This section highlights the post-Cold War security and political environment that led to the
“humanitarian intervention” in Somalia by the UN and US peace enforcement forces. Orford (2003:2) observed that following the demise of the Soviet Union, a new kind of international law and internationalist spirit appeared to have been ushered in the conduct of international relations as world conditions were no longer constrained by the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism. This international environment led Douzinas (2003) to argue that the demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a “new moral order … which sees individual human rights being promoted at the expense of state sovereignty” as exemplified in the Somalia crisis where humanitarian interveners paid little attention towards respecting Somalia’s state sovereignty.
Humanitarian intervention has been defined as "the justifiable use of force for the purpose of protecting the inhabitants of another state from treatment so arbitrary and persistently abusive as to exceed the limits within which the sovereign is presumed to act with reason and justice (Fonteyne 1974:304). In the case of Somalia, there was no central government to blame for the plight of the suffering Somalis. There were however, two powerful warlords contesting for the control of the capital and parts of Southern Somalia who were running quasi-government militia organizations whose struggle and competition for power exacerbated the famine that ravaged Somalia in 1991-1992.
4.2.1 A Brief historical background to the crisis
Somalia is a country that is ethnically, religiously and linguistically unified though it is however divided along clan loyalties (Hirsch and Oakley 1995:3). The origins of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia can be traced back to the war between Somalia and Ethiopia (1977-78) over the Somali dominated Ogaden region in which Somalia was defeated and left impoverished (De Waal 1997). This conflict ruined the Somali economy and burdened it with
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the challenge of supporting approximately 2 million refugees from Ethiopia a situation where Somalia ended up having the highest ratio of refugees to indigenous population in the entire world; a burden it could not sustain on its own (Furley and May 1998:144). War torn Somalia thus became an important market for the disposal of other countries’ surplus agricultural produce including from the US as donor agencies scrambled for opportunities to participate in the lucrative humanitarian business where the UN High Commission for Refugees was spending an average of US$ 70 million per annum (Sitkowski 2006). Prior to the demise of President Siyad Barre’s oppressive regime, food aid was systematically abused as a tool for rewarding allies and keeping them loyal to him, as well as punishing opponents by depriving them access to the food aid a situation that continued unabated up to the last day of his rule.
President Siyad Barre’s rule ended in January 1991 following a civil war in which the most powerful opponent to his rule was General Farah Aideed. A political vacuum resulted from the ousting of President Siyad Barre as there was no single political/military faction powerful enough to form a central government in Mogadishu. The fall of President Siyad Barre was immediately followed by the country’s implosion and deconstruction of the state leading to chaos and anarchy that was a direct result of ‘the unravelling of the country’s densely knit structure of clans and kinship networks (Annan and Mousavizadeh 2012:39). Following the downfall of Siyad Barre’s regime the Somali civil war worsened as the two most powerful factions led by interim President Ali Mahdi Mohammed and General Mohammed Farah Aideed fought for the control of the capital, Mogadishu (Adam 1995:69-78). The post-Barre political and security environment threatened the highly lucrative international humanitarian aid industry that had worked relatively smoothly under Siyad Barre’s regime as the regime “created and exaggerated food emergencies,” a situation that favoured aid agencies (De Waal, 1997:163-178). This meant that aid agencies were conniving with the Siyad Barre regime to exaggerate food aid required in order to profiteer from the excess food donations.
The civil war that ensued crystallized around sub-clan divisions which made it difficult for humanitarian organizations to effectively distribute relief aid because of high levels of banditry that looted food aid and even threatened the lives of the aid workers, a situation that qualified Somalia to join the list of “failed states” following the collapse of its central government (Adebajo and Landsberg 2007:170). The fall of the repressive Siyad Barre regime, instead of ushering in peace and stability, triggered and unleashed more conflict and bloodshed as the
“liberators began fighting for spoils of the war and for the new loot” leading to a situation where there was nothing else left to loot from Mogadishu except the foreign donations by
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foreign humanitarian organizations hence fighting in Mogadishu was predominantly over the control of foreign relief supplies (Durch 1996:317-318). Some international aid agencies began to view military intervention for the protection of international humanitarian aid as the only viable and just solution to the Somali crisis hence they began to lobby UN and US officials for a “humanitarian” military intervention.
What makes this appeal suspicious is the observation that there were no similar calls for military humanitarian intervention in similar cases on the African continent, involving countries stricken by war and famine. Sitkowski (2006) observed that in Sudan where an estimated 250 000 people died of starvation in 1988 alone, there were no calls made by aid agencies for UN peacekeepers to launch a humanitarian mission to rescue the dying Sudanese population. This discrepancy led him to conclude that Somalia was targeted for military intervention because of its smaller size compared to Sudan and that it was more easily accessible by sea and air, hence it was an ideal and more feasible target for an experimental large scale military humanitarian intervention to distribute food aid (Ibid.). Added to this, Somalia neither had a strong ally among the P-5 in the Security Council nor a formidable centralized military establishment the size of the Sudanese military apparatus that could effectively resist any foreign, uninvited military “humanitarian intervention” on its territory.
4.2.2 UN/US opportunity to experiment with new concepts of peacekeeping
The Somali humanitarian crisis presented the UN Secretariat and the US military leadership with an ideal opportunity to experiment with new concepts and doctrines of second generation peacekeeping operations that included operational innovations in military humanitarian missions in troubled countries on the periphery (Al Qaq Op.Cit.). The Somalia crisis came at an opportune time when the world body was embarking on more intrusive peace-building missions designed to establish liberal democracies in rogue countries unhindered by the Cold War politics (Francis 2006:101). The argument for peace-building interventions was that post- Cold War internal conflicts were global problems that called for multilateral responses by the world community (Sisk 2001). The argument goes further to state that internal conflicts had direct and indirect implications for neighbouring states through spill overs such as refugees or small arms proliferation as well as indirect implications for the entire international community that included violation of international norms on crimes against humanity, or through the creation of humanitarian emergencies manifested through acute food insecurity, lack of water or housing, and basic safety for affected populations (Hazem, Huth, and Russett 2003). In order to operationalize the new peace-building concept of peacekeeping, a military humanitarian
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intervention plan for Somalia was therefore hatched by the UN Secretary General with the full backing of the US military leadership right from its conception.
Former US ambassador Oakley acknowledges that the Bush administration wanted to partner with a more globally active UN “… with greater US support and participation, particularly in peacekeeping and nation building” (Hirsch and Oakley 1995:152). Such partnering with a more globally active UN would suggest that the US was trying to maximize on the opportunity availed by the end of the Cold War to assert itself as the dominant remaining power through the manipulation of the UN and other multilateral institutions in an attempt to spread Western liberal value systems across the Third World countries on the periphery. Maren (1997:221) observed that the active partnering of the US and the UN immediately after the Cold War where the UN received “…greater US support and participation, particularly in peacekeeping and nation building” resulted in the US going to the extent of drafting Somalia’s unrealistic humanitarian mandates for peacekeeping and peace enforcement resolutions on behalf of the UN Secretariat. He highlights that the humanitarian mandates for Somalia were drafted in the office of the US Chief of Staff, General Colin Powell (Ibid.). Haass (1994:73) concurs and further posits that all the major Security Council resolutions on Somalia during the early 1990s, including the "nation-building resolutions” were authored by US officials, mainly in the Pentagon, and handed to the UN as faits accomplis. Haass adds that only after the disastrous October 3, 1993 fire fight did the US try to exonerate itself from the operation that it had started, sponsored, commanded and almost entirely directed after having usurped the powers of the Secretary General and the Secretariat that are normally charged with the overall responsibility of controlling and giving direction to peacekeeping operations.10 Haass (1994) noted that one international civil servant remarked that the UN was seduced and hoodwinked ultimately resulting in its eventual abandonment by the US to clean up the Somali political and military mess when the humanitarian adventure operations disastrously went wrong.
It is evident that the US/UN military adventure in Somalia that was launched without the express approval by the Somalis was part of a well calculated grand strategy of the “noble
10 The Director of Africa Centre at Great Zimbabwe University Dr. R. Uriga is of the view that the interest shown by the US in trying to create a new central government in Somalia through a military humanitarian intervention appears to suggest that the US could have fuelled the conflict in Somalia in order to avail itself and the UN an opportunity to intervene so that a completely new regime accountable to the US was left in power after the withdrawal of peacekeepers. He added that as part of the US efforts to create a New World Order after the demise of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that most of the conflicts in Africa were externally engineered and sponsored in order to create crises that called for UN peacekeeping intervention yet African leaders ended up inviting the very sponsors of conflict on the continent to come as peacekeepers to solve the problems they created.
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Leviathan” world-wide design to protect the developed world and some parts of the international society from “rogue states and truculent warlords.” The second generation humanitarian peacekeeping missions in Africa that started with the Somali peacekeeping experiment were deliberately designed to deeply embroil UN peacekeepers and peace-builders in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The creation of a New World Order through the cooperation between the UN and the US was expected to usher in a new dispensation that would replace power politics in international relations with “moral and ethical” considerations implemented by the “newly non-polarized UN” and where necessary, coercively imposed by the Security Council that was free from bi-polar balance of power politics. The humanitarian argument of the 1990s portrayed a scenario where both ethical considerations and international law were converging towards defining an international obligation to intervene and interfere across national borders for humanitarian reasons in situations where serious human rights violations where seen to have been perpetrated by the government of the society in question or in cases where the government was seen to be failing to contain such violations (Johnson 2006:115). It was under this dispensation that the UN and the US military operations were launched in Somalia which raises a requirement to establish the real motivating factors outside the alleged humanitarian justifications.
The next section examines the non-humanitarian motives that could have influenced the UN Secretary General and his Secretariat to champion the advocacy for launching a military
“humanitarian intervention” in Somalia at a time when the famine and starvation crisis was subsiding.