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

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The massacre did not end with the mass demonstrations. On
Thursday morning Mogadishu was rocked by constant and rapid
gunfire, much of it from heavy weapons. Col. Peck confirmed that US
forces were laying siege to a large part of the city. "We are conducting
a sweep of the area from where we detected gunfire in the morning,"
he declared. "We have cordoned off the area." There is no doubt that
such a house-to-house "search and destroy" mission will result in a far
higher death toll.
Mogadishu's streets were filled Wednesday with young Somali
men and women who set up roadblocks of burning tires and debris
throughout the capital. Crowds attacked the US, French and Egyptian
embassies and confronted combat-equipped marines and US
tanks with stones, sticks and their bare hands. They also turned their
wrath against the mission of the United Nations, which has provided
an international fig leaf for the US operation, and the hotel housing
the Western press, which has systematically bed about the events in
their country.
US officials have attempted to dismiss this popular uprising as the
outcome of a dispute between two rival "warlords." The upheavals in
Mogadishu came in the wake of fighting Monday between rival
militias in the southern port of Kismayu and public broadcasts by the
leader of one of the factions, Mohamed Farah Aidid, denouncing US
policy.
While Aidid's statements may have served as a spark for the
demonstrations, their real source lies in the opposition of the Somali
people to the attempt by US imperialism to subject them to a new
form of colonialism. The limited scenes of the demonstrations
broadcast on US television made this clear. Youth advanced under
fire from US troops carrying banners with slogans denouncing the
"recolonizatdon" of Somalia and demanding the removal of foreign
forces.
This is no mere phrase for the people of Somalia. For them, like
the masses throughout Africa, colonialism is a matter of bitter
experience of generations of workers and oppressed. More than a
century of colonial rule and economic plunder by the European
powers and the subsequent US-sponsored wars and counterrevolutions
have left their scars throughout the continent. The killings in
Mogadishu are only the latest in a long line of atrocities committed
by imperialism against the African peoples.
The sheer scope of the demonstrations proved that they expressed
something far more fundamental than a factional dispute between