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Wishes, Hopes and Counter-negotiations Due to US Desire to Destroy Somalia

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As the real MV FAINA negotiations have blown up, and new, counter-negotiations have been undertaken with the involvement of ominous forces, the MV FAINA crew spent Christmas far from their relatives and with increased concern about their fate.

The various reconnaissance flights undertaken herald only a disastrous development that has been long planned and eventually delayed for little time. With State Department officials comically pretending to be fully unaware of the ongoing counter-negotiations, and with the representatives of the pirates being pulled from discussion to discussion and from delay to delay, one can easily guess that the terrible hit will be given in due course of time – only to give president-elect Obama the glory of an early military success, deceiving the numerous supporters of the pro-African theory.

In this article, I re-publish the “Daily Press Briefing” in which Mr. McCormack stated that the US administration is unaware of the ongoing counter-negotiations, and the Ecoterra 88th Press Release Update that focuses on other developments off the Somali coast and relates to recent publications on the subject.

In a separate article, I will expand on why the US administration is fully aware of the ongoing counter-negotiations, and what ominous results are being sought after.

Daily Press Briefing – Department of State

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2008/113477.htm

QUESTION: Somalia? Pirates? Looks like there is a new twist in this saga of the high-jacked Ukrainian Vessel, MV Faina. There are numerous press reports stating a certain U.S. businesswoman, a CEO of the private security company Select Armor, whose name is Ballarin, I believe, is trying to negotiate with the pirates. The owner of the vessel, of the MV Faina, published an open letter to U.S. Ambassador in Kyiv yesterday, asking U.S. Government to interfere, because they say that her efforts basically undermine the process of trying to release the vessel. Anything on that? Where are you – what are you going to do in this situation? Have you seen this letter?

MR. MCCORMACK: I’m not – yeah, I’m not aware of these particular efforts.

QUESTION: Is she somehow representing the U.S. Government?

MR. MCCORMACK: Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge, no.

QUESTION: Well, are you going to do anything about it?

MR. MCCORMACK: I’m not sure that it’s within our purview to do anything about it. I’m sure we’ll take a look at it. I’m not aware of the reports that you refer to.

88th Update 2008-12-25 21:11:43 UTC

Ecoterra Intl. – Stay Calm & Solve it Peaceful & Fast !

Ecoterra International – Update & Media Release on the stand-off concerning the Ukrainian weapons-ship hi-jacked by Somali pirates.

Our thoughts are with all the 360 seafarers who are presently held captive in Somalia and who cannot celebrate a Merry Christmas together with their families in peace! Likewise we wish all unbiased naval forces, who honestly try to contribute to justice and humanity in the Somali waters quiet festive days.

We also can make sea-piracy in Somalia an issue of the past – with empathy and strength and through coastal and marine development as well as protection!

New EA Seafarers Assistance Programme Emergency Helpline: +254-738-497979
East African Seafarers Assistance Programme – Media Officer: +254-733-385868

Day 92 – 2191 hours into the FAINA Crisis – Update Summary

Efforts for a peaceful release continued, but the now three months long stand-off concerning Ukrainian MV FAINA is not yet solved finally, though intensive negotiations have continued.

Serious efforts are under way to bring all parties involved in the case of the FAINA together in order to allow for a united, coordinated, safe and fast release.

Ecoterra Intl. renewed it’s call to solve the FAINA and the SIRIUS STAR cases with first priority and peaceful in order to avert a human and environmental disasters at the Somali coast. Anybody encouraging hot-headed and concerning such difficult situations inexperienced and untrained gunmen to try an attempt of a military solution must be held fully responsible for the surely resulting disaster.

Clearing-house:

News from other abducted ships ——–

Alert: Turkish airforce F16 fighter-jets are set to run a reconnaissance and scaremonger mission tomorrow, after the Muslim Friday-prayers over Puntland and especially Eyl, sources revealed. So far it is clear that the Somali parliament has not agreed to any such violation of the Somali airspace, which would be a prerequisite to it being sanctioned under the latest UN security council resolution 1851. Turkey tries to flex its muscles being angry over the abduction in Somali waters of 3 Turkish vessels, one of which is tied financially to a Turkish MP, and had threatened earlier to attack the ships in order to free them by a military strike, even if that would mean that Turkey would have to sacrifice the crew. Though an official confirmation could not been obtained from the Turkish Forces Headquarters, observers and military attachés of other nations see such sabre-rattling as unwise attempt to compensate too much military testosterone, because the Turkish side would not gain anything from a few killed pirates, a dead crew and a sunk vessel, which certainly has been prepared to be blown up in case of any attack. It only would create a human and environmental disaster and contribute to military escalation.

Somali pirates have released a Yemeni fishing boat, Faluja, along with ten fishermen held earlier in the Gulf of Aden, the Yemen coastguard has confirmed. The coastguards in Aden as saying the fishermen have already arrived in Aden. On December 10, two Yemeni fishing boats, Faluja and al-Qana’a, were seized by Somali pirates while fishing in the Gulf of Aden. Seven fishermen of those who were onboard the two boats managed to escape the pirate attack. 5 fishermen remain so far with MSV AL-QUANA’A in Somalia.

The Yemeni fishing vessel, during whose capture a Kenyan man was killed, is said to have been grounded on the beaches near Hafun.

With the latest captures and releases now at least 18 foreign vessels with a total of at least 350 crew members (of which 92 are Filipinos) are held in Somali waters and are monitored on our actual case-list, while several other cases of ships, which were observed off the coast of Somalia and have been reported or had reportedly disappeared without trace or information, are still being followed. Over 132 incidences (including attempted attacks, averted attacks and successful sea-jackings) have been recorded to far for 2008 with until today 49 fully documented, factual sea-jacking cases (incl. the presently held 18). Mystery mother vessels Athena/Arena and Burum Ocean and not fully documented cases of vessels are not listed in the hi-jack count any more until clarification. Several other vessels with unclear fate (also not in the actual count), who were reported missing over the last ten years in this area, are still kept on our watch-list, though in some cases it is presumed that they sunk due to bad weather or being unfit to sail. In the last four years, 22 missing ships have been traced back with different names, flags and superstructures.

Other related news ——-

The Yemeni government said on Wednesday it is creating a regional anti-piracy centre to battle the growing number of high-seas hijackings by Somali pirates in the area. The centre will act as a hub for the exchange of information about piracy and for the coordination of multi-national naval forces in international and Somali territorial waters, a Yemeni transport ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Saba news agency. Yemen has already started work on building the centre which should be completed in about six months, with 10 Red Sea and Gulf of Aden countries taking part, the official said. Arab nations on the Red Sea met in Cairo in November and committed to cooperate in the fight against the pirates, but did not announce any concrete measures. In addition to Yemen, the official said that Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Sudan would be involved in the centre. “It would be wrong to say that the creation of centre will lead to a regional or international force, because it is simply a technical and coordination centre,” he said to AFP. When there are acts of piracy, “it will fall upon the naval forces of the closest country to intervene”.

South Korea said Wednesday it would send a destroyer to keep pirates away from military equipment being shipped back from Iraq. A 3,500-ton destroyer carrying anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine helicopter has been made ready for the mission, the Joint Chiefs of Staff office said. The office said the warship would escort a 13,000-ton cargo ship carrying military equipment including 110 trucks and ammunition, which would leave Kuwait on Friday. The defence ministry said the destroyer would carry a special military force and was more than strong enough to deal with any pirate attacks. South Korean troops returned home last week after Seoul wound up a four-year military mission to help reconstruct war-torn Iraq. South Korea is also considering sending a warship to combat rampant piracy off Somalia, where its own ships and crews have been targeted several times. The defence ministry will ask parliament to approve the deployment. In September Somali pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter carrying a cargo of 33 tanks and grenade launchers. Seoul is thinking of sending a 4,500-ton destroyer carrying missiles and other modern weaponry early next year, according to Yonhap news agency.

Beneath the surface of daring maritime hijackings, a larger agenda appears to be in play, writes Galal Nassar in Al-Ahram Weekly. Piracy has topped the news recently from the Middle East and warships from around the world have converged around the Horn of Africa. It is important to bear in mind that, with the rise of piracy in the region, the West has trained its focus more intensely on security of the seas while leaving the domestic crisis in Somalia to play itself out.

Odd, isn’t it, that not a minuscule fraction of all this media attention was drawn to the area when boats of Somali refugees were sinking in the same bodies of water? That, apparently, was just a routine game of Russian roulette played by people who were obviously not newsworthy and did not merit international humanitarian concern. In fact, more often than not, passing ships did not even pause, as is required by international law, to save the lives of those whose rusted boats were stranded in the middle of the sea and who had no hope of reaching shore alive. Nor were the countries of the world stirred into action by Yemen’s appeal for relief for thousands of refugees who had managed to make it to its shores alive. Sanaa was left to deal with those gaunt and wasted survivors on its own. Even worse, the tragic events that have been unfolding on land in Somalia for several years and that have reaped an even more disastrous human roll have received just as little attention. And what is particularly amazing is that the man who caused all that destruction on land and the rise of piracy on the seas, by overthrowing the government that had managed to restore peace and security to the country was the first to dispatch warships to the Indian Ocean.

Somalia perches on the most important maritime channels in the world. Through this passageway passes Arab oil on its way to European and American markets. It is also a relatively inexpensive route for the shipment of Western industrial products to Asia and Africa. The maritime channel has special strategic significance for Washington and Israel. For the former, it serves as the vital link between the US’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and its Fifth Fleet stationed off the coast of Bahrain and its Seventh Fleet in the Indian Ocean. Tel Aviv, meanwhile, has not forgotten that Egypt together with Yemen closed the Bab Al-Mandeb upon the outbreak of the 1973 October War, which came as an additional blow to Israeli and international shipping with the closure of the Suez Canal following the Israeli occupation of Sinai in 1967. Israel has been pressing for the internationalisation of the Red Sea. With its ships no longer confined to a narrow lane as they pass to and from the port of Eilat, it would have much greater maneuverability in those waters as well as the opportunity to secure supply lines for its naval units. There is no overstating what a military advantage this would bring to the Hebrew state and what a threat this would pose to Arab national security.

Because the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden are integrally connected with the Bab Al-Mandeb, the Red Sea and, some would add, the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, those powers are keen to see immediate results in these vitally strategic waters. Indeed, the Western drive to form an international naval force in the Red Sea is, perhaps, the most salient proof that the internationalisation of the Red Sea is coming and only waiting for the Western powers and Israel to reach an accommodation over their shares of the pie. During the coming months those powers will engage in intensive and, most likely, secretive talks and machinations with the purpose of assigning roles and dividing stakes. Naturally, Israeli aims will be given high priority. In approving the resolution this week, the Security Council effectively mandates that the Red Sea too will come under an international mandate (meaning under the control of the US and the Zionist entity), essentially seizing those waters from Arab sovereignty on the grounds that the Arabs have been unable to keep them secure. Western schemes to internationalise the Red Sea will strike a debilitating blow to Arab security, which is already weak and crumbling since the occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Arab territory and holy sites in Palestine at the expense of and to the ongoing detriment of Palestinian national and human rights. What should the Arabs do to forestall these plans? Perhaps the most important actions they should take are the following: first, work together under the umbrella of the Arab League and in cooperation with African countries to resolve the Somali crisis and bring peace to that war-torn country; second, revive an idea that had gained some support in the 1980s until it was shelved as the result of US pressure. This was to create an Arab Red Sea Organisation establishing a security system for the Red Sea basin.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, was the first to voice the Zionist entity’s ambition to gain control over the Red Sea. In 1949 he said, “We are surrounded on land. The sea is our only route of contact with the rest of the world. Developing Eilat will be a major goal towards which we will direct our steps”. Countries overlooking the Red Sea sensed the danger. In 1950 Saudi Arabia and Egypt struck an agreement granting the latter military access to several strategically placed islands in the Gulf of Aqaba, the two most important of which are Tiran and Sanafir. The purpose was to restrict Israeli maritime activities. The action became one of the motives behind the tripartite aggression of 1956. Later, in 1967, Egypt’s closure of the Gulf of Aqaba became the direct cause of the Six Day War in which Israel occupied extensive tracts of Arab land.

In the face of this development, the Arab nations, especially the frontline states with Israel and those bordering the Mediterranean, became more acutely aware of the threat of Israeli expansionism and the strategic importance of the Red Sea and the Bab Al-Mandeb in particular. These were the vital maritime links between the Israeli port of Eilat and Africa and Southeast Asia. Israeli naval displays in the Red Sea between 1970 and 1973 drove home the point to such an extent that Yemen declared itself an immediate party to the Arab-Israeli conflict. During this period Yemen alerted the Arab League to Zionist activities on the Eritrean coast near Bab Al-Mandeb. The League followed through on this alert and discovered that, indeed, Israel in cooperation with the US had rented several islands from Ethiopia. It further discovered an espionage network based on Barim Island in the centre of the straits whose task was to gather intelligence on the area straddling the southern entrance to the Red Sea and to safeguard the passage of Israeli ships. On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a simultaneous attack on Israel and, for the first time, the Arabs coordinated in asserting the right of sovereignty over their territorial waters by closing the Bab Al-Mandeb to Israeli ships. On 14 October of that year, Yemen deployed forces on several islands in the Red Sea in order to prevent Israel from occupying them.

From 1973 to 1979, the Arabs convened several conferences for the purpose of protecting Red Sea security from Zionist infiltration into the area. Among the most important resolutions to come out of these conferences were one declaring the Red Sea an Arab sea that would remain independent from international conflicts, and another calling for cooperation among Red Sea basin countries in the exploitation of its wealth for the benefit of the people of the region and against the policies of the Zionist entity. In all these conferences, Yemen played a crucial role in formulating a unified Arab vision on the prevention of Zionist infiltration. By virtue of its strategic location, Yemen was perhaps foremost among the Arab countries to appreciate the dangers of Israeli ambitions in the region and to observe the Israeli drive to establish closer relations with African nations near the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Thus, in October 1977, Sanaa sent a secret memorandum to the Arab League warning of the growth of an Israeli and Ethiopian military presence on the Eritrean coast and near Bab Al-Mandeb. It also reported that Ethiopia had sold a strip of the Eritrean coastline to Zionist intelligence agents, placing Israel in a position to directly threaten Yemeni islands and the southern portion of the strait.

The continued lack of a clear and cohesive collective Arab security policy for the Red Sea zone, the hostile relations between some Arab and African states and, more importantly, inter-Arab tensions in that area in particular, all worked in favour of Israeli designs. Tel Aviv scored a significant victory in this regard. It is embodied in the Camp David Accords of 16 March 1979 in the form of the recognition of Israel’s right to freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba, the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal. The distortion in regional balances that this caused was instrumental in perpetuating political and economic instability, all the more so in view of the general climate that enabled Israel to establish an even greater presence and more powerful influence in the Red Sea area and to deploy these in ways inimical to Arab interests.

Controlling East Africa: The commander of the Israeli navy said, “Control over the Suez Canal only gives Egypt one key to the Red Sea. The second and more important key from the strategic point of view is the Bab Al-Mandeb. This could fall into Israeli hands if it could develop its naval force in the Red Sea zone”. Elyahu Salbetter writes that Israeli defence strategists and planners are fully aware of the Arab threat to Israel in the Red Sea, which underscores the need for Israel to establish closer relations with non-Arab countries in east Africa. Certainly, since 1990 the political climate has been even more conducive to Israel’s ends. With the aid of its strategic alliance with the US and its overall military superiority, Israel has succeeded in strengthening its political, economic and military ties with Red Sea nations.

Several Arab studies have concluded that Eritrea’s occupation of the Hanish Islands in December 1995 was supported and engineered by Israel with the aim of gaining a stronger foothold in the southern Red Sea. Apparently that move had been a relatively long time in the planning. As early as 1990 an Israeli delegation visited Asmara to gather intelligence on the situation in Eritrea and the southern Red Sea area. Israeli strategists then drew up an urgent plan for a more vigorous foreign policy towards east Africa. Discussed in a five-hour secret Knesset session on 16 March 1992, the most important points in the plan were: To normalise relations with such African countries as Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia, Togo, Mozambique and Kenya, and to counter Arab influence in Africa; to strengthen Israeli military presence in the Red Sea and in Eritrea and Ethiopia; and to strengthen economic ties between Eritrea and Israel.

In addition to sending 1,700 military experts to help train the Eritrean army, Israel created a network of political and cultural loyalties by building large palaces, offering 60 grants for Eritrean students to study in Israel, and sponsoring various cultural exchanges. On 13 February 1993, an Israeli delegation of security and economic officials paid a secret five-day visit to Eritrea. The agreement in principle that resulted from that visit was officially signed in Tel Aviv, in March that year, between Yitzhak Rabin and Asyas Afourki. It provided that Israel would supply Asmara with military and agricultural experts and build national infrastructure in exchange for permission to maintain a permanent and full Israeli presence in Eritrea and for freedom of movement for Mossad agents in the country. The agreement further obliged Asmara to refrain from engaging in any cooperative activities with Arab countries and to postpone the idea of joining the Arab League indefinitely.

Following this agreement, Israel augmented its forces in Eritrea to 3,000 troops who took up station in military bases in areas near Sudan and Yemen. Of particular importance are the bases on Sorkin Mountain, overlooking Miyun Island near Bab Al-Mandeb. On this island, located at the entrance to the Red Sea, Israel installed radars that monitor the more than 17,000 ships that pass through the straits, and through which also passes 30 per cent of the world’s oil production. In mid November 1995, Eritrean forces (without Israeli assistance) undertook a failed bid to occupy the Hanish Islands. The balances of power at the time were such as to enable Yemen to regain control over the strategic islands. Today, pirates have become part of the strategic equations and one can not help but to suspect that Israel is behind this threat to one of the most important maritime routes in the world.

In Somalia, the Islamic Courts Movement almost succeeded in putting an end to the reign of terror and violence of rival militias after it had brought most of the country under control and isolated the remnants of a weak and decaying government. Then Ethiopia intervened, on the grounds of having been invited in by that government, which it claimed to be legitimate, in order to drive out the ICM. The result was to open the way to the return of piracy and commerce in death and destruction. Today, as the Somali resistance is gaining more and more ground, “piracy” has become the catchword for the next round in the game of international intervention, this time to be played out — in the beginning — at sea. In short, international powers are in the process of turning piracy at sea into the avenue for preventing the ICM’s rise to power on land and the reconstruction of the Somali state. It is the “war against terror” all over again, with a twist.

One can not help but to ask, as well, how it could happen that a couple of hundred pirates could operate only a stone’s throw away from the place where the warship USS Cole was bombed? Remember, this is an area where US forces are at the ready, in which regional and international navies have command posts, and in which there have been dozens of intensive joint naval manoeuvres. Which brings us to the question, if the US military that is by some accounts prepared to make war on Iran cannot handle pirates then could squads of Iranian boatmen detain US freighters or oil tankers with impunity? Numerous senior military officials in the West have spoken about the training and tactical expertise these pirates possess. Is the purpose to caution ships away from the area? Or is it to excuse the inability of Western forces to deal with the threat? Or is it to rally support for another international interventionist drive?

Are we not reminded of the scenarios that accompanied the build-up preceding every bombardment and invasion of countries in the Middle East? In particular, should we not be alerted by experience with the game that preceded the invasion of Iraq, especially all the media play that was given to weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi military preparedness? Is it not more rational, in light of previous experience, to believe that certain powers have plans to establish control over the area and that magnifying the “piracy peril” is one of the means towards this end? Does it not also make sense that this falls in line with a tangential plan to end opposition to the presence of foreign military forces in the Gulf of Aden by twisting the economic screws? Is this not a likely interpretation of the sounding of the alarm that “piracy” will force commercial naval traffic to make the detour around the tip of Africa?

Which is more dangerous, pirates or the Islamic Courts Movement? A very similar question was raised with regard to Afghanistan: Which is more dangerous, the Taliban or drug trafficking? The Taliban was overthrown and drug trafficking thrived again. In Somalia, the ICM was ousted and piracy thrived again. If the world wants to end the trade of drugs as well as the death and destruction in Afghanistan it should force the withdrawal of international forces. The same applies to Somalia. If the world wants to end the piracy phenomenon and the threat to major maritime routes, it should lift its protective shield from the collapsed government in Somalia, pressure Ethiopia to leave, and allow the ICM back into power. There is no need for more occupation armies. The key to ending the real dangers and to halting death and destruction is to stop foreign intervention in the domestic affairs of nations and to let the people of nations enjoy the freedom of choosing their preferred form of rule.

Tags: Counternegotiations, Desire, Destroy, Hopes, Somalia, Wishes

Ecoterra Press Release 300 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 113b

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What Fate of Uganda’s Troops in Somalia Reveals About Our Politics
By Charles Onyango Obbo (Monitor)

A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers.

A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.

That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.

The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.

The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.

One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.

In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.

Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.

My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.

So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.

That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task — is part of something big.

If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.

This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.

The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.

Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.

By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.

If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.

Shifta war refugees cry for justice
By Ali Abdi

Fearing for his life as the shifta war raged in the 1960s, Halake Maamo fled from his home in Isiolo to Somalia.

The shiftas, or guerrillas of Somali origin, waged a secessionist war against the Government in the harsh and dry plains of northern Kenya.

However, after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and life became intolerable, Maamo returned to his homeland and settled in Garbatulla, Isiolo District.

But life has never been the same again for Maamo and thousands of other returnees. Most of them do not have Kenyan identity cards and lead poor lives, as they are yet to recover from the turmoil that disrupted their lives.

Although they are at peace unlike when they were in Somalia, their major concern is lack of national identity cards and government support to rebuild their lives.

While a few wealthy ones with political connections have obtained the crucial documents, many, especially those who stay in remote parts, are yet to be issued with IDs.

Maamo says he applied for the document on arrival in 1995 after a thorough vetting process. He is still waiting. Another vetting was done last year and he is now waiting for a response from the Government.

“The only thing new in my life is the peace otherwise I feel like a prisoner as my movement is restricted because I do not have a national identity card. I cannot travel to Isiolo town to see my relatives for fear of arrest by police who refer to me as that refugee from Somalia,’’ said Maamo in a recent interview.

Secession

Maamo, 78, left Merti in Isiolo North, one of the five epicentres of the war triggered by secessionists who wanted to cede Northern Frontier District (NFD) to Somalia, when his family was killed in 1967.

The previous year Maamo and his eldest son Dida, then only aged seven, had watched his father and relatives frog-matched from their huts and shot dead at a ‘concentration’ camp in Merti.

Today, he recalls that scores of other villagers labelled sympathisers of the rebel movement were killed.The secession campaign was spearheaded by the Northern Peoples’ Progressive Party (NPPP).

“The elders were brought from Sericho, Modogashe, Iresaboru, and here (Merti) and taken to Garbatulla. They were loaded onto two trucks to Isiolo. About five kilometres away, they were told to alight and run. But they shot them from the back,” says Maamo, a father of five.

Others who share Maamo’s story include Isiolo County Council chairman Adan Ali (Kinna ward) and his counterparts Mr Godana Tache (Garbatulla), Ali Adhi (Modogashe) and Mr Hassan Balla (Garfasa). They all lost their fathers in the incident.

Died Poor

‘‘My father Ali Wako was brought from Modogashe and was among those massacred in Garbatulla during the same incident. The elders viewed as anti-Kenyatta government were rounded up from villages across Isiolo South Constituency,” says Ali.

Ali is a grandson of the late Wako Happi, one of NPPP’s presidents who spearheaded the secessionist campaign in northern Kenya, then known as the Northern Frontier District.

Ali said his grandfather was detained in 1963 and released in 1969 after the movement was crushed.

“He fled to Somalia in 1972 and came back in October 1984. He died a poor man in Isiolo in 1996,” Ali said.

The co-ordinator of Friends of Nomads International, Mr Yusuf Dogo, says about 3,000 returnees are impoverished because they have no documents to show they are Kenyan.

They cannot get jobs or crucial government services, and many young people dare not step into the town for fear of arrest.

Most of those displaced by the Shifta war started the journey back home from Somalia refugee camps from 1984 following retired President Moi’s plea to leaders of Northern Frontier District (NFD) to come back home with their followers.

For more than 20 years now, they are still refugees in their own country.

Ali says unlike other pastoralists in the country, the returnees have experience in farming and should be helped by the Government to start and run irrigation projects.

Compensation

“The Government promised to help the returnees re-build their lives. They should be given IDs and helped start income generating projects,’’ said Ali.

The councillors want the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and other rights bodies to help them sue the Government for compensation.

“If the internally displaced people of the post-election violence have been compensated why not us whose families were killed and property destroyed?’’ posed Tache, the Garbatulla councilor.

Isiolo District Registrar of Persons M Auma confirms that the returnees lack identity cards, with some waiting for more than a decade. He said his office in collaboration with local elders, the provincial administration and the National Security Intelligence Service have vetted hundreds of applications since 2004.

“When we took up the matter with the head office in Nairobi, we were informed that the case of the returnees would be dealt with by the Ministry of Immigration. We are still waiting,’’ says Auma.

Dogo says the returnees should be helped rebuild their lives through income generating projects. And Dogo suggests irrigation projects in areas such as Gafarsa, Muchuru, Malkadaka and Rapsu for those from Isiolo.

He also advises the Government to unconditionally issue them with identity cards, saying it is their constitutional right.

Dogo says the military employed the infamous scotch-earth tactics to round up and kill the livestock as one way to defeat the rebels.

Dogo attributes the widespread poverty in the region to the indiscriminate killing of livestock during the war.

Livestock rounded up indiscriminately from the residents were detained and slaughtered in a camp where Daawa Primary School and Orphanage stands today.

Africa’s Problems Success story of the West
By Regis Maburutse (BBD)

African Politics and economics is directly linked to its cultural diversity, from the north tip down to the south, Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which for years cultural differences has traditionally been used as a measure of defining tribal superiority in the dispensation of national wealth and political leadership.

Political superiority in this continent is generally not defined by democratic principles rather by tribal lines. The value imposed by western Aid has vastly added to a further compounding and cementation of these old and outdated beliefs of who should be a leader of any African nation based on tribal grounds.

African problems are further compounded by the AIDS scourge as one could pick out any country in the world and talk about its problems and maybe as Africa has been so tragically ravaged by AIDS in the last 30 years or so it stands out on a world scale.

Africa is a large continent with many countries making up its bulk. They are many and varied from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert to the Zulus of Kwazi Natal to the wandering nomads of the Sahara.

Geographically, the continent runs from this large expanse of desert of Botswana through to equatorial jungle in the Congo and down the rift valley of Ethiopia past the mountains of the moon the source of the mightiest river, the Nile, running through Sudan and Egypt perhaps Africa’s greatest tourist draw card apart from the safaris.

So although varied and vibrant a native of Mombasa is going to experience totally different problems to one of the Kalahari Desert. Piracy has been round for many years off the coast of Somalia and many of the eastern African countries are Muslim.

Now one of the real problems in Sudan is religion for it is fueling a war between Muslims and the rest of the country. Even one of Africa’s greatest tragedies the genocide in Rwanda was ignited by old religious conversions. So yes missionary work has added in part of Africa’s problems just as it has elsewhere around the world by imposing a state of western beliefs over traditional ones and in Africa these would be many and varied, Witchdoctors still hold power today. Also bad medicine like childhood Muti practices are problem from within.

But the problems from without began to arrive with the onset of colonialism and the fay the likes of Van Rens Burg set up the Cape Colony and David Livingstone trekked through what was then Rhodesia and a steady flow of foreigners came to the continent to seek their fortune.

De Beers is known all over the world for diamonds taken out of African soil. Of course this sort of exploitation is going to cause problems especially if the assumption is the black man is inferior and can work for peanuts. The advent of slavery where people were taken from the west coast to America did not help this prejudice.

For years in the recorded history of Africa there had been tribal invasions running the entire length of the continent. In the history of Botswana it is recorded that the vultures flew constantly over the kalahari as the peaceful Bushmen were no match for the tribes from the north. So like any tribal nation as Australia was there were going to be tribal conflicts over land motivated by power and greed so these problems were her before colonization.

In Mozambique it is recorded that when the Belgians left they just up and went leaving reasonably sophisticated infra structure in the hands of the locals and the government crumbled.

South Africa is experiencing the same problems now since the hand over from President De Klek. The resignation recently of Thabo Mbeki and the controversy over the criminal background of the incumbent President Zuma show that in the wake of a colonial or foreign influence the locals are struggling.

It was reported in the early days of the handover from Mbeki to Kgalemani Motlanthe that the indigenous vineyard workers whom had now takeover the vineyards in such places as Stellenbosh in Cape province were actually wiring out workers pay cheques when there was no money in the bank.

The most publicized and tragic problem Africa has had to face is without doubt the AIDS virus and its democratic values. Speculation still exists as to how it came to be but if you believe the documentary showing how it came from the Belgian Congo then it is a direct result of western nations meddling.

It was reported that back in the 1950’s the medical researchers European were trying to find a polio vaccine that could be taken orally. Their research led them to Africa and of all places to the kidneys of a chimpanzee. They built a large compound in the Congo far up a river and housed many chimps and began experimenting.

They dissected the innards of the monkeys and used them in the manufacture of the new drugs. But one small oversight as in the kidneys lay dormant and unnoticed another virus AIDS. When they tried experimenting on the locals and it started to show deathly results the European researchers vanished. They know it to be valid as locals had been eating monkey and coming down with the same illness. So this huge problem was caused by outside interference.

Population growth without proper birth control education will be an internal problem for Africa for many years. It is very common to practice polygamy and if you are producing many children from many wives as the king of Swaziland then there will be more children to fed and treat medically.

All in all Africa’s problems were set in motion by foreign intervention and like any economic venture much of the continent was raped and not much put back for the African people. Look at the Shell Company’s involvement in Nigeria and the mess it has left with oil fires burning near villages.

As many counties are independent of foreign rule now the rest of the problems in Africa will fall on local shoulders and it is the hope of the whole world that for once in her history Africa can reach a stage of enlightenment in many countries and many areas but the war in Sudan must stop now to set the example for the rest of the country and problems of Zimbabwe must go too.

A Toilet in Somalia
By Charles G. Cogan

Intelligence professionals get it. But the general public does not. The image is out there of terrorists in djellabas negotiating fences in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. This was in the good old days, before 9/11. Such, the pensée unique goes, is what would happen if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again and brought al-Qaeda back.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen was quoted in the New York Times on December 2 as saying, “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” Rolf knows whereof he speaks: a graduate of West Point, a former CIA Chief in Moscow and lately chief of intelligence at the Department of Energy, he is now the reigning guru on nuclear terrorism. The article goes on to state that, “Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued [...] that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.” In other words, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to carry out terrorist operations. These can be mounted from anywhere or anyplace, from Yemen to Somalia, to Hamburg or to … Detroit.

In carefully chosen but tortuous formulations, President Obama, almost subliminally, got across the notion that the Taliban are different from al-Qaeda, in his speech at West Point:

I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda…We must keep up the pressure on al Qaeda…Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and to its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.

In other words, al-Qaeda are the real bad guys, whereas there may be some good guys among the Taliban. Then, one may ask, since al-Qaeda’s terrorists, numbering in the hundreds, are now in a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, why are we sending thousands more combat troops into … Afghanistan!

In his speech at West Point, President Obama recognized the protean nature of the al Qaeda threat: “Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

Yet the President, in ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, in addition to the 21,000 he sent last spring, aligned himself not only with his pre-campaign rhetoric about a “necessary war,” but also with the sway that the military has established within American society. At least he did allow himself an out, which is quite unaligned with military doctrine: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

It was, indeed, a tortuous exercise for a tortured President.

(*) Dr. Charles Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan were run. He is currently an Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Modern Slave Trade

Pinoy sailors send home record $2.5 billion in 9 months

The cash sent home by overseas Filipino sailors rose by $108 million or 4.51 percent to a new record of $2.501 billion in the nine months to September this year, from $2.393 billion over the same period in 2008, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines reported Tuesday.

TUCP secretary-general and former Senator Ernesto Herrera attributed the nonstop rise in remittances from sea-based migrant Filipino workers to increased enlistment by shipowners in Europe and Asia.

“A growing number of European and Asian shipping firms are disbanding their multinational crews, and replacing them wholesale with all-Filipino personnel that are younger and more able,” said Herrera, former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.

“Foreign employers find Filipino sailors quick learners, and easier to train compared to other nationals. This may be due to their superior instruction here, apart from their ability to understand English,” Herrera said in a statement.

Herrera, meanwhile, renewed TUCP’s plea for the International Maritime Organization and shipowners to aggressively repel piracy and protect sailors. At least 71 Filipino sailors are still being held by pirates off Somalia.

According to the Department of Labor and Employment, some 229,000 Filipino sailors are on board merchant shipping vessels around the world at any given time.

>From January to September this year, remittances from Filipino sailors based in Norway soared by 110 percent to $229.551 million from $109.079 million over the same nine-month period in 2008.

Remittances from Filipino sailors based in Japan were also up 57 percent to $222.505 million from $141.886 million.

The other fast-growing sources of remittances from Filipino sailors were the United Kingdom, up 122 percent to $192.373; Germany, up 47 percent to $175.067 million; Singapore, up 60 percent to $107.945 million; Greece, up 67 percent to $93.446 million; Cyprus, up 23 percent to $46.390 million;

The Netherlands, up 114 percent to $41.281 million; Denmark, up 182 percent to $28.864 million; Oman, up 24 percent to $24.948 million; Hong Kong, up 33 percent to $24.870 million; and Sweden, up 126 percent to $24.223 million.

The double to triple-digit increases more than offset the 24 percent drop in remittances from Filipino sailors based in the U.S., to $1.216 billion from $1.595 billion.

The cash sent home by sailors accounted for 20 percent of the aggregate remittances from all migrant Filipino workers in the nine-month period.

Migrant Filipino workers wired home a total of $12.789 billion in the nine months to September this year, up $516.62 million or 4.21 percent from the $12.273 billion they remitted in the same period in 2008, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

[N.B.: All the foreign hard currency sent as remittance home by worker from the Philippines is channelled through the system of the Philippine government first before given to the families in local currency. Therefore the labour abroad - if maid or mercenary - from the governmental perspective needs to be pushed as hard possible, which safeguards unscrupulous manning agencies from being prosecuted for their abusive practices and abused workers hardly find any assistance or help at their foreign missions. In Syria it is specifically bad, where Filipinas after running away from their employers, because they can not stand the working conditions "under their masters" any longer then are sued and even arrested until they pay a "disengagement fee" - often several thousand dollars. The benefit of foreign currency generation for the Philippine government is also the reason why the governmental orders to not let Filipinos sail into piracy-prone areas are neglected and were never enforced.]

WE SAY: Corruption is all about perception (IslandsBusiness)
‘So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction’

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 was published last month. The index measures the perceived level of corruption in a nation’s public sector, which obviously includes government, its various departments and public enterprises. This year, New Zealand has bagged the numero uno spot. It has always been hovering at the top but this time it beat the reputedly squeaky clean Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland (2nd, 3rd and 6th places respectively) and the exceptionally entrepreneurial Singapore.

New Zealand must feel lucky to have bagged the top spot this year. In fact, some people were even surprised that it did.

For, in the past couple of years, the country’s governments have been embarrassed by more than a smattering of corruption cases, not to mention the questionable financial dealings of several ministers while in office.

The most high profile one was of former Labour Party—and later independent—Member of Parliament Taito Phillip Field, who became the first New Zealand MP to be convicted on charges of corruption and awarded a six year jail sentence. Field, a long time citizen of New Zealand but of Samoan origin, was found guilty of 11 charges of bribery and corruption and 15 charges of attempting to obstruct or pervert the course of justice.

Also last year, an enquiry into the academic qualifications claim of the head of Immigration New Zealand and Deputy Secretary of Labour, Mary Anne Thompson, revealed that she did not hold a degree from the prestigious London School of Economics. She had used that claim, it was believed, to apply for a number of government positions. It was also brought to light that under her watch the performance of the Pacific Division had deteriorated and it was alleged that she helped relatives or friends from Kiribati gain residency in New Zealand.

Some commentators at the time sought to give these two high profile cases an “us and them” type of spin saying such incidents were inevitable as New Zealand’s population becomes culturally diverse and that as some immigrants rise to positions of power, whether administrative or political, they are bound to bring the social and cultural mores of their original countries along with them. Both the individuals in question having had Pacific roots, the invisible finger was pointed at Pacific islands culture.

But like love, sex, crime and politics, corruption too is a starkly human trait and cannot be blamed exclusively on culture or race by any stretch of logic. Just as these New Zealand commentators found out in the months after the Field and Thompson sagas.

Several ministers have been found to have used ingenious subterfuge to claim allowances and pecuniary gain for travel (in some cases palming off the costs of travel of partners to taxpayers), housing and other benefits, especially in an environment that was charged with public anger on the continuing fall out of not just the global financial meltdown but also of New Zealand’s own subprime crisis—the domino-like fall of dozens of finance companies gobbling up the life savings of thousands of mums and dads’ investors.

And most recently, an investigation has found that New Zealand lawyers have been fraudulently skimming off more than a hundred million dollars from tax payers annually through the legal aid system—yet another damning evidence of corruption going unchecked for years. All this in a country that the world perceives to be the most clean and green in the world.

Incidentally, the green image also has received a bit of a bruising recently with the country’s agriculture and farm sector contributing excessively to greenhouse gases when compared to its geographic size and that of its population and the more recent revelation that one in six New Zealanders may be drinking unsafe water.

In the case of the lawyers, it was not about an individual or two. It was a whole bunch of them that were rorting the system almost giving it the colour of the “institutionalised” corruption that is most commonly associated with governments in developing countries.

Clearly, therefore, as the Transparency International report calls itself, corruption is all about perception, notwithstanding the fact that there are dozens of statistical tools that are employed to compute the final rankings using the expertise of a number of professionals and researchers.

And people’s perceptions of nations are no different from their perception of brands. Some nations, like some brands, are always favoured in the public mind (no matter how many chain emails you receive about the amazing corrosive tooth dissolving and toilet cleaning powers of bottled fizzy drinks, no one really stops drinking them. In fact their sales grow every year).

The Pacific Islands score far worse than New Zealand and Australia (ranked eighth). While Fiji has not been ranked this year, Samoa leads the islands pack at 56, followed by Tonga at 99, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati sharing the number 111 spot and Papua New Guinea coming in last at 154 (the last in the list is Somalia at 180).

So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While that it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction and of course fodder for the news media.

On the other hand, indices that are based on hard research and verifiable data and not mere “perception”, which help the people of a nation to hold their governments accountable—such as those that measure human development and those that evaluate the ease of doing business in countries—are far more useful.

It will be interesting to see if, following the string of incidents of corruption that have come to light in New Zealand this past year, whether it still retains the top spot next year.

Haven’t They Always?
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
By Rick Rozoff

On Thursday December 10 U.S. President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection for the prize on October 9 of this year, less than nine months after Obama assumed the mantle of the American presidency and less than a month after that announced the doubling of his nation’s troops for the world’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. The first contingent of new forces, consisting of 1,500 Marines, is to arrive next week, right before Christmas.

Ten days before the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American president delivered a speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he pledged an additional 30,000 troops for a war now in its ninth year. His (and his predecessor George W. Bush’s) Defense Secretary Robert Gates hastened to add that 3,000 more support troops would be deployed, bringing the total to over 100,000, only 20,000 short of American soldiers in Iraq, and with as many as 50,000 more non-U.S. forces serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. In his West Point address Obama reminded his listeners that “When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan….” He has ordered that number to be more than tripled.

A brief report on Obama’s peace prize appeared on the CBS News website on December 7 with the seemingly paradoxical title “A Peace Prize for a War President” by the news agency’s White House correspondent, Mark Knoller.

Neither the title nor the article it introduced was ironic. They reflected the straightforward truth.

The feature stated “There’ll be no effort by Barack Obama to disguise or obscure the fact that he’s a war president when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday.

“The ceremony takes place ten days after he announced plans to escalate the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 American troops there.”

The selection of Obama evoked a prompt and aptly indignant response from Michel Chossudovsky at the Centre for Research on Globalization, who on October 11 published a piece called “Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth” [1] which stated inter alia that “When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,” then “the Lie becomes the Truth.”

Although there are no firm, codified guidelines for nominating and agreeing upon a Peace Prize recipient, Alfred Nobel’s will states that it should be conferred upon a “person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Those criteria have arguably never been honored or strictly abided by since the annual prize was first awarded in 1901. Several winners have been cited for helping to end wars – often by simply prevailing in them. One of the two American presidents previously awarded the prize, Woodrow Wilson, is such a one.

The other was Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 said “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”

Both Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919 were standing presidents when they received the prize. The first had fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (the war he demanded a year before it began) and Wilson brought the United States into the First World War.

The Spanish-American War inaugurated the expansion of the U.S. from a hemispheric to an Asia Pacific power. And an empire. World War I placed the American army on the European continent for the first time and signaled its emergence as a international military power. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 when William McKinley, who launched the conflict with Spain and acquired Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico as spoils of war, was assassinated; Wilson not only sent over one million soldiers to France but also deployed 13,000 troops to fight the new Russian government of Vladimir Lenin in 1918.

But neither Roosevelt nor Wilson were commanders-in-chief of a war when they were given the Nobel Prize. And they received it for, at least in theory, contributing to ending wars; the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state escalating a war already in its ninth year half a world away from his own nation is a precedent that was reserved for this year.

Reuters quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on December 7 stating “We’ll address directly the notion that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and – and his [Obama's] commitment to add more troops around – into Afghanistan.”

Juxtaposition, paradox, irony, contradiction and so forth are terms too weak and inaccurate to describe the timing of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, coming as it did between two pledges of military reinforcements for the world’s largest-scale and longest-running war. Travesty is a better word.

Speculation was rife after October 9 regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s rationale and motives for awarding Obama the prize, and press pundits were not amiss in offering explanations. But actions are more revealing than assumed or imaginary intentions and what the Nobel Committee has accomplished is to yet further tarnish its reputation and that of the prize it grants.

It is hard to think of any recipient, and surely any recent one, who personifies the qualities indicated by Alfred Nobel himself. Advocating and working for peace seem to have little if anything to do with being awarded the nominal Peace Prize. But twice in the last three years it has been conferred upon individuals far more deserving of indictment for violating the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, especially that section of Principle VI, Crimes against peace, which is defined as “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”

Two years ago the prize was shared by Al Gore, who as the vice president of the U.S.’s first post-Cold War administration helped preside over deadly street battles in Somalia and bombing – incessant bombing – attacks in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia. And the launching of Plan Colombia in 1999, the latest fruit of which is the Pentagon’s acquisition of seven new military bases in the country and the resulting threat of armed conflict with its neighbors. Arranged by this year’s Peace Prize recipient. But, again, Gore received the prize years after leaving office and for work in an area unrelated to his former government posts.

Obama’s December 1 speech was larded with lines evocative of the worst rhetorical excesses of his predecessor combined with allusions to broadening the war reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s expansion of what had previously been America’s longest war from Vietnam into Cambodia in 1970. “[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies….”

The current administration has, in addition to plans to boost combined U.S. and NATO (“our allies”) military forces to 150,000 in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated drone missile attacks inside neighboring Pakistan and, as the above quote demonstrates, declared western and southern Pakistan part of the expanding war theater.

The president mentioned or alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization several times in his address, in one instance with a degree of hyperbole that is as frightening as it is extravagant. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.

“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”

The entire world is threatened by a spreading cancer. This alarmist and crude phraseology was employed by a 21st century leader of the world’s superpower, a Harvard graduate, but could as well have been lifted from the lowest yellow journalism screed of the Cold War.

In attempting to deny the obvious – the inevitable – Obama continued by stating that “there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations….”

Troops from America’s NATO and NATO partner vassals and tributaries in the war against barbarians – the terms are those of Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – will not be limited to the war in Afghanistan, which in fact is a laboratory for a far broader global strategy, as “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan….Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere –

they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones said in October that “according to the maximum estimate, al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.” Government estimates for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are in the neighborhood of 20,000.

This is the global cancer that requires 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops and an Afghan army of a quarter million or more troops. And a war that will continue well beyond the 2011 deadline mentioned in the West Point speech and be fought with intensified vigor and as far from Afghanistan as the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Southeast Asian archipelago.

With the deployment of “senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council,” as the New York Times characterized them, on the Sunday morning television news program circuit on December 7, the scope and the length of the already biggest and longest war in the world became undeniable.

The National Security Adviser, former Marine general and NATO top military commander James Jones, told CNN’s State of the Union: “We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times. We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”

He added that the influx of more American and NATO troops “will allow us to move our forces back towards the border regions, where really the most important struggle that we’re going to have is to make sure that on the Pakistani side of the border, that we eliminate the safe havens.”

Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press that although there would still be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan in 2011, only “some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit, will begin to withdraw at that time.”

The Pentagon’s Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and acknowledged that there were no plans for a “rush to the exits” and that there “could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.” [2]

Little noted with the expansion of the war is that its range is widening as its intensity is deepening.

The top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe and Eurasia, General Roger A. Brady, was in Georgia on December 7 and in the neighboring South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan on the 8th to discuss both nations’ increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and solidifying strategic military relations.

The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has recently and once again threatened war against Nagorno Karabakh and by unavoidable implication Armenia, which is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia. The latter is obligated to provide Armenia military assistance under terms of the treaty in the event of it becoming the victim of aggression. With the American commander listening attentively, defense minister of Azerbaijan Colonel-General Safar Abiyev said that ongoing negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh “were not fruitful and such a situation forced Azerbaijan to use other ways to liberate its lands from the occupation.” [3]

On December 4 the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who fought a five-day war with Russia in August of last year, spoke of his offering the U.S. and NATO 1,000 more troops for the Afghan war and ominously added: “This is a unique chance for our soldiers to receive a real combat baptism.

“We do not need the army only for showing it in military parades….While our allies – in this case the United States and Europe – are concentrating on other issues [Afghanistan and Iraq], our enemy is getting active. The sooner the Afghan situation is resolved and sooner the war is over in Iraq, [the sooner] Georgia will be more protected.” [4]

The enemy is Russia and the quid pro quo is U.S.-trained Georgian troops receiving a war zone “baptism” for a future conflict with their “numerous, dangerous and perfidious” adversary. The adjectives are also Saakashvili’s, as are these words: “We need an army that knows how to fight. And participation in the operation in Afghanistan is a unique chance to study this and receive experience….Our final aim is to free the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] and unite and integrate Georgia.” [5]

Other nations are obtaining combat experience in Afghanistan under NATO auspices for use in and on the borders of their homelands, including, like Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations bordering Russia – Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland and Ukraine – as well as future belligerents in conflicts elsewhere like Colombia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

If the world’s sole superpower and its NATO entourage can employ the military necessity at will to advance their interests abroad, their “vassals” will be emboldened to do so nearer home and will receive the arms and training to execute their designs.

Far from promoting peace, even an enforced peace, a Pax Americana, the war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general are igniting power kegs around the world.

If it can be argued that Obama inherited the war in South Asia from George W. Bush and is intent on “finishing the job,” his signing of the $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations in July and the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in late October belies any claim of objection to the enhanced use of the military in general and war in particular.

Next year’s Pentagon budget is the largest, in both current and real U.S. dollars, since 1945, the last year of World War II. Although it contains $130 billion for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq that previously would have been appropriated as separate supplemental funds, immediately after the signing of the Defense Department budget the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated “he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” [6] with the first request to be approximately $50 billion.

With the announcement on December 1 of another Afghan troop surge, the Pentagon’s requests for “emergency financing” can be expected to grow in both size and frequency. As with the claim of a troop withdrawal (or “drawdown”) by 2011, the alleged ending of war supplements is a public relations ploy and sleight of hand trick employed to beguile a gullible public.

Even in a world that over the last decade has been afflicted with such logical and moral affronts as humanitarian war and preemptive retaliation, awarding a peace prize to a war president represents a new nadir of cynical realpolitik and a flagrant endorsement of militarism, however well-disposed many may have been toward its most recent recipient.

Notes:

1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=15622&context=va

2) New York Times, December 7, 2009

3) Azeri Press Agency, December 8, 2009

4) Civil Georgia, December 5, 2009

5) Rustavi2, December 4, 2009

6) Associated Press, November 1, 2009

International Counterterrorism Policy in the Obama Administration
By Daniel Benjamin (*)

If memory serves, when I spoke to you two years ago, my view was that the United States had developed great skills at what I called tactical counterterrorism–taking individual terrorists off the street, and disrupting cells and operations. On the strategic side, I thought we were losing ground. Now, I believe the administration is redressing that gap. In my roughly six months in office, my view of our tactical capabilities in the areas of intelligence, the military, and law enforcement have more than amply been confirmed. One of the great rewards of government service is the chance to work with colleagues in all of these areas, and I must say that their level of competence and professionalism is really extraordinary. When I consider how far we have come since my days at the NSC in the late 90s, I think it is quite remarkable.

And we are now working to match their proficiency by formulating the kind of policies that seek to shape the environment that terrorists operate in so that they find their efforts more constrained. We are rebuilding and reinvigorating old partnerships to combat terror and establishing new ones with others who have been on the sidelines. As we look at the problem of transnational terror, we are putting at the core of our actions a recognition of the phenomenon of radicalization—that is, we are asking ourselves time and again: Are our actions going to result in the removal of one terrorist and the creation of ten more? What can we do to attack the drivers of radicalization, so that al- Qaida and its affiliates have a shrinking pool of recruits? And finally– and vitally–are we hewing to our values in this struggle? Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. Thus, we have moved to rectify the excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forbidding enhanced interrogation techniques, and developing a more systematic method of dealing with detainees. We are also demonstrating our commitment to the rule of law by trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other al-Qaida operatives in our court system.

Finally, we have a strategy for success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President has put forward a clear plan to constrain the Taliban and destroy the al-Qaida core, and the administration is putting up the resources necessary to achieve that goal. Moreover, we are working with Pakistan to establish the kind of relationship, based on trust and mutual interests, that will lead to the defeat of radicalism in that country, which has in recent months seen so much violence. We understand the trust deficit, built up over decades that created the current situation. We know that challenges in the region will not be overcome overnight. But we believe we are now firmly on the right track.

Before going any further, we need to consider the threat today: On any given day, al-Qaida remains the foremost security threat the nation faces. Yet having said that, it is clear that for al-Qaida, it has been a difficult period. The group is under severe pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in severely degrading its operational leadership. The coming troop increase in Afghanistan will further reduce al-Qaida’s capabilities and those of other extremist organizations. The Pakistani military has been working to eliminate militant strongholds in its territory. As a result, al-Qaida is finding it tougher to raise money, train recruits, and plan attacks outside of the region.

In addition to these operational setbacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida has not been successful in carrying out the attacks that would shake governments in the Arab world, which continues to be a primary long-term focus. It has failed to mobilize the masses–and this is a key point–which they have repeatedly said is their means of establishing Islamic emirates in the region.

Finally, there has been a decline of support for al-Qaida’s political program and there are several reasons for this: indiscriminate targeting of Muslim civilians in Iraq and Pakistan alienated many who were previously sympathetic to al-Qaida’s larger aspirations. The result has been both popular disaffection and a backlash from clerics in Muslim countries who have issued fatwas against the killing of other Muslims, notably in Iraq, although I note that this has yet to happen on a large scale in Afghanistan.

Second, al-Qaida’s ideological hard line has alienated more pragmatic organizations and individuals in the wider militant community. It has also created confusion over who carries the true banner of Islamic resistance to Western imperialism.

Third, denunciations of al-Qaida by extremist clerics have damaged the religious legitimacy of the group and raised questions about the proper use of violence in countries where there is no overt military action.

Fourth, al-Qaida and similar groups are becoming increasingly vague about who the primary enemy is, creating confusion in the militant community about the fundamentals of its strategic direction.

Yet despite these setbacks, al-Qaida has proven to be adaptable and resilient in two arenas. The first is in ungoverned or under-governed areas, often where there are tribal conflicts in which it can attach itself to the different parties. Thus in Yemen, al-Qaida operatives are marrying into the local tribes, and taking up their grievances against the government. In the sparsely populated Sahel, al-Qaida operatives, sometimes operating with individual local tribesmen and nomads, kidnap foreigners. In the FATA, operatives are marrying into local Pashtun tribes and are serving the larger interests of the Taliban insurgency by providing technical know-how and disseminating propaganda. And in Somalia, al-Qaida’s allies in al-Shabaab now control significant tracts of territory. These weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al-Qaida and its allies and to dismiss their significance is to misunderstand their historical importance for training, recruitment, and operational planning. Quite frankly, the problem of un- and under-governed spaces is one of the toughest ones this and future administrations will face.

The second arena where Sunni radicals continue to succeed is in persuading religious extremists to adopt their cause, even in the United States. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed Monday in Chicago portrays an American citizen–David Headley–playing a pivotal role in last year’s attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. So even if this radical movement is not mobilizing the masses, it is still galvanizing enough people to take to violence and poses a continuing, powerful threat. The importance of these two cases should not be glossed over–the conspiracies these men were engaged in had roots in the FATA, and eight years after 9/11, should give us all pause. The threat to the U.S. remains substantial and enduring despite the operational constraints on al-Qaida central.

It is also multifaceted as we have seen in the movement of young men, many of them motivated by a sense of ethnic duty, who have left their communities in Minnesota, been radicalized in Somalia, and fought and died for al-Shabaab.

As the example of David Headley indicates, al-Qaida is not the only group with global ambitions that we have to worry about. Lashkar e-Taiba has made it clear that it is willing to undertake bold, mass-casualty operations with a target set that would please al-Qaida planners. The group’s more recent thwarted conspiracy to attack the US embassy in Bangladesh should only deepen concern that it could evolve into a genuinely global terrorist threat. And let me say as an aside, very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT, a truly malign presence in South Asia. We are working closely with allies in the region and elsewhere to reduce the threat from this very dangerous group.

As you know, I worked on terrorism in the White House when al-Qaida first surfaced in the late 1990s and I can tell you now, after having access to the intelligence again, that the threat has become far more complicated due to the proliferation of groups and the cross-pollination of networks. The global radical milieu has become thicker. There is so much more that we have to keep tabs on than there was in 1999.

So what are we doing to meet this challenge? Faced with this continuing and evolving threat, President Obama has articulated a clear policy – to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its allies. That is our overriding objective, and to achieve it we are using all the tools at our disposal. In weakly-governed areas we are collaborating with the relevant local authorities to bolster their security forces to prevent al-Qaida safe havens. Moreover, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and those of our allies continue to disrupt terrorist plots at home and abroad–as we have here in Denver and New York, in London, and in other countries around the world. We are working with the international financial community to deny resources to al-Qaida and its supporters. Now, as al-Qaida affiliates turn to kidnapping for ransom to raise funds, we are urging our partners around the world to adopt a no-concessions policy toward hostage-takers so we can diminish this alternative funding stream in regions like the Sahel, the FATA, and Yemen.

But this is not enough, as the continuing flow of recruits–and the lengthening roll call of conspiracies testifies. As President Obama succinctly put it, “A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.” We need to look to look to what my colleague Deputy National Security John Brennan has called the upstream factors. We need to confront the political, social, and economic conditions that our enemies exploit to win over the new recruits…the funders…and those whose tacit support enables the militants to carry forward their plans.
The threat is global and our enemies latch on to grievances on behalf of the entire Muslim world, so we must work to resolve the long-standing problems that fuel those grievances. At the top of the list is the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, as you know, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell are working very hard to resolve it.

Even with their efforts, peace in the Middle East will take time, and as we know, it will not eliminate all of the threats. But while the big policy challenges matter in radicalization, local drivers are critical as well. We are developing tailored-approaches to alter them. How do these different elements of our global counterterrorism strategy fit together?

To be sure, terrorism is a common challenge shared by nations across the globe—one that requires diplomacy—and one that the United States cannot solve alone. As Secretary Clinton has said, “Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.” The Obama administration has worked hard to reach out and, on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect, to forge international coalitions. The administration has been working at reinvigorating alliances across the board and reengaging in the multilateral fora concerned with counterterrorism—fora that, in all honesty, were neglected for some time at the many UN entities, the G8, and the vast range of regional organizations that are eager to engage on counterterrorism issues.

Building the counterterrorism capacity of our partners at the national level is also a top priority. Consistent diplomatic engagement with counterparts and senior leaders helps build political will for common counterterrorism objectives. When the political will is there, we can address the nuts and bolts aspect of capacity building. We are working to make the counterterrorism training of police, prosecutors, border officials, and members of the judiciary more systematic, more innovative, and far-reaching, and we are doing this through such efforts as the Antiterrorism Assistance Program. In its more than 25-year old history, the ATA program has trained more than 66,000 professionals from 151 countries, providing programs tailored to the needs of each partner nation and to local conditions.

ATA is just one of many programs–on the civilian and the military sides of the house—that is increasing the ability of others to ensure their own security. With this kind of work, we are making real the President’s vision of shared security partnerships as an essential part of US foreign policy. This is both good counterterrorism and good statecraft. We are addressing the state insufficiencies that terrorism lives on, and we are helping invest our partners more effectively in confronting the threat–-rather than looking thousands of miles away for help or simply looking away altogether.

We are also addressing the local drivers of radicalization that still lead large numbers of people to adopt al-Qaida’s ideology, and as I said earlier, we understand the dangers of radicalization, and we are working both to undermine the al-Qaida narrative and to ameliorate the conditions that make it attractive. We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation. In recognition of this, my first step has been to build a unit focusing on what we in the government call “Countering Violent Extremism” in my office to focus on local communities most prone to radicalization. There is a broad understanding across the government that we have not done nearly enough to address underlying conditions for at-risk populations–-and we have also not done enough to improve the ability of moderates to voice their views and strengthen opposition to violence.

Adopting a tailored-approach to countering violent extremism does not mean we can neglect broader structural problems. There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies. But a tailored-approach to CVE requires identifying which of these problems are driving radicalization and are amenable to change with the help of local governments and leaders who understand the problems best.

Over time, the measures and the methods I have described above will reduce terrorists’ capacity to harm us and our partners. No element can be neglected if we are to succeed since they reinforce one another. Global engagement builds coalitions based on mutual interests and mutual respect. And these coalitions, in turn, help us partner with individual nations to enhance their capacity to counter extremism. This, finally, enables us to work with them to develop tailored-approaches to preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists.

I don’t want to leave you today with the impression that we have figured it all or that there won’t be real setbacks in the future. The contemporary terrorist threat was decades in the making and it will take many more years to unmake it. There is much we still need to learn, especially about how to prevent individuals from choosing the path of violence. But I believe we now have the right framework for our policies, and ultimately, I am confident, this will lead to the decisions and actions that will strengthen security for our nation and the global community.

(*) Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism – U.S. Government

We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:

A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.

There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !

ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org

For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.

ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:

PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2

NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.

LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.

WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”

ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.

ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)

The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME and ECOTERRA Intl. helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. Basically the East African Seafarers Assistance Programme tackles all issues of seafarers welfare and ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.

Please consider to contribute to the work of SAP, ECOP-marine and ECOTERRA Intl. Please donate to the defence fund.

Contact us for details concerning project-sponsorship or donations via e-mail: ecotrust[at]ecoterra.net

Kindly note that all the information above is distributed under and is subject to a license under the Creative Commons Attribution. ECOTERRA, however, reserves the right to editorial changes. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/. The opinion of individual authors, whose writings are provided here for strictly educational and informational purposes, does not necessarily reflect the views held by ECOTERRA Intl. unless endorsed. With each issue of the SMCM ECOTERRA Intl. tries to paint a timely picture containing the actual facts and often differing opinions of people from all walks of live concerning issues, which do have an impact on the Somali people, Somalia as a nation, the region and in many cases even the world.

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Press Contacts:

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Tags: 113b, 2009, Chronicle, December, Ecoterra, June, Press, Release, Somalia

Ecoterra Press Release 300 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 113b

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What Fate of Uganda’s Troops in Somalia Reveals About Our Politics
By Charles Onyango Obbo (Monitor)

A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers.

A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.

That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.

The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.

The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.

One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.

In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.

Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.

My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.

So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.

That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task — is part of something big.

If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.

This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.

The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.

Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.

By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.

If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.

Shifta war refugees cry for justice
By Ali Abdi

Fearing for his life as the shifta war raged in the 1960s, Halake Maamo fled from his home in Isiolo to Somalia.

The shiftas, or guerrillas of Somali origin, waged a secessionist war against the Government in the harsh and dry plains of northern Kenya.

However, after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and life became intolerable, Maamo returned to his homeland and settled in Garbatulla, Isiolo District.

But life has never been the same again for Maamo and thousands of other returnees. Most of them do not have Kenyan identity cards and lead poor lives, as they are yet to recover from the turmoil that disrupted their lives.

Although they are at peace unlike when they were in Somalia, their major concern is lack of national identity cards and government support to rebuild their lives.

While a few wealthy ones with political connections have obtained the crucial documents, many, especially those who stay in remote parts, are yet to be issued with IDs.

Maamo says he applied for the document on arrival in 1995 after a thorough vetting process. He is still waiting. Another vetting was done last year and he is now waiting for a response from the Government.

“The only thing new in my life is the peace otherwise I feel like a prisoner as my movement is restricted because I do not have a national identity card. I cannot travel to Isiolo town to see my relatives for fear of arrest by police who refer to me as that refugee from Somalia,’’ said Maamo in a recent interview.

Secession

Maamo, 78, left Merti in Isiolo North, one of the five epicentres of the war triggered by secessionists who wanted to cede Northern Frontier District (NFD) to Somalia, when his family was killed in 1967.

The previous year Maamo and his eldest son Dida, then only aged seven, had watched his father and relatives frog-matched from their huts and shot dead at a ‘concentration’ camp in Merti.

Today, he recalls that scores of other villagers labelled sympathisers of the rebel movement were killed.The secession campaign was spearheaded by the Northern Peoples’ Progressive Party (NPPP).

“The elders were brought from Sericho, Modogashe, Iresaboru, and here (Merti) and taken to Garbatulla. They were loaded onto two trucks to Isiolo. About five kilometres away, they were told to alight and run. But they shot them from the back,” says Maamo, a father of five.

Others who share Maamo’s story include Isiolo County Council chairman Adan Ali (Kinna ward) and his counterparts Mr Godana Tache (Garbatulla), Ali Adhi (Modogashe) and Mr Hassan Balla (Garfasa). They all lost their fathers in the incident.

Died Poor

‘‘My father Ali Wako was brought from Modogashe and was among those massacred in Garbatulla during the same incident. The elders viewed as anti-Kenyatta government were rounded up from villages across Isiolo South Constituency,” says Ali.

Ali is a grandson of the late Wako Happi, one of NPPP’s presidents who spearheaded the secessionist campaign in northern Kenya, then known as the Northern Frontier District.

Ali said his grandfather was detained in 1963 and released in 1969 after the movement was crushed.

“He fled to Somalia in 1972 and came back in October 1984. He died a poor man in Isiolo in 1996,” Ali said.

The co-ordinator of Friends of Nomads International, Mr Yusuf Dogo, says about 3,000 returnees are impoverished because they have no documents to show they are Kenyan.

They cannot get jobs or crucial government services, and many young people dare not step into the town for fear of arrest.

Most of those displaced by the Shifta war started the journey back home from Somalia refugee camps from 1984 following retired President Moi’s plea to leaders of Northern Frontier District (NFD) to come back home with their followers.

For more than 20 years now, they are still refugees in their own country.

Ali says unlike other pastoralists in the country, the returnees have experience in farming and should be helped by the Government to start and run irrigation projects.

Compensation

“The Government promised to help the returnees re-build their lives. They should be given IDs and helped start income generating projects,’’ said Ali.

The councillors want the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and other rights bodies to help them sue the Government for compensation.

“If the internally displaced people of the post-election violence have been compensated why not us whose families were killed and property destroyed?’’ posed Tache, the Garbatulla councilor.

Isiolo District Registrar of Persons M Auma confirms that the returnees lack identity cards, with some waiting for more than a decade. He said his office in collaboration with local elders, the provincial administration and the National Security Intelligence Service have vetted hundreds of applications since 2004.

“When we took up the matter with the head office in Nairobi, we were informed that the case of the returnees would be dealt with by the Ministry of Immigration. We are still waiting,’’ says Auma.

Dogo says the returnees should be helped rebuild their lives through income generating projects. And Dogo suggests irrigation projects in areas such as Gafarsa, Muchuru, Malkadaka and Rapsu for those from Isiolo.

He also advises the Government to unconditionally issue them with identity cards, saying it is their constitutional right.

Dogo says the military employed the infamous scotch-earth tactics to round up and kill the livestock as one way to defeat the rebels.

Dogo attributes the widespread poverty in the region to the indiscriminate killing of livestock during the war.

Livestock rounded up indiscriminately from the residents were detained and slaughtered in a camp where Daawa Primary School and Orphanage stands today.

Africa’s Problems Success story of the West
By Regis Maburutse (BBD)

African Politics and economics is directly linked to its cultural diversity, from the north tip down to the south, Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which for years cultural differences has traditionally been used as a measure of defining tribal superiority in the dispensation of national wealth and political leadership.

Political superiority in this continent is generally not defined by democratic principles rather by tribal lines. The value imposed by western Aid has vastly added to a further compounding and cementation of these old and outdated beliefs of who should be a leader of any African nation based on tribal grounds.

African problems are further compounded by the AIDS scourge as one could pick out any country in the world and talk about its problems and maybe as Africa has been so tragically ravaged by AIDS in the last 30 years or so it stands out on a world scale.

Africa is a large continent with many countries making up its bulk. They are many and varied from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert to the Zulus of Kwazi Natal to the wandering nomads of the Sahara.

Geographically, the continent runs from this large expanse of desert of Botswana through to equatorial jungle in the Congo and down the rift valley of Ethiopia past the mountains of the moon the source of the mightiest river, the Nile, running through Sudan and Egypt perhaps Africa’s greatest tourist draw card apart from the safaris.

So although varied and vibrant a native of Mombasa is going to experience totally different problems to one of the Kalahari Desert. Piracy has been round for many years off the coast of Somalia and many of the eastern African countries are Muslim.

Now one of the real problems in Sudan is religion for it is fueling a war between Muslims and the rest of the country. Even one of Africa’s greatest tragedies the genocide in Rwanda was ignited by old religious conversions. So yes missionary work has added in part of Africa’s problems just as it has elsewhere around the world by imposing a state of western beliefs over traditional ones and in Africa these would be many and varied, Witchdoctors still hold power today. Also bad medicine like childhood Muti practices are problem from within.

But the problems from without began to arrive with the onset of colonialism and the fay the likes of Van Rens Burg set up the Cape Colony and David Livingstone trekked through what was then Rhodesia and a steady flow of foreigners came to the continent to seek their fortune.

De Beers is known all over the world for diamonds taken out of African soil. Of course this sort of exploitation is going to cause problems especially if the assumption is the black man is inferior and can work for peanuts. The advent of slavery where people were taken from the west coast to America did not help this prejudice.

For years in the recorded history of Africa there had been tribal invasions running the entire length of the continent. In the history of Botswana it is recorded that the vultures flew constantly over the kalahari as the peaceful Bushmen were no match for the tribes from the north. So like any tribal nation as Australia was there were going to be tribal conflicts over land motivated by power and greed so these problems were her before colonization.

In Mozambique it is recorded that when the Belgians left they just up and went leaving reasonably sophisticated infra structure in the hands of the locals and the government crumbled.

South Africa is experiencing the same problems now since the hand over from President De Klek. The resignation recently of Thabo Mbeki and the controversy over the criminal background of the incumbent President Zuma show that in the wake of a colonial or foreign influence the locals are struggling.

It was reported in the early days of the handover from Mbeki to Kgalemani Motlanthe that the indigenous vineyard workers whom had now takeover the vineyards in such places as Stellenbosh in Cape province were actually wiring out workers pay cheques when there was no money in the bank.

The most publicized and tragic problem Africa has had to face is without doubt the AIDS virus and its democratic values. Speculation still exists as to how it came to be but if you believe the documentary showing how it came from the Belgian Congo then it is a direct result of western nations meddling.

It was reported that back in the 1950’s the medical researchers European were trying to find a polio vaccine that could be taken orally. Their research led them to Africa and of all places to the kidneys of a chimpanzee. They built a large compound in the Congo far up a river and housed many chimps and began experimenting.

They dissected the innards of the monkeys and used them in the manufacture of the new drugs. But one small oversight as in the kidneys lay dormant and unnoticed another virus AIDS. When they tried experimenting on the locals and it started to show deathly results the European researchers vanished. They know it to be valid as locals had been eating monkey and coming down with the same illness. So this huge problem was caused by outside interference.

Population growth without proper birth control education will be an internal problem for Africa for many years. It is very common to practice polygamy and if you are producing many children from many wives as the king of Swaziland then there will be more children to fed and treat medically.

All in all Africa’s problems were set in motion by foreign intervention and like any economic venture much of the continent was raped and not much put back for the African people. Look at the Shell Company’s involvement in Nigeria and the mess it has left with oil fires burning near villages.

As many counties are independent of foreign rule now the rest of the problems in Africa will fall on local shoulders and it is the hope of the whole world that for once in her history Africa can reach a stage of enlightenment in many countries and many areas but the war in Sudan must stop now to set the example for the rest of the country and problems of Zimbabwe must go too.

A Toilet in Somalia
By Charles G. Cogan

Intelligence professionals get it. But the general public does not. The image is out there of terrorists in djellabas negotiating fences in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. This was in the good old days, before 9/11. Such, the pensée unique goes, is what would happen if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again and brought al-Qaeda back.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen was quoted in the New York Times on December 2 as saying, “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” Rolf knows whereof he speaks: a graduate of West Point, a former CIA Chief in Moscow and lately chief of intelligence at the Department of Energy, he is now the reigning guru on nuclear terrorism. The article goes on to state that, “Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued [...] that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.” In other words, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to carry out terrorist operations. These can be mounted from anywhere or anyplace, from Yemen to Somalia, to Hamburg or to … Detroit.

In carefully chosen but tortuous formulations, President Obama, almost subliminally, got across the notion that the Taliban are different from al-Qaeda, in his speech at West Point:

I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda…We must keep up the pressure on al Qaeda…Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and to its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.

In other words, al-Qaeda are the real bad guys, whereas there may be some good guys among the Taliban. Then, one may ask, since al-Qaeda’s terrorists, numbering in the hundreds, are now in a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, why are we sending thousands more combat troops into … Afghanistan!

In his speech at West Point, President Obama recognized the protean nature of the al Qaeda threat: “Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

Yet the President, in ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, in addition to the 21,000 he sent last spring, aligned himself not only with his pre-campaign rhetoric about a “necessary war,” but also with the sway that the military has established within American society. At least he did allow himself an out, which is quite unaligned with military doctrine: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

It was, indeed, a tortuous exercise for a tortured President.

(*) Dr. Charles Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that the covert action operation against the Soviet