Somalia: A History of U.S. Interventions

By Anand Gopal

This was an article I read at the MR Zine about U.S. involvement in Somalia. This can also bring into focus the recent U.S. airstrikes in Somalia against Islamic insrugents.

Anand Gopal is a doctoral student in physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

There's a woman -- some call her "Black Hawk Down" lady -- who lives in a packed, squalid neighborhood in the middle of Mogadishu and runs a rather simple but grisly museum. For under a dollar, visitors can view her prized possession, the mangled, mud-splattered nose of a US Black Hawk helicopter that was shot down during the American intervention in Somalia thirteen years ago. The wreckage, quite popular among Somalis and foreigners alike, serves as a macabre memento of the decades of civil war that have raged on Somali soil. But more than anything, this strange little museum in the heart of Mogadishu reminds one of the constant, often disastrous foreign interventions into Somali affairs. As US-backed Ethiopian troops occupy Mogadishu and American helicopters fire at targets in southern Somalia, the time is ripe for a reexamination of the US role in the region.

The Mayor of Mogadishu

American involvement in Somalia began as early as World War II, when the US rejected the British-sponsored consolidation of all areas with Somali majority (including the Ethiopian territory of Ogaden, but excluding areas in northern Kenya, then under British control) into a Somali state. The US, eager to protect the territory and rule of their strong ally Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, instead fashioned a partitioningthat has defined the politics of the region ever since. Eritrea was placed under federation with Ethiopia, while Somalis were dispersed among Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the Republic of Somalia, which gained independence in 1960. The consequences were calamitous; Eritrea's amalgamation with Ethiopia sparked an increasingly bloody thirty-year battle for independence, while the goal of a Greater Somalia fueled rapacious irredentist wars over the next fifty years.

With unwavering US support of Selassie's monarchy in Ethiopia, the USSR increasingly turned towards Somalia, and the Horn of Africa became a critical theater for the Cold War. Siad Barre's coup in 1969 ushered in "scientific socialism" and attracted even more Soviet assistance, and in 1975 the US lost influence in Ethiopia following the overthrow of Haile Selassie and the monarchy. By the late Seventies, the Russians shifted support away from Somalia and began underwriting Mengistu's brutal regime in Ethiopia. No sooner had the Russians left than the US sought to bring Somalia into its sphere.

The Carter administration was quick to declare that Somalia should become "a friend." Befriending Somalia, however, meant supporting the severely repressive Barre regime, with its dismal human rights record and penchant for causing regional wars. Barre packed the government with members of his Mareheen clan, tortured and summarily executed opponents, silenced critics, outlawed opposition parties, crushed freedom of the press, and employed a feared secret police. Barre also exacerbated existing clan divisions by habitually playing various clans off one another.

Carter easily forgot the rhetoric of being a "human rights president" whenever strategic interests were involved. Somalia, a sparsely populated desert nation with few natural resources, nonetheless lies in a vitally strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea. The port of Berbera overlooks sea routes between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. US presence in Berbera, together with the southern port of Kismayu, would ensure control over the flow of Mid East oil. Moreover, American officials understood that the Somali ports could provide key bases in the attempt to neutralize nearby Soviet presence and defend US interests in the Persian Gulf (indeed, Berbera was used as an intermediate deployment base during the first Gulf War). Carter pledged military and financial aid in return for control of Berbera and other bases. Foreign multinationals, including four major oil companies, were quick to win concessions. The US, fearing a direct confrontation with Soviet troops, also insisted that Barre withdraw Soviet troops from Ogaden in Ethiopia, which became a sticking point in Somali-US negotiations.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran and the concomitant loss of a base in the Indian Ocean convinced officials to finalize the deal; thus one of the Reagan Administration's first acts was to move US troops and weapons into Berbera and send over $40 million in military aid to the Barre government. Somalia quickly became a US client state. In subsequent years the US delivered an average of $80 million in economic and military aid per year (through 1987), topping $115 million in 1984 and 1985. Somalia became one of the leading recipients of US military assistance in all of Africa in the eighties, and received almost $700 million in overall aid during the decade. In addition to US support, Barre enjoyed assistancefrom Italy, West Germany, China, and South Africa. Barre employed much of this aid to fight Ethiopia over the Ogaden region and to suppress resistance movements within the country. He used massive aerial bombardment of the north to crush Somali resistance fighters, killing and displacing thousands in the process. However, Barre was unable to contain the growing insurgency, fueled by widespread hatred of his regime. Moreover, by the late eighties, Somalia's strategic importance began to wane as Moscow's influence in the region decreased and Saudi and Egyptian compliance with the US increased. By 1990, Barre had almost no support inside or outside the country, except for continued American logistical support, small-scale economic support, and military training. The extent of the rebellion and civil war was so widespread that Barre had little authority outside of the capital Mogadishu, an ignominious fact that earned him the derisory moniker "the Mayor of Mogadishu." Barre's power slipped rapidly, and he was finally overthrown by a coalition of guerilla groups in early 1991. Somalia has not seen a central government since.

Black Hawk Down

The Somalia of US and Barre's creation was one of shambles. It was a nation of refugees, with over 40% of the population classified as such at any given time. The country's political structure was nonexistent, with bandits and guerillas roaming and controlling the lawless countryside. Inflation soared, the formal economy collapsed, and there was no national banking system to speak of. Most of the population owned weapons and were ready to pledge allegiance to whichever forces could provide stability and protection. Clan divisions, which Barre so ruthlessly exploited, gave birth to independent and armed factions fighting for regional and local control. By 1992, widespread famine and drought devastated the country. Years of economic mismanagement, cronyism, graft, war, and repression, under Barre's direction and with the sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit support of the US, had taken their toll. Yet, with the Western media dutifully supplying decontextualized images of emaciated Somali children, the US began the steady drumbeat of intervention. The worst of the famine and drought passed in the summer, and the situation steadily improved towards the close of the year. Nonetheless, in December 1992, Washington launched "Operation Restore Hope," with the mandate of "creating a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian relief." And thus began the US's greatest military defeat in twenty years.

The intervention in Somalia, together with the first Gulf War, was actually the opening salvo of a battle of a different kind. This was a battle against the prevalent public perception, since Vietnam, that US force should be used sparingly, if at all. The Somali intervention marked the first in a series of "humanitarian interventions," designed to render open, substantial intervention and even war once again fit for public consumption. Indeed, as then Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Africa Affairs revealed, a plan for a smaller, more aid-oriented intervention was scrapped because "it failed to meet the US military's new insistence on the application of massive, overwhelming force." Intervention would also provide a sorely needed stability for US business interests in the region, especially the four major oil companies with concessions in the country. Sure enough, during the US stay in Somalia the new US embassy operated from the compounds of oil multinational Conoco.

The Americans, connected in many Somalis' minds with the detested Barre dictatorship, did little to win friends. In June of 1993, US and UN forces attacked a civilian hospital with over 500 occupants. In July, US helicopters fired into a meeting of political, religious, and clan leaders, killing 54. In September, American forces opened fire into a crowd, killing over 50 civilians. Other UN troops' hands were unclean as well. Belgian soldiers engaged in hundreds of incidents of rape, torture, and murder. Canadian troops frequently used unnecessary force, killing scores of civilians. Malaysian, Pakistani, French, Nigerian, and Tunisian forces were all accused of vandalism, property destruction, and civilian attacks. It is only in this context that the famous events of 3 October, where eighteen US rangers were killed and one captured, are sensible. The violent Somali reaction, flashed across television screens worldwide and later fictionalized in Black Hawk Down, was built upon a searing hatred for repeated US and international intervention in local affairs. What the news clips failed to show, however, was the Americans' disproportionably violent reaction in which hundreds of Somalis were murdered.

The War on Terror

US intervention in Somalia ended in disaster for all sides concerned; as American forces sped away from Somalia, tail firmly between legs, Somalia continued its precipitous descent into anarchy and chaos. Various warlords and clans parceled Somalia between themselves, and civilians often bore the brunt of internecine fighting. In 1999, the most influential warlords made the first attempts at forming a national transitional government (TNG); Ethiopia (and by extension, the US) withdrew support, however, and soon the effort lost its feet. Ethiopians preferred to support a transitional government in which it could play a more influential role, and after 2000 Addis Ababa and Washington both supported the rival Somalia Restoration and Reconciliation Council (SRRC).

Under Siad Barre's tightly controlled regime, mosques and religious figures were often the only source of uncensored information. Under such conditions the population turned increasingly to political Islam, and, by the mid-eighties, al Ittihad al Islami established themselves as the foremost Islamist organization. By the mid-nineties, a warlord alliance headed by Abdilliahi Yusef and Ethiopia (anxious to quell its own restive Muslim population) succeeded in partially crushing al Ittihad. In the process, parts of al Itthad dissolved into a series of independent Islamic courts, courts that would -- under the banner of law and order -- eventually unify as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and take power in June of 2006. Yusef, on the other hand, began a long and fruitful collaboration with Ethiopia and the US. Yusef was at the head of an Ethiopian-backed effort to unite the TNG, SRRC, and other factions, culminating in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of 2004.

The US, for its part, views Somalia as a major theatre of the War on Terror. When a group of regional warlords with a sense of marketability formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), the US was quick to provide funding. The Bush administration has frequently levied the charge that the UIC has ties to al Qaeda, an accusation that the warlords are only too happy to trumpet. The US-backed ARPCT fought in bloody clashes with the UIC in May of 2006, leaving hundreds dead. The UIC managed to capture Mogadishu in June, and almost immediately UIC leaders accused Ethiopian troops of crossing the border. The US began to meet regularly with Ethiopian officials and by late 2006 gave the go-ahead for the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia, with Yusef's TFG as the sponsored government. The TFG has an extremely weak base in Somalia, most notably in the capital city, and most likely cannot survive without direct Ethiopian intervention and indirect US support (a fact which Yusef clearly recognizes -- he is demanding that Ethiopian troops remain in Somalia for months).

As US AC-130s target suspected al Qaeda fighters in southern Somalia and scores lie dead in the bombers' wake, Somalis' oppression under imperialism and misgovernment seems destined to play on repeat. Moreover, Washington's repeated overtures to the least popular in Somalia -- dictators like Barre and warlords like Yusef -- ensure that anti-Americanism will continue to do well in Somali hearts and minds. As the US strives to make Somalia safe for multinationals, the Somali horizon looks bleak indeed. But perhaps some will find a silver lining; deep in the heart of Mogadishu, the Black Hawk Down lady will continue to have steady profits, and possibly even more souvenirs, for years to come.

Image From:
Washington Post

Mid Point In the Middle East? Part II

By Tariq Ali

This is the second part of an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.

Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Inferno in Iraq

If it is Syria’s shelter for the Iraqi resistance to the east that has made it the target for an American siege, it is with good reason. For in Iraq itself, the war has gone from bad to worse for Washington. Confronted with a dauntless insurgency, the Occupation is still—after three years and an outlay of over $200 billion—unable to assure regular supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjugated. Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil revenues have been looted wholesale by America’s local minions, not to speak of a horde of us contractors on the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the population under un sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, as sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears.

In the midst of these scenes from hell, the morale of the occupiers themselves is showing signs of giving way. Denied the luxury of a casualty-free attack from 30,000 feet, American troops are stalemated: confined to barracks, embarking on missions only with air power or ultra-protective ground cover, but still losing lives almost daily. In a February 2006 Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, 72 per cent thought the us should pull out within a year, and of those 29 per cent thought they should pull out ‘immediately’. Less than a quarter—23 per cent—backed the official stance, reiterated by the president and most of the domestic establishment, that the us must ‘stay the course’. Military reserves are now so depleted that the Pentagon has announced a waiver on criminal records for army recruits and is increasingly forced to rely on mercenaries bought in the marketplace.

The political cover laboriously constructed for the invasion has not fared much better. A first round of elections for a puppet government was boycotted en bloc by the Sunni community. A Made-in-usa constitution had to be rammed through with a manipulated plebiscite. A second round of elections has led to quarrels between the different American clients, and accompanying parliamentary deadlocks. Vast sums spent on bribes to assorted figures and funding for favoured candidates have yielded scant rewards, with the humiliation of the stipendiaries of both the cia and the Pentagon, Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, at the polls. At the time of writing, the American viceroy is using a Kurdish president to oust a Shi’a premier who has become inconvenient. Popular cynicism about the ‘Purple Revolution’ is general, the credibility of the authorities in Baghdad all but invisible.

Not that the liberation of Iraq is close at hand. The continuation of the Occupation has led to an intensification of the sectarian tensions upon which it has rested. Lethal attacks by Sunni on Shi’a and Shi’a on Sunni have now become a daily occurrence, with tragic loss of life in both communities. The initiative for these came at first from deadly bigots in the Sunni resistance. But the originating responsibility for a disastrous slide into communal warfare, alongside and interwoven with a patriotic struggle against the foreigner, lies with the Shi’a clerics—and above all Ayatollah Sistani—who threw in their lot with the conquerors of the country, fatally exposing their communities to risk of retribution from the resistance, so long as ordinary believers followed the direction of their leaders. The cisterns of sentimentality ladled over the collusion of Sistani with Bremer, Negroponte and Khalilzad rival those once poured over that other taciturn, dignified elder of his country, who in the evening of his years protected his people while keeping his distance from the occupier. But the Pétain of Najaf can expect a better fate. Gratitude for his role in saving the American bacon should assure him of the Nobel Peace Prize for which Thomas Friedman, a swaggering champion of the invasion, has recommended him.(1)

Had the Shi’a leadership at large, and Sistani in particular, told the Americans to pack their bags in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and Shi’a alike rose against the Occupation, Iraq would now be a free country with a reasonable prospect of communal harmony, founded on joint struggle against the invader. Instead Sistani and his entourage joined forces with the Americans to suppress the revolt of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the south and the Sunni resistance in the north and west of the country, with the aim of taking power in Baghdad under us tutelage, and building a sectarian regime on demographic preponderance and foreign arms. The confessional parliamentarism of this option has predictably guaranteed a deepening of sectarian hatreds, as the taint of collaboration with the enemy spread downwards, leading to indiscriminate retaliation and then reciprocal massacres by jihadis on one side and death squads on the other. The progenitors of this mayhem are now using it as a pretext to prolong their invasion of the country, with kickbacks to Sunni politicians to induce them to plead with America to stay, as if the occupation that has unleashed it were the remedy rather than source of an ongoing catastrophe.

The reality is that there is only one way to halt this spiral of violence: the path refused by Sistani in 2004, and now taken up once again by Muqtada al-Sadr—a national agreement between Sunni and Shi’a leaders, the maquis in the provinces and the militias in the capital, to secure the expulsion of all occupying forces from the country without further ado. ‘Cut off the head of the snake and remove all evil’, as Muqtada exhorted on returning from Lebanon to a shattered Samarra and Baghdad. His militias, largely made up of the urban poor, are recruited in quarters that were once strongholds of Iraqi communism. The expeditionary armies from America and Britain could not last a month in Iraq, if the Shi’a at large followed the example of their Sunni compatriots. Indeed, it would take only a vote in the puppet parliament demanding the immediate withdrawal of foreign forces to make the position of Washington and London untenable. Given the modern history of Iraq, there would still be many grave tensions in the relations between the two communities, not to speak of the recent role of the Kurds as the Gurkhas of the invader. But until the spreading poison of Western intrusion is removed, there is no chance of wounds, past or present, healing. The Anglo-American armies need to be driven out of the country, bag and baggage, for Iraq to have any future.

Iran in the crosshairs

In Basra and Maysan provinces, in the far south-east of Iraq, the local Shi’a authorities are now refusing to cooperate with the British occupiers. Their change of attitude is likely to bear some relation to the new situation across the border. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential elections of 2005 represents the biggest political upset of the new century in the region. The mayor of Tehran, a hard-core clerical militant from a working-class family and soldier in the war against Iraq, handsomely defeated the candidate favoured by the Western media and its masters: the corrupt clerical tycoon and political operator Rafsanjani, ruler of the country in the late 80s and early 90s, whose lavishly financed campaign—complete with hi-tech rallies, bumper stickers and hijab-edrah-rah girls—was overwhelmed by the protest votes of the dispossessed. Running on a platform of egalitarian redistribution—‘put the oil money on the table of the poor’—with a cd portraying his millionaire opponent living in the lap of luxury, while he gave much of his own salary to the needy, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who could, with any conviction, put on street-cleaner’s clothes to sweep the Tehran gutters. Against Rafsanjani’s hollow establishment rhetoric, he called for concrete solutions to the housing crisis and unemployment, and the problems these caused for young couples wanting to get married, as well as promising an end to corruption and to compliance with us dictates on energy issues.(2) As a result, the campaign was sharper in tone and offered a more serious choice of social policy than did the elections of 2004 in the United States, or 2005 in Britain, and saw a higher turnout.

Ahmadinejad reaped a harvest of discontent not only with the corrupt and brutal record of Rafsanjani’s presidency, but also the time of his spineless successor. Under the reformer Khatami, economic conditions steadily worsened even as oil prices rose, while naive overtures in foreign policy, Gorbachev-style, merely produced Bush’s Axis of Evil, much as the Russian versions met with Reagan’s Evil Empire. Ready to defend the rights of foreign investors, but rarely those of independent newspapers or student demonstrators, given to vacuous dialogues with the Pope on spiritual values, but incapable of firm protection of civil rights, Khatami manoeuvred ineffectually between contradictory pressures until he had exhausted his moral credit. Ahmadinejad’s base in the popular classes embeds a greater social sensibility in the new presidency, but there is no guarantee the practical outcomes will be better. The millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, are in desperate need of a coherent policy of national development. But Islamic voluntarism is not a stable alternative to creeping neoliberalism, and the temptation to ratchet up cultural repression to compensate for economic frustration is usually irresistible.

In Iran’s sprawling, opaque political system, the presidency is surrounded with competing centres of power, nearly all of them more conservative than the incumbent. The Supreme Leader Khamenei does not want to be upstaged by a young firebrand. The mullah–bazaari nexus behind Rafsanjani has already thwarted Ahmadinejad’s efforts to clean up the Oil Ministry, and remains entrenched in the Expediency Council. The pro-Western middle class that identified with Khatami is licking its wounds, and looking for a comeback. All are ready to pounce on any inexperience or misstep, of which there will be not a few.(3) The social backdrop to such disputes remains tense enough in its own right. The skewed development model inherited from the Shah, battered by nearly a decade of war, then subjected to Rafsanjani’s inflationary boom and Khatami’s privatizations, has produced a vast black market, an unofficial unemployment rate of 25 per cent and a looming agricultural crisis. Students are disaffected, labour rebellious, the Arab south-west, Kurdish and Azeri north, and Baluch south-east simmering. There is ample material in this maze for every kind of domestic and imperial intrigue to topple the unwelcome victor of a popular contest. Meanwhile, those who once dreamt of ‘liberation’ via a us intervention should take note of the worsening nightmare in Iraq.

But for the moment, it is Iran’s external role that holds centre stage. Here too the directionless clerical state has left a scene of confusion. Since the end of the Iran–Iraq War, its foreign policy has been little more than a ragbag of incoherent opportunism, combining conventional diplomacy of a cautious, typically collaborationist sort with largely costless gestures of solidarity to fellow-Shi’a abroad, principally Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, with crumbs for the Palestinians. Tehran was tactfully silent during the Gulf War of 1991, with not even a peep of complaint when us troops were stationed in the Holy Places. It instructed its surrogates in the Northern Alliance to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. It collaborated with the cia in preparations for the occupation of Iraq, and directed sciri and its other political assets to prop up us rule in Baghdad. In exchange for these favours to the Great Satan, what has it received? American armies camped on its eastern and western borders, and American threats to obliterate its reactors.

Even by the standards of today’s ‘international community’, the Western campaign to oblige Iran to abandon nuclear research to which it is entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself is breathtaking. The country is ringed by atomic states—India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel—and American nuclear submarines patrol its southern coast. Historically, it has every reason to fear outside threats. Although neutral, it was occupied by both British and Soviet forces during World War Two. Its elected government was overthrown by an Anglo-American coup in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988, the Western powers abetted Saddam Hussein’s onslaught, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. In the war’s final stages, the us destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf, and for good measure shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.

At present, Iran has little more than primitive gropings towards the technology needed for nuclear self-defence. Yet these are being presented as a casus belli by Bush, Blair, Chirac and Olmert, whose own states are armed with hundreds—in the American case, thousands—of nuclear weapons. Whining and cavilling over the small print of Vienna protocols, however warranted, is a futile pursuit for Iranian diplomacy. The country would do better to choose the right moment and simply withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of all the anachronistic emperors in the world, it is the most brazenly naked. There is not a shred of justification for the oligopoly of the present nuclear powers, so hypocritical it does not dare even speak its name—Israel, with 200 nuclear bombs, is never mentioned. There will never be nuclear disarmament until it is broken.

To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires a coherence and discipline of which there is little sign at present. With their own operational habits and doctrines to the fore, the Iranian clerics have played a profoundly divisive role in keeping the Shi’a parties and Sistani, Tehran’s bearded queen on the Iraqi chessboard, pitted against the resistance forces. A de-confessionalized alliance of forces from Tehran to Damascus, via Basra and Baghdad, would both damp down communalist conflict and strengthen Iran’s position. Little in the recent Iranian record suggests the country’s ruling institutions are capable of dealing with imperial arrogance when they confront it, other than with a hydra-headed incompetence. However, circumstances may now be forcing them into decisions they have so far sought to evade. It will not be easy to dress up surrender to Western threats as dignified national wisdom. It will not be difficult to turn Shi’a crowds and militia against the Western occupation across the border. Tehran controls more significant hostages today than a mere embassy. It is unlikely, if the country kept its nerve, that the Pentagon or its proxies would risk an attack.

Outlook

The crisis in the Middle East that began in 2001 is not in sight of any dénouement. At best, we are perhaps only at mid-point in the unfolding drama. New forces and faces are emerging that have something in common. Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad: each has risen by organizing the urban poor in their localities—Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Jenin, Beirut and Sidon, Tehran and Shiraz. It is in the slums that Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij have their roots. The contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West relies—overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, cia bagmen—could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum. The limits of this radicalism, so long as it remains captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial greed and comprador submission, but so long as what they offer is social alleviation rather than reconstruction, they are sooner or later liable to recuperation by the existing order. Leaders comparable to figures like Chávez or Morales have yet to emerge, with a vision capable of transcending national or communal divisions, a sense of continental unity and the self-confidence to broadcast it. Thanks to its ex-mayor, there is now a statue of Bolívar in Tehran. The region awaits an equivalent spirit.

Meanwhile, the emplacements of the hegemon have scarcely budged. The current turmoil is still confined to those areas of the Middle East where for twenty years or more American power never really penetrated: the West Bank, Ba’athist Iraq, Khomeinist Iran. The real us anchorage in the region lies elsewhere: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. There its traditional clients have held the line, and are on hand to help out with regional problems. Beyond them, Europe and Japan stand shoulder to shoulder with America on Iran and Palestine, while Russia, China and India make no difficulties. It is too soon to count on imperial defeat.

Notes

1. Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-cia Middle-East chief, had a similar view. In an essay that begins: ‘The January 30 elections in Iraq will be easily the most consequential event in Arab history since Israel’s six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s alliance in 1967’, Gerecht concludes: ‘Continue to pray every night for the health, well-being and influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani [sic] . . . It is a blessed thing that Sistani and his followers have a far better understanding of modern Middle Eastern history than the American or European liberals.’ ‘Birth of a Democracy’ in Gary Rosen, ed., The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, Cambridge 2005, pp. 237, 243.
2. For a hostile account from the Left, see Iran Bulletin—Middle East Forum, series ii, no. 3, December 2005. For a cinematic examination of the class polarization in Iran see Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), scripted by Abbas Kiarostami—the film was banned by the Khatami government. Will Panahi’s latest offering, Offside—about women and football—share the same fate under Khatami’s successor?
3. Denial of the Judeocide, a typical expression of the ignorance, stupidity and prejudice of fundamentalist culture, is one of the first examples. Euro-American outrage—the French Socialist Party’s Fabius has gone so far as to call for an international travel ban on Ahmadinejad—is, of course, the merest tartufferie. Iran had no part in the Shoah. Turkey, on the other hand, denies the genocide for which it was responsible, without bien-pensant opinion in Europe batting a diplomatic eyelid: indeed, no cause is so eagerly embraced, in the name of multiculturalism, as rapid Turkish entry into the eu. Armenia is not Israel: who cares?

Image From:
U.S. Army

Mid-Point in the Middle East? Part I

By Tariq Ali

This was an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.

Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney–Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: ‘the dangers against which us forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization’. Five years later, what is the balance sheet?

On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’, ‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every Latin American country.(1)

More alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is slipping. No irreversible setbacks have yet occurred, but in the past year the position of the us in the region has weakened. The shift has not been uniform—at least one front has moved in the opposite direction, with a successful intervention in Lebanon. But elsewhere the tide of events is running against Washington. In Iran and Palestine, elections have humiliated those on whom it had counted as pliable instruments or interlocutors, propelling more radical forces into power. In Iraq, the resistance has inflicted a steady train of blows on the us occupation, preventing any stabilization of the collaborator regime and sapping support for the war in America itself. The Cheney–Wolfowitz political project of establishing a model satellite state for the region lies buried underneath the rubble of Fallujah. In Afghanistan, guerrillas are on the move again and Washington is wooing Taliban factions close to Pakistani military intelligence. Further revelations of torture by us and British forces, and plunder of local resources by the invaders and their agents, have intensified popular hatred of the West across the Arab world. American forces are overstretched, and the belief of troops in their mission is declining. Establishment voices at home are beginning to express fears that a debacle comparable to—or even worse than—Vietnam may be looming. But outcomes across the whole theatre of conflict still remain uncertain, and are unlikely to be all of a piece.

Palestine

Western enthusiasm for rainbow revolutions stops, as is to be expected, when the colour is green. Hamas’s triumph in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council has been treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures have been applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the polls. Numerically, the extent of that victory should not be overstated—with 45 per cent of the vote on a 78 per cent turnout, Hamas took 54 per cent of the seats. But morally, given the undisguised intervention by Israel, the us and the eu to assure a Fatah majority, the result was equivalent to a landslide. Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the ‘international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the idf, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and eu funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and us congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the Authority against Hamas’.(2) Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.

Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.

How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of idf killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.(3) On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed ‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the eu declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a long-standing demand of Tel Aviv.

What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history. ‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993.(4).

The real grievance of the eu and us against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The West’s priority now is to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly picked for his post by Washington as was Bremer in Baghdad—at the expense of the Legislative Council is another.(5)us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film. But since each of these involves some risk of boomeranging, more likely is an attempt to domesticate Hamas, in the belief that it too will relax with the fruits of office, and become in time as ‘pragmatic’ as its predecessor. This is certainly a reasonable calculation. Hamas is historically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Egyptian branch is now scarcely more radical in outlook than the ruling party in Turkey.(6)plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona. Like all religions, Islam offers a complete palette of ideological positions, from fulsome collaboration with capital and empire to impassioned opposition to them, with a great deal of mobility in between.

Whether Hamas could be so rapidly suborned to Western and Israeli ends may be doubtful, but it would not be unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown. The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. To do that would require the Palestinian national cause to be put on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equally, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run.(7)

Lebanon and Syria

To the north, the relative independence of Syria’s Ba’ath regime, and the institutional stability that allowed it to punch above its weight in the region, have long been irritants to Tel Aviv and Washington. Whatever its history of political opportunism, Damascus, unlike Cairo, has refused to scuttle the Palestinian cause by signing a separate peace with Israel, or to collaborate with the us occupation of Iraq. With the spread of the Iraqi insurgency in the provinces along its border, able to draw on a sympathetic hinterland, neutralization or removal of the younger Assad has moved up the American agenda.(8) Since us forces are now in no position to mount a second invasion, the obvious route to toppling the government in Syria was to create a pressure point in Lebanon, where Western powers can manoeuvre freely. For there Syrian troops, installed since 1976, were an exposed and unpopular presence. Forcing their withdrawal, it could be hoped, would foment domestic unrest conducive to regime change.

Contemporary Lebanon still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset—a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris, once it became clear that Syrian independence was inevitable, to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority that had long been France’s catspaw in the Eastern Mediterranean. The country’s confessional chequerboard has never permitted an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim—today perhaps even a Shi’a—majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the mid-seventies, providing the occasion for the entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon with tacit us approval, and their long-term establishment there—ostensibly as a buffer between the warring communities, and deterrent to a complete Israeli takeover, which was on the cards with the idf invasions of 1978 and 1982. Over time, Damascus came to exercise a pervasive control over wide areas of Lebanese political life. Its military and intelligence apparatus picked candidates for the highest offices of the state, manipulated cabinets and factional disputes, assassinated recalcitrant politicians and amassed personal fortunes in the process.

In 1994, the billionaire property magnate Rafik Hariri—a creature of the House of Saud—was approved for premier. Once installed in power, he became the Berlusconi or Thaksin of his native land, rebuilding the centre of Beirut with his own companies to his own profit and engineering an exchange-rate crisis when he was briefly ousted, to return as the only man rich enough to solve it. With his huge hoard of cash, he could purchase connections to give him increasing leeway in dealing with Damascus. Among friends acquired in these years was another venal politician, Jacques Chirac, to whose campaign funds he is said to have generously contributed.(9) France has never lost interest in its colonial foothold. By 2004, Chirac was seeking to make up for the desertion of the us over Iraq required by domestic considerations, and after arranging for a joint Franco-American coup in Haiti, had every reason to help Bush and Hariri expel Syria from Lebanon. Damascus, of course, knew what was afoot. In August, Bashar Assad summoned Hariri and—according to his son—told him: ‘If you think that President Chirac and you are going to run Lebanon, you are mistaken. This extension [of President Lahoud’s term] is going to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and over Walid Jumblatt’s’.(10)

The following week, France and the us pushed a resolution through the Security Council demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia. The response was not long in coming. In February, as the campaigning season opened for Lebanese elections, Hariri was blown up by a car bomb outside the St Georges hotel in Beirut. He was not the first Lebanese politician to suffer this fate—two previous presidents, Bashir Gemayel in 1982 and René Moawad in 1989, had gone the same way without much commotion. This time, however, the un Secretary-General immediately convened a Commission of Enquiry, dispatching a German prosecutor armed with plenipotentiary powers to investigate the crime, which duly concluded that Syria was responsible. Since this was plain from the outset, all that the Commission has revealed is the extent to which the un, under the miserable figure of Annan, has become an automaton for the will of the West. For, of course, Israeli assassinations—of leaders of Hizbollah, Fatah, Hamas—have never raised a whisper of reproach in the Secretariat, let alone any commission of enquiry. The fate of Lumumba, Ben Barka, Guevara, Allende, Machel, says enough about the continuity of these Western traditions.

In Lebanon itself, the killing of Hariri—whose largesse had built a wide clientele—provoked more genuine reactions, with vast demonstrations by the country’s middle class demanding the expulsion of Syrian troops and police, while a host of Western organizations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution (11). Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal, and produce a more congenial government in Beirut. But the various Lebanese factions remain as spreadeagled as ever, Hizbollah has not disarmed, and Assad has not fallen (12). America has taken a pawn, but the castle has yet to be captured.

Notes:

1. Over the last few years, Chávez has visited the major countries in every continent, embarrassing some of his hosts by demanding a global front against imperialism. His hour-long interview on al-Jazeera had an electric impact on 26 million Arab viewers. It received the station’s largest ever email response—tens of thousands—with the bulk of them posing a simple question: why can’t the Arab world produce a Chávez?
2. Graham Usher, ‘The New Hamas’, merip, 21 August 2005.
3. By the end of 2004, Israeli death squads and helicopter gunships had assassinated much of the Hamas leadership—Sheikh Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, Ibrahim Makadmeh, Adnan Ghoul, Sheikh Khalil—and tried but failed to kill Muhammad Dayf, Mahmoud Zahhar, and possibly Khaled Meshaal and Musa Abu Marzuq in Damascus.
4. Yediot Aharonot, 12 August 1993, cited in Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Washington 2000.
5. For this hopeful prospect, see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley: ‘Insofar as the burden has shifted to Hamas, the us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film.
6. In the late 60s and 70s the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood stood by as their secular plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona.
7. Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor and Manchester 2005. For nlr’s positions on what a viable two-state solution might entail, see Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, Guy Mandron, ‘Redividing Palestine?’, Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, Yitzhak Laor, ‘Tears of Zion’, nlr 10, July–August 2001.
8. Initially, it was hoped that Bashar, trained in a British medical school, would prove as amenable as the younger Mubarak or Gaddafi, both in the pocket of the West. His loyalty to the traditions of his father was a severe disappointment.
9. On the Elysée’s campaign, see Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire, Washington 2005, p. 259.
10. See Detlev Mehlis’s uniiic report on the assassination of Hariri, October 2005. Jumblatt is the—currently staunchly pro-Western—clan leader of the Druze.
11. Saatchi & Saatchi helped orchestrate ‘Freedom Square’ rallies; Spirit of America supplied sandwiches, flags and theatrical effects, including a huge Freedom Clock with an electronic ‘countdown to liberty’; a deck of ‘Most Wanted’ playing cards with Syrian faces—a gimmick pioneered by the Israeli paper Maariv when targeting Palestinians, and publicized globally by the American army in Iraq—was distributed. See CounterPunch, 18 November 2005.
12. During the recent crisis, several Syrian opposition groups offered the Assad regime a deal: a national government to defend the country against the West, followed by elections in which the Ba’ath Party would be a major player. The Ba’ath High Command turned it down, preferring to rely on repression at home and manoeuvring abroad.

Image From:
New York Times

Remembering W. E. B. Du Bois

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

This was an article in the August 2003 issue of the Monthly Review. It was written in commemoration of Du Bois' death who died in August of 1963 after a long and eventful life. Du Bois tackled issues of imperialism, classism, racism, and socialist issues. Over his long life Du Bois (he was 95 years old when he died) wrote many books, essays, poems, and speeches to support the struggle for human rights and Third World solidarity. While Du Bois made his mistakes, such as supporting Imperial Japan (as Third World liberators) and supporting Stalin his contributions to American society, as well as to the world, far outweighed his mistakes and his writings still resonate with us today despite some of them being written 100 years ago.

Some works by Du Bois:

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

John Brown (1909)

The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924)

Africa: Its Place in Modern History (1930)

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935)

Encyclopedia of The Negro: Preparatory Volume with Reference Lists and Reports (1946)

Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imprialism (1960)

Readers:

David Levering Lewis, editor. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Owl Books, 1995.

Eric J. Sundquist. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organizing and educational center formed to raise awareness in the USA regarding issues facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

“No nation threatens us. We threaten the world.”

—W.E.B. Du Bois (1958) commenting on the role of the United States internationally.

While we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, we should as well be commemorating another event. On the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, the life of one of the 20th century’s most brilliant individuals came to an end. W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, Pan Africanist, political leader, champion of the struggle against white supremacy in the United States, died in Ghana, August 27, 1963.

It is easy to forget about Du Bois since an orchestrated effort has been conducted by the larger society to minimize his contributions and, in fact, to expunge him from our collective memory. Beginning with the Cold War in the late 1940s, the government and the right-wing went out of their way to harass Du Bois, restrict his travel and opportunities, and limit his access to those who wanted to or needed to hear his words.

For us at TransAfrica Forum, the work and life of Du Bois was particularly significant because of his commitment to the struggle against racist discrimination at home as well as against imperialism and colonialism abroad. Du Bois saw no inconsistency in taking up both struggles, usually at the same time. Thus, Du Bois is acknowledged as the “father” of the modern Pan African movement. He was directly involved in organizing and helping to lead the first five Pan African Congresses. He was also one of the leaders, along with the great Paul Robeson, of the Council on African Affairs, a U.S.-based advocacy group on Africa which was, in many ways, a political ancestor of TransAfrica Forum. Du Bois was also a founder of the NAACP, editor of the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis, and author of the monumental and definitive study Black Reconstruction in America.

Du Bois would probably have been heralded by the larger US establishment if he had restricted his criticisms to racial matters in the United States. Du Bois refused to be so constrained. Du Bois’s critique of U.S. society expanded over time to examining the economic roots of racial oppression as well as his expansive analysis of Western colonialism and the U.S. role in propping up colonial empires, allegedly in the name of fighting communism.

Following World War II when the United States came to the aid of various European colonial powers, in some cases reinforcing their domination, in other cases attempting to replace them, Du Bois was one of the courageous few who would not be silenced. Du Bois saw that anti-communism and red-baiting were not aimed at stopping the spread of a totalitarian ideology, but rather were aimed at silencing any and all dissent from policies that advanced corporate interests. For his recognition, the forces of repression came down upon him.

Ultimately Du Bois chose to leave the United States and reside in Ghana. Before his death he began work on an encyclopedia of the African world. He did not live to complete it.

It is not enough for us to honor the memory of Du Bois, though that is itself important. Reminding ourselves, and particularly younger activists and scholars of the renown of such a human being has a value in and of itself. Yet for those who work with and support TransAfrica Forum, and other organizations committed to a democratic foreign policy on the part of the United States, the life and work of Du Bois has an additional value. All too often I hear people suggest that international events are too distant from the realities of the everyday person. Du Bois repudiated such notions, suggesting instead that it is inconceivable that we, African Americans, can fight the good fight here in the United States for social justice in isolation from the fight for what we now call global justice. A system that would ignore the plague of HIV/AIDS as it ravages Africa and the Caribbean; a system that would promote the interests of pharmaceutical corporations over those of the individuals living with HIV/AIDS, can never be expected to discover humanity in its treatment of those of African descent living in the United States.

The reverse is also true. As often as we attempt to illustrate our patriotism through volunteering to support United States wars overseas, and other such adventures, we may achieve awards and note, but it brings us no closer to achieving actual freedom, equality and dignity at home. To the extent to which we stand up for what is right rather than what the establishment deems to be popular, we regain our humanity. If there is no other lesson to learn from the work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois, it is that one simple point.

Image:

exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu

The Lakota Ghost Dance: Ritualized Rebellion Against Colonial Rule

This is an essay I just completed this semester for my Dance 430, Dance History class at San Francisco State University.

Image from Walden3d

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
The whites are crazy — Ahe’yuhe’yu!(1)

—

It was mid-day and Wovoka, the son of Tävibo, lies sick on his bed in his wickiup. Wovoka is considered a great weather man by his people (whom are apart of the Paiute tribe in Mason Valley, in western Nevada), just like his father, who had also been a prophet. As he is laying ill in his bed from a fever the sun is becoming darkened due to a solar eclipse. All over his tribal camp people became distressed and began shooting their guns at the object which was blocking the sun. As the sun darkened Wovoka slipped more and more from consciousness until, all of a sudden, he found himself being taken up into heaven where he spoke with God, who commanded him to preach a gospel of peace, to live justly in the world, and to bring a new dance to his people. The year was 1889 and the day was January 1st (this day would latter be called by the Paiute people “the day the sun died”(2)), this was the day that the Ghost Dance was born and the day that Wovoka stated that he became God’s prophet to the Native American peoples. Soon Native Americans (and whites) from all over the United States began to come to Mason Valley to hear Wovoka speak,(3) word also got out to the Dakotas, the tribal lands of the Lakota, and the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation decided to send an elder, Good Thunder, as well as four or five others, to see this Wovoka themselves and to here his message. After being satisfied and returning to their reservation the Lakota decided to send more delegates, this time from three agencies instead of just Pine Ridge, back to western Nevada, among them was Good Thunder, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and others.(4)

The simple message of Wovoka intrigued the Lakota (as it had others) especially because of their present day situation which was very much looking bleak (to say the least). The medicine man Short Bull, during a trip between Valentine in Nebraska and the Rosebud Reservation (east of the Pine Ridge Reservation), heard the words of Wovoka through the reading of a letter that Wovoka had wrote:

I, Jack Wilson [Wovoka’s white name], love you all...When you get home you must make a dance to continue for five days...You must all dance in the same way...Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring...Do not refuse to work for the whites, and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them.(5)

Soon, Short Bull would became one of the Lakota leaders of the new religion preached by Wovoka.(6)

The Ghost Dance religion’s underlying principles (with beliefs varying from tribe to tribe) was that one day every single Native American, living and dead, would become reunited with a regenerated earth and would live a life without disease, death, and sorrow.(7) Short Bull and Kicking Bear emerged as charismatic leaders of the new religion for the Lakota and spoke prophecies, based on the prophecies of Wovoka, that by the spring of 1891 the Native American messiah would come down and destroy the white man and bring the buffalo back to the earth. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight state that, “This would happen, it was believed, because whites had proven themselves a faithless race causing God to turn his wrath against them.” Due to the coming apocalypse (hastened by large dances, that would go on for days, as commanded by Wovoka) the Lakota decided to remove all of the trappings of white culture that had been thrust upon them by the white colonial powers (the government and the settlers), to be civil (even towards whites) and practice a life of good will (which Wovoka commanded), and to perform the dances, which would demonstrate their faith in their own inviolability.(8)

The dance in question was called “dance in a circle” by the Paiute, the Kiowa called it the “dance with clasped hands,” and the Lakota called it the “spirit dance.”(9) For the Lakota (and others) the Ghost Dance was danced in a circle by either small or very large groups of people for days. Ethnologist Warren K. Moorehead, who visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during the peak of the Ghost Dance “fever,” described one encounter with the dance:

The largest camp of dancers was located upon Wounded Knee Creek under the charge of Chiefs No Water, Short Bull and Little Wound...A pole or sapling some thirty-five feet in height was erected...built near the dance ground were several...sweat houses, separate structures being provided for women...A priest...called aloud to those who wished to participate...several hundred men and women crowed up and, grasping hands, formed a circle fully two hundred feet in diameter...the priests began a prayer to the Great Spirit...”Great Wakan Tanka: We are ready to begin the dance as you have commanded us...we beg that you give us back our old hinting grounds, and our game...transport such of the dancers...to the Spirit Land far away and let them see their dead relatives...the priests began a doleful chang, which is taken up by the assembled multitude and loudly sung over and over again. The circle moves toward the left. For the first half hour the motion is short step...After the space of half an hour...“Weep for your sins” commands the high priest. They moan and cry, rolling upon the ground, apparently in great agony. Some of the more desperate ones crowd up to the sapling...Others cut their arms...The scene is most impressive. Surely the [Lakota] are serious in their grief...A new song is struck up...the dancing becomes fast and furious. The men and women leap backward and forward. They seem possessed of the spirit of demons...the priests are extremely active. They run from one excited dancer to another, gently compelling them to lie prone upon the earth...The scene of a Ghost Dance at night makes a vivid impression upon the mind. The music in its strange wild key rings in the ears for days, while one can never forget the reeling figures, the earnest, expressive faces.(10)

Why had the Ghost Dance caught on in such as big way? In November of 1890 around 40% of the Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation and 30% at the Rosebud Reservation had taken up the religion of the Ghost Dance.(11) The answer lies in the colonial policies of the United States government and the history of repression that had fallen upon the Lakota in the decades culminating before the Ghost Dance revival. Essentially what the Ghost Dance was, was a “ritualized resistance as a means of repelling colonial rule” taken up by the Lakota to protest and fight back against the U. S. government and the white settlers who were legally (by U. S. standards), and illegally (even by U. S. standards), encroaching on their reservation lands.(12)

In 1868, leaders of the Lakota agreed to sign the Ft. Laramie Treaty which forfeited most of their hunting grounds in exchange to never be disturbed in by any outsider while they live on the “Great Sioux Reservation.” Yet this treaty had taken away hunting, as well as sacred, grounds that originally had been theirs according to the original reservation treaty of 1858 (which gave them their entire western half of South Dakota). Yet once gold was found in the sacred Black Hills the U. S. government moved quickly to take it away from them. Again, their lands were encroached upon and the Lakota were forced to sign a treaty breaking up the “Great Sioux Reservation” into six smaller reservations divided into three distinct land masses, all separate from each other (classic divide and conquer), further humiliating the Lakota and subjugating them to further colonial rule.(13) Instead of living like they had, as hunter-gatherings with the freedom to move about the land, they were forced, like prisoners of war, to stay in one area which further lead them to take up crop growing (in an area unsuitable to grow crops), cattle ranging, and as well as receiving ration handouts from the government.(14) In 1887 the Dawes Act also allowed the purchase of Lakota lands. Senator Henry L. Dawes, from Massachusetts, argued in 1890 for the cutting of further rations to the Lakota, this despite food shortages resulting in the near extinction of the buffalo by white settlers (which lead to massive starvation in the winter of 1889). Dawes stated that “the best way to treat the Indian was to starve him into self-support. ‘Root, hog, or die...Next year you are only to have so much, and you must supplement it by the labor of your own hands.’”(15)

The Ghost Dance was born out of this misery, the Lakota, a once proud warrior society that roamed free on the Great Plains, were now reduced to obeying the whim of the U. S. government and the white settlers; they also faced starvation and loss of land (one of the greatest blows of this was the loss of the sacred Black Hills). The Ghost Dance was a repudiation of everything the white man and the U. S. government stood for and was the basis for the resistance to the colonial powers. The hope of the Ghost Dance for the Lakota was that the white man would be destroyed and that the buffalo (and the hunting grounds) would return to the earth for the Lakota and other Native Americans to enjoy. In response to the ever looming and encroaching presence of white culture, participants in Ghost Dance circles (in the Lakota reservations) were forbidden to bring anything associated with white culture into the dance, only traditional Lakota clothing and artifacts were allowed (this despite the fact that Wovoka would wear white man’s clothing). Capeci and Knight state that “[t]he antiwhite bias of the Ghost Dance was important. The reservation spectacle of once-proud [Lakota] warriors humbling themselves before officials by wearing store-bought” white clothing was seared into the minds of the Lakota and “the act of shedding these cloths” was a “liberating gesture. For some, western dress also foretold the violent end to be suffered by the white race, as the Messiah would” use western dress to distinguish between who to kill and who to allow to survive.(16)

While violence and rebellion against the white settlers and the government was not preached in the Ghost Dance (all though it had been used before by the Lakota, as the Battle of Little Big Horn has shown us) the Lakota were willing to use force to protect their dances from reservation police, government agents and military, as well as white settlers. Violent resistance to protect their sacred traditions had been uncommon during reservation period (in fact, some of their traditions had been banned by the government).(17) Yet for the Ghost Dance, the Lakota were willing to die, and indeed, go to war. Although the Lakota were still tempered by the fact of past defeats and constantly having their land being encroached by white settlers.

Despite the promise for renewal, and re-energizing the Lakota in their fight against their oppressors, the Ghost Dance ended in tragedy at the Massacre of Wounded Knee where over 150 men, women, and children were killed (fleeing) by the Seventh Calvary. Not even this non-violent (though potentially violent in certain aspects) religion was allowed by the colonial masters. Where the Lakota saw hope in the Ghost Dance whites saw a threat. The actions at Wounded Knee, states Scott L. Pratt, were seen by whites and the government as “a necessary, even humanitarian, response because it brought a quick end to a ‘craze’ that was good for neither whites nor” Native Americans.(18)

Due to the "theological eclecticism" of the Lakota and the fact that the Lakota were a traditional warrior society their “interpretation of the Ghost Dance was more militant than Wovoka’s teachings.”(19) The Lakota believed that their ritualized rebellion against the government and white settlers would evolved into a military victory and restore the Lakota and other Natives back to their original state in a new world. It gave the Lakota a source of pride and revitalized their spirits as a nation as well as meeting the needs of the Lakota warriors, who had been feeling the sting of defeat by the white man for years. The Lakota “adapted traditional rituals to redress the wrongs done to them. In this way they waged war long before any bullets had been fired or lives lost.”(20) The Lakota wouldn’t have a revolt this large (ritualized or armed) until February of 1973, when around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over Wounded Knee by force and declared it the “Independent Oglala Sioux Nation” and told the government they would not leave until they had addressed the grievances of tribal leaders, an investigation into the treatment of Native Americans in America, and a review of all treaties signed by the government.

—
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
The father says so, the father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,
The father says so, the father says so.(22)
—

Endnotes

1. James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 221. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Arapaho tribe, Mooney (who wrote this in 1892-1893) states that, “In this song the father tells his children of the desolation, in consequence of their folly and injustice, that would come upon the whites when they will be left alone upon the old world, while the Indians will be taken up to the new earth to live in happiness forever.” (Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 222).
2. William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.
3. Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Chicago,
San Francisco, Philadelphia: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1989), 5, 35.
4. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 6, 9-10.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 19.
8. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism: The North American
Ghost Dance and East African Maji-Maji Rebellions,” Historian 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1990): 584-602,
Academic Search Premier, http://0-web.ebscohost.com.
9. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 8.
10. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 36-39.
11. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
12. Ibid.
13. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 15-16; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 11.
14. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 16.
15. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 18.
16. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
17. Ibid.
18. Pratt, Scott L. “Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism.” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 154.
Endnotes
19. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
20. Ibid.
21. Encyclopedia Britannica (2006), “Wounded Knee,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9077525 (accessed November 16, 2006).
22. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 307. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Lakota. Mooney sums up the aspect of this song quite nicely by stating, “This fine song summarizes the whole hope of the Ghost dance—the return of the buffalo and the departed dead, the message being brought to the people by the sacred birds, the Eagle and the Crow. The eagle known as wañ’bali is the war eagle, from which feathers are procured for war bonnets.” (Mooney, ibid., 307).

China’s New Interest In Africa, Symbiotic or Parasitic?

By Rorik Strindberg

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

In the October 28 2006 issue of the Economist, there is an article titled, “China in Africa; Never to late to scramble.” The second halve is a direct reference to the scramble for Africa, which occurred after the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885. Although this is a direct reference to the “New Imperialism” or often known as “Empire for Empire’s sake,” Chinese ambitions in Africa seem to be in concert more with the imperial ambitions of the first wave of imperialism. The best example of the first wave of imperialism is Great Britain’s involvement in India, dating form the 17th century to the 20th century. Is this the path that the Chinese will fallow in Africa?

British involvement in Indian was initially simply economic. The English (1) desired to initially purchase Indian goods, silks, clothing, ect. The Mughal Empire, the Muslim rulers of India left in place after the fall of the Mongolian Empire, had allowed the British and others to trade in modern India. It is important to note that England initially simply did not have the power to “take over” the Mughal Empire. Treaties with the Dutch, after the Anglo-Dutch merger when William of Orange became the king of England, the English and the Dutch agreed to give the English control of the Indian Trade and the Dutch control of Indonesia. The next step towards English control of India was to get the French out of India, which was accomplished after the Seven Years War, or as we call it in America the French and Indian (Native American Indian) War. After an English victory, the French were expelled from India. The most important idea of English Imperialism in India is that it evolved slowly. Initially it would have been absurd to even think that the tiny nation like England could ever control the Mughal Empire. As the Mughal Empire began to crumble the British begin to assume more and more of the role of the government, to maintain the trade. After the Napoleonic wars from 1792-1815, when the British were excluded from trade with the European Continent, industrialization picked up speed. After this period the British needed markets to export their industrial products to, and places to get raw materials from. This fact greatly increased the rational and rate of imperialism.

A similar process occurred in Egypt with the British and in Mexico with the French. Both Egypt and Mexico had a history of reneging on debts. To solve this Egypt became a protectorate of Britain, where British forced the Egyptians to pay off their debts. In Mexico, the French imposed Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico for the same purposes.

Back to China and Africa. Although China has been involved in Africa since it begin to export Maoism to Africa in the 1950’s, recently China is more involved in Africa and will be increasingly in the future. Africa-China trade in 1995 was just 3 billion dollars, and now has multiplied by just under a factor of eleven to 32 billion dollars. China now accounts for 10% of African trade, although this figure is expected to double by 2010. China is primarily interested in Africa as markets to export surplus goods, and importing raw materials. China needs minerals, farm products, timber and oil. (2) Many African Nations are elated by the idea of trading with China, for Western traders, the IMF and Paris Club, are constantly pestering African Nations over, corruption, torture, democracy, and the lack of accountability. The Chinese simply are not concerned with such nuances that only get in the way of making money. For example, when Canadian and American Firms left Sudan because of domestic backlash of dealing with the greatest human rights of the 21st century, Chinese state-owned firms quickly replaced them. Now Sudan virtually has UN veto power through China to any action in the Darfur. China is also building armament factories in Sudan.

A little side note, it dose not matter how many lighters are held up at a rock concert, China and Sudan will not stop the killing. (3) The only way to stop the killing would be to have a whole lot of US Marines show up at President Omar al-Bashir’s front door. Who knows what kind of mess that would create?

Although China invests money in Africa, it really does little good. Most of the jobs that are created are for Chinese workers. This includes many of the railroads that the Chinese are building in Africa in turn for oil. Also, many of the cheaper Chinese products are displacing African businesses; there is a detailed description of in the article of a shop owner in Angola that can not do business any more because of Chinese competition. Also in Thomas Freidman’s The World is Flat, there is a detailed description of how cheaper Chinese plastic lanterns are replacing the ones previously made by Egyptians. One really has to wonder if this is a symbiotic relationship or a parasitic relationship.
In the defense of the Chinese, one also has to look at the money lent and aid by America and Europe to Africa. American Aid to Africa has to employ American not African Firms and most of the European Aid to Africa ends up back in the hands of the Europeans. This is in the forms of Swiss Bank Accounts and European luxury items. Although, most of the Western money at least has good intentions, like the World Bank’s plan for Chad. This is where World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz proposed to lend Chad money at a low interest rate, so that they could build an oil pipeline. The money was lent on the basis that a large percent of the oil money would be reinvested in the people of Chad. The President of Chad spent all of the money on the military.
There are other models for African nations to fallow. Botswana and South Africa posses a GDP per capita that are about the same as Russia and are higher then Mexico, Brazil, India and China. Botswana since 1966 has the one of the highest growth rates. Many attribute this to parliamentary government and fiscal discipline. One dose not have to sleep with the devil for profit.

In conclusion I will admit that I am a Sinophobe, and this should be taken into account when you read my articles. I find their state offensive, as one Chinese activist said; China represents the worst of Capitalism and Communism. Also, China executes more criminals per year then the rest of the world combined, and sell their body parts on the black market. This is what their government really dose. (4) This is neglecting numerous other human rights violation committed by the Chinese State, for the sake of time. One really has to wonder do the Africans really know what they are getting into with China. One can see how easily trade involves into outright colonialism. I wonder what will happen when African nations renege on their debts to China or the security situation in Africa prevents China from getting its oil. Can you say Imperialism?

Footnotes

1. I switch between England and Britain because the union of England and Scotland forms Great Britain and to refer to Britain before 1707 is incorrect.

2. Economist, 53

3. This is a program that I am highly critical of that always appears on Myspace.com

4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4921116.stm