Vol. 81/No. 40      October 30, 2017

 

Decades of war in Somalia rooted in
imperialist domination

 
More than 300 people were killed in a brutal car-bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia, Oct. 14 by the Islamist terrorist al-Shabab. The group has links with al-Qaeda and imposes its brutal anti-working-class rule in substantial parts of the country.

The bombing comes after Washington stepped up airstrikes against al-Shabab-controlled parts of the country in June. This followed a Pentagon decision to expand U.S. military targets in its air assassination campaign. Washington’s bombers, 400 troops, including special operations units, and 22,000 soldiers from an African Union “peacekeeping” mission, are attempting to prop up the Somali government. The African Union troops are due to start leaving next year.

The decadeslong wars are rooted in more than a century of imperialist domination in the Horn of Africa. The imperialists have no interest in developing industry or agriculture in the region, only in taking control of its strategic location near the Middle East. British, French and Italian colonists arbitrarily carved Somalia up into five colonial territories in the late 1800s.

A Somali national struggle grew as part of a wave of struggles for independence and self-determination after the second imperialist world war. In 1960 British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland united as independent Somalia. Kenya and Djibouti, neighboring countries with sizable Somali populations, won independence in following years.

Somalia today is an impoverished semicolonial country torn by clan rivalries.

For the past quarter of a century it has been wracked by war and imperialist interventions, without a centralized government. Since the 1991 overthrow of the Mohamed Siad Barre regime, which had been backed and then dropped by the Stalinist rulers in the Soviet Union, rival clans have fought for control of the country.

Since then, Somalia has been ravaged by famine, civil war, U.S. invasion and a takeover by Islamist forces. Over time, and splits and fusions, these Islamist forces evolved into al-Shabab, based in southern Somalia and among Somali peoples in eastern Kenya.

Washington’s intervention coupled with al-Shabab’s murderous assaults visit disaster on working people. They also face the impact of the worldwide capitalist crisis, magnified by years of debt bondage. Earlier this year the International Monetary Fund refused to cancel parts of the country’s $5.3 billion debt until it started to make some payments.

Just under a million people have fled drought conditions since last November, while 6 million Somalis — more than half the country’s population — require emergency food aid to survive.

Despite its expanded military intervention in the region, like in its never-ending war in Afghanistan, Washington is no closer to establishing stability in the region to pursue its imperialist interests.  
 
 
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