Horace G Campbell (2013-09-26)The
Somali militant group Al Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the
September 21 attack at an upmarket shopping mall in Nairobi in which
dozens of people were killed. Progressives must intensify their
opposition to extremists who manipulate Islam, but also reject the
imperial forces inside Africa and their alliesTHE FUTURE OIL BONANZA IN SOMALIA
In the past two years the news from Somalia has been dominated by the
information that there could be as much as 110 billion barrels of oil
and gas off the shores of Somalia. There is also likely to be vast
natural gas reserves in Somali waters in the Indian Ocean. Fields
containing an estimated 100 trillion cubic feet of gas have been found
off Mozambique and Tanzania. British politicians and British oil
companies have been the most active in seeking to corner the future
exploration of this oil and it is not by accident that the most recent
conferences on the future of Somalia has been held in London and hosted
by David Cameron, the Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party
of Britain. One of the first companies to have signed a contract with
the Government of Somalia is the front for British petroleum interests
that is now registered as Soma Oil & Gas Exploration Ltd. This
company was recently founded in the United Kingdom and its chairman is
Michael Howard, a former leader of the Conservative Party. We are also
informed that CEO Robert Sheppard has experience as an adviser for the
U.K. oil company BP PLC (LON: BP) in Russia.
Very soon after the long transition and the more than fifteen meetings
to organize a sensible form of governance in Somalia, the British moved
in to muscle out an African as the Special Representative of the
Secretary General (SRSG) for Somalia. Nicholas Kay has emerged as the
SRSG for Somalia at a moment when Britain is seeking to dominate the
institutions and organizations that will have control over the decision
making processes for the oil and gas exploration in Somalia. From the
moment of the decomposition of the Somalia government and the
manipulation of the military entrepreneurs by western forces, Britain
had been cooling its heels working with the political elements in that
section of Somalia that had been colonized by Britain after the Berlin
Conference. During the colonial era Britain had used this region to
provide meat for its troops in the Gulf and British Somaliland was
governed from India.
British oil companies for decades had knowledge of the massive oil
reserves off the coast of Somalia and the British teased the ‘leaders’
of Somaliland with the gesture that they would recognize this
secessionist region as a breakaway state. Pan Africanists will remember
that at the Berlin Conference in 1885 the peoples of Somalia were
divided in to five areas (French Somaliland, -now called Djibouti,
British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, the Ethiopian areas of Somalia
–in the Ogaden and the Somalia peoples who were located in what came to
be known as Kenya), There are up to 300,000 citizens of Somali
extraction in Europe and while the racism of Britain alienates the more
than 100,000 Somali youth, Britain is opportunist and when Mo Farah won
the gold medal for the 10,000m at the London 2012 Olympics, the British
press forgot the jingoism that alienated and confused many youth of
Somali extraction who yearned for some purpose in their lives.
British newspapers and politicians had showered praises on the breakaway
region telling them that this was a region of peace in a haven of
violent Somalia. However, the British always had their eyes on the
massive oil resources. Some foreign companies signed deals with the
breakaway governments of Puntland and Somaliland but these entities were
never recognized by the African Union.
For about ten years the British were waiting in Somaliland until they
knew that Ugandans had cleaned up the situation and many Africans died.
They were quite willing for Africans (Ugandans and Burundians) to die in
the AMISOM operation while the western P3 members of the Security
Council quibbled over how much money the UN should spend on the
peacekeeping force in Somalia. Nicholas Kay, the new SSRG, has traveled
to the General Assembly this week to lobby for more resources for
AMISOM, presumably because it will be important to guard the British
nationals who will be flocking to Mogadishu. Kay is by no means a small
player in the British political establishment. Before he was deployed to
Mogadishu as the SSRG he had been the Africa Director at the United
Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Prior to this position at the
FCO, he served as Ambassador to the Republic of the Democratic of the
Congo and the Sudan from 2007 to 2010 and 2010 to 2012, respectively.
He was also the United Kingdom’s Regional Coordinator for Southern
Afghanistan and Head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team for Helmand
Province from 2006 to 2007. In short, he has the experience of serving
British interests in war zones. There are numerous other British
elements in the interstices of the United Nations system working to
ensure the ascendancy of British interests.
MOVING AGAINST AFRICANS AND MANIPULATING AFRICANS
The US form of warfare in Somalia had followed the new template of
drones, local militia forces, private military contractors and third
party countries. In the war in Libya, this form of warfare had been used
with the army of Qatar acting as the third party country. In Somalia;
Uganda had been the country most willing to serve imperial interests
after the Ethiopians had invaded to oust the Union of Islamic Courts.
The historic differences between Somalia and Ethiopia ensured that
Ethiopia could not be a real force for peace, especially in the very
undemocratic and repressive conditions inside Ethiopia. Ugandans
deployed more than 6000 fighters to Mogadishu and hundreds lost their
lives. The Ugandans and Burundians formed the bulk of the African Union
Peace Keeping forces (AMISOM) that drove Al Shabaab out of Mogadishu
The reports from the families in Uganda were that hundreds, if not
thousands of Ugandans lost their lives in the forms of battle that raged
from street to street and alley to alley in Somalia. Reports of the
fighting were that it was similar to the kind of warfare of 1914-1918.
While this fighting was going on, the western countries were opposed to
financing the AMISOM mission and were quite willing and ready to have
Africans die in the streets of Mogadishu as it turns out now to serve
the interests of western oil companies.
If Museveni was a front for the US military in Somalia, by the time the
body bags were being flown back to Kampala, Museveni had his own
interest in ensuring that the violent extremists in Somalia were
decapitated. Museveni worked closely with Augustine Mahiga who had moved
from the safety of Nairobi when he took up the position of SRSG in
2010. Both Mahiga and Museveni had worked closely with Nyerere and both
had been on the periphery of the Dar es Salaam school in the era of
Walter Rodney, Issa Shivji and the period when all operatives in
Tanzania identified with the African liberation project. When Britain
wanted to get the position of SRSG, the campaign of disinformation
intensified about the diplomatic and military capabilities of their
African allies such as Mahiga and Museveni.
After the Ugandans died in the hundreds, the Western military lobby
moved against Augustine Mahiga the Special Representative of the
Secretary General. Mahiga is a Tanzanian and he worked hard from
Mogadishu while the European members of the UN team spend their time in
Nairobi. There had been a struggle between Germany, Norway, Britain and
South Africa to get this SRSG post that can be like the neo-colonial
governor in Mogadishu. Kay won out using the British special
relationship with the USA to succeed.
The Norwegians wanted the position of SRSG and promised $30 million in
aid to the new Somalia government, but the British muscled out the
Norwegians. The secessionist state of Somaliland had signed a production
sharing agreement with DNO, a Norwegian oil and gas company, but
British interests were working hard against Norway. Enter David Cameron
who became the champion for the convening of conferences to reconstruct
Somalia. This very same Cameron who had been attacking Somali nationals
in Britain as the forces that ensured that multiculturalism does not
work was the same who dispatched William Hague to Mogadishu in n 2012.
The Prime Minister of Turkey, Edrogan had been the first leader of a
foreign government to visit Mogadishu in 2011 and Britain wanted to be
counted as a state that supported the people of Somalia. More recently
in September 2013, there was the convening of a special EU New Deal for
peace meeting in Brussels. The European Union pledged 650 million euros
to help Somalia's peace and rebuilding process but after one read the
fine print one could see that most of what was said amounted to pledges.
The British Department for International Development (DFID) rolled out
and published its own commitments made in the meeting but when the sums
were added it did not come to the $30 that had been pledged by Norway
and rejected by the Government of Somalia in favor of the British
promises.
REGIONAL DIMESNIONS
The heavy fighting to remove Al Shabaab from Mogadishu had been
undertaken by Ugandans and Burundians but in September/October 2011, the
Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) invaded Somalia under the banner of Linda
Nchi (Kiswahili for defend the nation). At the time of the Kenyan
incursion in 2011, I had written in Pambazuka that the intended
remilitarization of Africa will fail. I had written,
“The government of Kenya has declared that it will end its military
campaign against Al-Shabaab in Somalia when it is satisfied it has
stripped the group of its capacity to attack across the border. If one
goes by the experience of the past 18 years, then this statement can be
read that Kenya will be in for a long-term deployment to Somalia. The
corollary to this is the reality that Kenya and its cities will be
spaces of war, security clampdown and general destabilisation of the
population. Since the Kenyan foray, there have been two grenade attacks
at a bar and a bus terminal that killed one person and wounded more than
20 people in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. These attacks have already
affected the tourism industry, one of the most important sources of
revenue for the government of Kenya.”
From the books mentioned above we have read that the Kenyan incursion
into Somalia had been planned long in advance by the KDF and that the
Kenyans were looking for the most opportune time to justify the
incursion into Somalia. The international media blitz about famine,
refugees and Al Shabaab in 2011 provided the right background for the
Kenyan people to support the KDF into Somalia. Kenyans had been lukewarm
towards the military after the security forces had failed to protect
innocent civilians after the violence of 2008.
The political leaders of Kenya had been working with French companies to
map out the future of the recovery of oil resources in Kenya on land
and offshore. There had been disputes between Kenya and the Federal
Transition Government of Somalia over the Exclusive Economic Zones of
Kenya and Somalia. Both countries had produced competing maps to lay
claim to the EEZ off the coast of Southern Somalia. The Kenyan forces
had collaborated with a questionable military entrepreneur of the Ras
Kamboni group and the Ugandans were not happy that Kenya had intervened
in Somalia after hundreds of Ugandans had already lost their lives.
[ed notes;click link for whole article..just citing few excerpts..
