
Iokibe went on to explain how Japan’s military academy has been adapting to serve the wider role envisaged for the country’s “Self-Defense” Forces. “With peacekeeping operations becoming a major pillar of the SDF’s missions, there will come a day when students at NDA will become commanders leading units to a location in a different culture…,” he said. To prepare Japanese officers for this experience, “…all NDA students…will be required to take an area studies course….” And to teach these new courses, “…instructors who specialize in the Korean Peninsula, Oceania, South Asia, and Africa, whom NDA had heretofore lacked, have been newly appointed.”
One wonders what MSDF students might have learned from the academy’s African specialists before they were dispatched to deal with the pirates of Somalia earlier this year.
Blaming the Victims
Let’s hope they’ve been better informed about the recent history of Somalia than the general public have been. An Associated Press (AP) report, carried by The Mainichi Daily News, highlighting the increased activity of Somali pirates is typical of the mainstream media’s failure to inform people of the context of foreign – mainly American – meddling in which that piracy developed. The AP report reduced nearly two turbulent decades of Somali history to one carefully crafted, deceptive sentence: “Somalia has not had a functioning government since clan-based militias overthrew a socialist dictator in 1991 and then turned on each other.”
Whether intentional or not – you can probably guess which interpretation this writer opts for – the effect is to absolve the so-called “international community” led by the US of its responsibility for Somalia’s problems, by solely blaming internal factors for the breakdown of its governance.
Significantly omitted from the AP’s strictly factual but misleading account is any mention of who backed that “socialist dictator,” Mohamed Siad Barre, during the latter years of his oppressive regime, after he had been abandoned by his erstwhile Soviet sponsors for attacking Ethiopia, which had just had its own Marxist revolution.
In “Somalia: A Case Study in Interventionism,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo explains what happened next. “The Marxist dictator Barre then turned to the Americans, who were more than glad to welcome him with open arms. A US naval base was soon established at Berbera, and US aid poured in. But the regime was shaky. Dissatisfaction with Barre’s increasingly despotic rule led to rebellions, especially in the north and among the military corps, and the dictator reacted with savage reprisals carried out by his feared Red Berets.
“In the south of the country, the Marjeerteen clan was targeted on account of its support for anti-government guerillas: civilians were slaughtered, along with livestock, and water sources were despoiled. The result was a government-created famine. Barre’s next victims were the Isaaq clan in the north. Government troops leveled the city of Hargeysa, and the United Nations condemned the campaign as attempted genocide. Barre remained an American ally and recipient of US aid throughout this period.”
The AP article also neglected to tell readers that, for a short period in 2006, Somalis did have a “functioning government,” which had popular support from a people weary of being pillaged by the warlords that replaced Barre. In a 2007 Black Agenda Radio commentary, Glen Ford described the promising developments in the war-ravaged country: “When Muslim groups early last year subdued the warlords of Somalia – a nation that is 99 percent Muslim – a semblance of peace and at least some hope for the future took root. By all accounts, life was getting back to something like ‘normal’ for a people that had known only brutal warfare since 1991.”
That hope was short-lived, however. Just as Somalis themselves were establishing some peace and stability after 15 years of violent anarchy, foreigners intervened yet again to mess things up for them. As Ford put it: “Such a peace was unacceptable to George Bush’s crew, who whipped up an hysteria in the United States, claiming Al Qaida was establishing a base in Somalia, and urged the regime in neighboring Ethiopia, Somalia’s historical rival, to attack last December.” Many other informed observers, including American journalist Eric Margolis, were equally dismissive of neocon claims of links between Somali Muslims and Islamic terrorism. “In 2006, a stable, popular government was finally established in southern Somalia, a moderate Islamist movement known as Islamic Courts Union,” Margolis wrote. “It was quickly marked for death by the Islamophobic Bush administration which claimed, quite falsely, that the Courts Union was in league with al-Qaeda.”
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
However, just as in Iraq, neocon fabrications about Islamic terrorism in Somalia have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, while the world was focused on the Middle East, virtually the same scenario was being played out in the Horn of Africa – even with the same villainous characters playing key roles.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz advocated a US invasion of Iraq, incredibly claiming links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. A few weeks later, the indefatigable neocon hawk was in East Africa alleging that al-Qaeda terrorists might use Somalia as “escape routes.”
While Iraqis suffered the disastrous consequences of Wolfowitz’s spurious claims within eighteen months, it took a little longer before Somalis met a similar fate. In early 2006, the CIA began covert support of secular Somali warlords, brought together under the Orwellian-sounding Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). Proving that a decade is a long time in geopolitics, the CIA recruited some of the warlords that had driven US forces out of the country in the early 1990s, following the dragging of the corpses of American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, an event forever etched in the popular imagination by the propagandistic film “Black Hawk Down.”
The formerly infamous warlords – now redeemed in American eyes as valuable allies in the all-encompassing “war on terror” – were ostensibly hired to hunt down a few individuals suspected of involvement in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. If the operation was intended to counter the Islamic movement, it had precisely the opposite effect, as many moderate Somalis, angered by US support for the brutal and corrupt warlords, increasingly turned to the Islamic Courts, or to even more radical groups.
With the warlord-led Transitional Federal Government losing ground to the Islamists in Somalia, the US enlisted yet another dubious ally. Arguably possessing a human rights record worse than Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – not that one would know from international media coverage – Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi was hardly the best candidate to resolve what the US cited as the “threat to international peace and security” posed by the situation in Somalia, as it pushed through a UN resolution giving the green light to the Ethiopian invasion in December 2006.
If the Ethiopians intended to bring peace and security to Somalia, they went about it in a most peculiar manner. Amnesty International reported that the US-trained Ethiopian troops were “slaughtering Somalis like goats.” The US navy didn’t help matters either with their somewhat less than surgical air strikes which frequently killed goat herders instead of Islamic militants. If the dead goat herders hadn’t harboured any anti-Western sentiments, their embittered sons are less likely to be convinced of America’s good intentions.
After having provoked an Iraq-style insurgency, the brutal two-year Ethiopian military occupation came to end in January 2009, leaving behind the worst humanitarian disaster in Africa (a pretext for yet another “humanitarian intervention”?); a radicalized population, prime recruits for future terrorist attacks against the West; and that piracy epidemic.
As for those pirates that the Japanese MSDF are likely to encounter in their African mission, many of them are the same fighters forced to flee before the Ethiopian-driven US tanks invading their country, touted as part of Bush’s “war on terror,” which you may remember was supposed to “rid the world of evil” instead of multiplying it manyfold.
All of which prompts the question: was American policy in Somalia unfathomably stupid – or diabolically cunning?
In “Crusade Number Four,” Eric Margolis provides a succinct answer: “US policy in Somalia is being driven by neoconservatives seeking war against the entire Muslim World….” As to who might benefit from such a war, Margolis’ next sentence offers a clear hint. “Israel, which has maintained close intelligence, military, and economic links to Ethiopia’s regime, is also discreetly involved: it has long conducted covert operations in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea’s western littoral.”
In that op-ed piece, Japan’s top military educator described the environment in which NDA graduates will be operating as “a tumultous time filled with persistent threats.” He neglected, however, to credit the indispensable role of US foreign policy, under the misdirection of pro-Israeli elements, in ensuring that those threats are created and sustained faster than America and its allies’ military forces could ever possibly hope to deal with them.
On the bright side, while the job prospects for many young Japanese might look bleak, it seems there will be no shortage of work in the nation’s steadily globalizing “defense” industry for some time to come.
