Workers League - Behind the US invasion of Somalia - Mehring Books

it was renamed the Republic of Djibouti.
The new state, formed by the union of two artificial constructs of
imperialism, embraced little more than half of the Somali people. In
1962, Shermarke indicated the crippling effect of the boundaries
which had been drawn by imperialism, saying:
"Our misfortune is that our neighboring countries, with whom,
like the rest of Africa, we seek to promote constructive and harmonious
relations, are not our neighbors. Our neighbors are our Somali
kinsmen whose citizenship has been falsified by indiscriminate boundary
'arrangements.' They have to move across artificial frontiers to
their pasturelands. They occupy the same terrain and pursue the
same pastoral economy as ourselves. We speak the same language.
We share the same creed, the same culture, and the same traditions.
How can we regard our brothers as foreigners? Of course we all have
a strong and very natural desire to be united."
The legacy of imperialist domination borne by the states which
issued from the independence process was to prove fatal to their
subsequent economic and political development. Dozens of countries
in Africa and Asia — many of them now labeled "failed nations"
by the capitalist media and targeted as candidates for recolonizatdon
— became nominally independent without having any of the prerequisites
for modern life.
Somalia, for instance, was a country with no written language,
where education was almost unobtainable, and the conditions of the
masses had been maintained at the most primitive level. After 7 5 years
of colonial rule, the country was left without railroads or any other
significant economic infrastructure.
The domination of the world market by a few imperialist powers
had long ago blocked the path to economic development of countries
with far greater resources than Somalia. Nor were the richer states of
Africa able to achieve any greater level of economic independence.
The more developed their economies, the further they were integrated
into the world market under imperialist domination. In all
these countries, the successive bourgeois nationalist regimes have
demonstrated their total incapacity to resolve any of the issues facing
the mass of the population.
This was graphically demonstrated in Somalia where, even by
African standards, the bourgeoisie was exceptionally weak. At the
time of independence, about 80 percent of Somalia's estimated
population of three million were nomads. The remainder were
cultivators along the southern rivers or, between 5 to 10 percent, were
37