Billed as a "war on hunger", the dispatch of 30,000 foreign soldiers to Somalia with instructions to protect food convoys with all necessary force is in reality a mark of just how far the situation has deteriorated there under Western tutelage. Put simply, the invasion will not end the famine nor resolve the underlying conflict between waring Somali factions.
Getting food relief to the people who most need it is imperative in this crisis, perhaps the greatest tragedy Africa has ever known. But the intervention of predominantly US troops under the rubric of the United Nations has very dangerous implications. Calling it a mercy mission cannot hide the fact that it is in effect another Western military intervention in a Third World country.
This is not the solution. The only effective way to end the pillage of relief supplies by armed Somali factions is to flood the country with food in such enormous quantities that not a single individual is any longer in hunger nor any political faction able to make the slightest gain from theft of supplies.
Had the industrial nations of the world, which have long lived off the hides of Africa's oppressed and abused population, begun serious, massive relief efforts six months ago or sooner, the crisis would not have plunged to such catastrophic depths nor would the civil war over food supplies have emerged.
Two million Somalis in a population of 6 million are starving today. One thousand die every day. Three hundred thousand have died as a result of the civil war and famine since the overthrow of the US- backed dictator Siyad Barré in January 1991, while competing clans now fight over the remains of a moribund state. Of the mere 200,000 tonnes of relief aid provided this year, 80% has been hijacked.
In fact, what is needed on the ground is at least 60,000 tonnes of food relief a month. The contrast between the miserable efforts of Western governments to aid famine stricken Somalia and the GATT trade war over glutted markets for agricultural commodities in Europe and the United States is not only stark and striking, it is patently immoral.
But there is an additional dimension that makes the Somalia invasion alarming. With increasing consistency, the UN, acting at the behest and with the military backing of the United States government, is taking it upon itself to play the role of I government in more and more former colonial countries. In this case, it has entered Somalia with an invitation from no-one. The precedent of using military force in such a situation, which admittedly is dramatic, is an extremely worrying omen.
From Grenada to the Gulf War, from Los Angeles to Somalia, the increasing use of US military might to quell the effects of deteriorating economic and social conditions both inside the US and in the semi-colonial world and to advance US ruling interests has indeed been the hallmark of the United States' "new" world order. Meanwhile, it should be kept in mind that a little more than a decade ago, the US used the Somali regime to attack Soviet-backed Ethiopia.
Along with 28,000 US and 2000 French troops, 30 Australian military personal are in Somalia with the "UN" forces. The commitment of resources to this expedition is totally misguided and must be replaced by a massively increased shipment of Australian food aid to Somalia beginning immediately.