Africa And The Ethnic Crisis (3)

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Title: [SW News]( Lagos (Vanguard Daily) Africa And The Ethnic Crisis (3)
Posted by/on:[AAJ]Sunday, September 17, 2000[]

Africa And The Ethnic Crisis (3)

Story Filed: Sunday, September 17, 2000 3:37 PM EST

Lagos (Vanguard Daily, September 17, 2000) - Africa's predicament can be viewed on a tripod of causes, which has defined its relationship with the rest of the world: this three waves of history, dates from the Arab invasion of Africa since the Ottoman period, the slave trade and the colonization of Africa since the late 19th century.

Thus the African peoples have had to deal with a history of the most ruthless form of buccaneering in the continent. It has been the scene, in fact, of the most devastating international political and economic intrigue even during the cold war, when newly emerging African states were played off against the super powers. This pattern of history has created a dynamic of events which perpetuates the internal instability of the continent.

For instance, in the horn of Africa, where the Arab Islamic influence is prominent, there is a recreation of the conditions of war and slavery in the modern times, which dates back to the Arab conquest of Africa Somalia, for example, is a good test case of this history of instability in the horn of Africa. Once part of the Aksumite Kingdom of Ethiopia, Somalia was in an area known to the ancient Egyptians as the land of the black Berbers. Following the decline of Aksum, the Arabs set up trading posts in the gulf of Aden, and founded the Sultanate of Aden. In the 7th century AD. This was followed and characterized by resistance movements, and the Abyssinian raids in the 14th and 15th centuries, until the final pacification by the armies of the sultanate of Aden. The British occupation of Somalia was aimed as part of its possession of Aden, on the Arabian coast. Then followed a brief period of Egyptian occupation, which ended with the distractions on Egypt by the war with the Mahdist movement in Sudan, Somalia's neighbour at the horn of Africa. But in 1887, Britain again reoccupied Somalia, mainly to keep open the route to India through the Suez canal, and proclaimed it a protectorate to be known as the British Somalia. In time, also, Italy got a foothold on Somalia, along the Indian ocean coastline, by signing treaties, with clan chieftains. It is interesting how the same method was applied by the French, and especially by the British, whose crown agents began the colonial occupation of the Nigerian coast area by signing treaties of protection with the local chiefs, many of the times, under severe duress, about the same time as the Italians were signing treaties, with Somali chieftains in the coast.

By the turn of the last century however, there was local insurrection against the British occupation of Somalia. Britain abandoned the interior and by 1910, had occupied mostly the coastal regions. Although by 1920, it had forcefully quelled the Somali insurrection. But Italy had used the opportunity under the treaty of London, to secure its control of inland Somalia. By 1936, at the height of Fascism, Italy merged all its territories in Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia into the colonial state of Italian Africa. It expelled the British in 1940 and took over the protectorate completely in 1941. At the end of World War 11, Italy was forced to relinquish control of its African territories under the protocols of the 1947 peace treaty. The allied nations-the United States, the USSR, Great Britain and France, took over the responsibility of these countries, and Somalia became a UN trust after the war, administered by the British. In 1950, the British government was again replaced by Italy, which was mandated, having accepted the United Nations agreements, to run a provisional administration over Somalia.

However, by 1942, the Somali Youth League began to agitate for a complete restoration of cultural and political freedom. There were violent demonstrations in Somalia. Ethiopia, which had taken over the Haud and the reserved areas, banned the Somali Youth league, whose activities had spread especially among Somalis living in Ethiopia. There was political reprisals against the movement. Many fled, at such a scale, that Britain and Italy was forced to accept them as refugees. In 1960, Somalia was granted independence But when Somalia became independent, the colonial governments failed to clearly stipulate the relationship between the Ogaden region and the new republic of Somalia. The Ogaden region falls in the boundary between Somalia and Ethiopia, and would become the center of one of the most violent political conflicts in post colonial Africa. It would also be the scene of super- power manipulation of the crisis in Africa in the cold war era. Somalia and Ethiopia had gone to war, by mid 1977 over the Ogaden region, when ethnic Somali in the area instigated an insurrection. When Siad Barre took over power in Somalia, he declared Somalia a socialist state. His foreign policy was basically pro-Soviet. And the Soviet Union initially provided military and political support. But one of the Soviet Union's strategic ambitions, was a unification of the Socialist areas of Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Yemen, and create a formidable satellite in the Arab coast.

They were thus forced by the demands of policy to back Ethiopia in its war against Somalia in the Ogaden region. Somalia, on the other hand, allied more and more with its Arab and Islamic influences. That war of self-determination by ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden region, which began in 1977, stretched to 1988, when some form of peace agreement was reached. But its effect was singularly classic: an estimated dislocation of, about two million Somalis, who came as refugees into Somalia, the disruption of the critical social balance, led to the final disruption of the post-colonial state.

By 1988, there were factions, including the Ogadeni Somali Patriotic Front, and hundreds of other clan-backed groups created by the conflict, which began an armed domestic opposition to Siad Barre's regime. Faced by famine, which had been caused by drought, and by a destroyed economy caused by fighting, Siad Barre fled into exile in Nigeria, where he died. But his country descended into dystopic disorder, in which the Somali state has virtually ceased to exist, replaced by hundreds of factions and clans, in contention for power. Today, over a million Somalis have fled to countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan and Djibouti.. Somalia merely illustrates the unending cycle of violence and instability which African societies have faced through history.

Now the question: why is it that Africa's greatest conflicts are in its richest spots: the Niger Delta, the Red Sea area of the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes area, the diamond fields of Sierra Leone-and who indeed can say what justifiably provokes these almost curious conflagrations? Aside, that is, from the overbearing burden of memory: which reproduces and perpetuates old acrimonies, the result of years of exploitation and colonization. Ancient hatreds may exist, as some western intellectuals and writers insist, but these translate into forms that are fed by contemporary realities-mostly within the spheres of today's politics and economics. There is thus, more than a patina of truth in the view by New York Times Ian Fisher that "In broad outline, the conflicts (in Africa) are quite like those in the Balkans. Ancient divisions, even animosities, exist, but it takes a political elite to seize on them and transform them into something far more violent". And powerful western interests can account for the rise of Africa's political elite in the post colony:

The abolition of the slave trade meant that a new form of trade and relationship would have to exist between Africa and the rest of the industrial world. The change from slave trade to the trade in produce in the African coast for instance, created a new kind of interest. An interest in the raw materials that would feed the plants of the industrialized world. And with it came a new kind of relationship-the domination of those environments, and their exploitation, first by using local agents or middlemen, and finally by creating protectorates, when the natural greed of mercantilism set in. Africa is again the battlefield for new multinational interests, and for new foreign powers, intent once again on initiating the cycle of exploitation and blood. Today, the same cycle is recreating itself and feeding upon the conflict in Africa..

It is vital to understand the growing nature of transnational or multinational influence in the conflicts in Africa-the impact of globalization, investments etc.;, those things referred to as the conditions of post- modernity, and how they account for the crisis in Africa. It is important to see their realities of today and their use of old methods of conquest. Reports of the growing use of mercenaries and private armies in Africa's growing conflicts bears out on this assumption. Like De Beers, the South African mining giants, who has links with Executive outcomes, a mercenary group comprising soldiers in Apartheid South Africa's defence forces, whose sister company, Branch energy also has mining concerns in war torn Sierra Leone.

We are in the era of privatizing war-reminiscent of the activities of the trading companies in Africa in the 19th century, with men like Taubman Goldie in West Africa and Rhodes in South Africa, which fuelled the ethnic crisis in Africa and eventually the colonial scramble for Africa in the 19th century. The scramble for Africa has always involved local agents, whom the big international interests arm first to suppress the local population. Before they are themselves suppressed by a more terrible might. The African accomplices in the slave trade were first armed by the international slave cartel. Part of the use of the arms was also to create internal conflicts in Africa. When they had no more use for them at the abolition of the slave trade, they were forced to cede their territories, by signing treaties of protection.

Today, international multinationals and foreign governments with huge interests in Africa have armed and supported African dictators, who have suppressed the civil liberties of their people, created conditions of internal conflict, and exploited the natural resources of their people in partnership with these international interests. Many of the African rulers today are playing the exact roles of the middlemen of the slave-trading era. And there is a deliberate subversion of the nation states in Africa to create anomie, and provide an excuse for the recolonization of Africa. Various insurgent groups are armed to undermine existing governments, to create chaos, and establish their own areas of dominance. For many years in many African countries, military coups funded and supported from abroad, have acted within that purpose of subversion. The hint of recolonization comes through clearly in some statements, like the one credited to Crispin Blunt, conservative member of the British parliament, who was arguing forcefully for Sandline, a mercenary group operating in Sierra Leone ".The British government" he said "has made it clear, their distaste for the private sector military company, but if such companies had been used in Sierra Leone and they would have secured the country's wealth creation area-the diamond mines-which could have been handed over to a major mining corporation" And as part of the neo-colonial adventure, the World Socialist journal notes, the British government has virtually taken over the administration of its former colony-a move to secure its own 'strategic interest'

Meanwhile, the various movements and sporadic interpenetration of peoples across boundaries, the displacement of local populations which spill over new areas, and create new boundaries, are bound to ignite a condition of stateless warfare. Africa is already in a state of flux: Eritreans, crossing the Sudan to escape two years of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Rwandan Hutu refugees crossing into the Makivele refugees camp in the Mbabara district of Southern Uganda, Sudanese refugees crossing into the borders to Camps in the Ugandan northwestern districts of Moyo and Adjumani, Sierra Leonean refugees crossing into Liberia-creating new boundaries, new ethnic mixes, and future scenarios for massive conflicts in the coming centuries. It is, as the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo says, like "a going and coming that goes on for ever" because in Africa peace is not good business. And so war dominates.

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