Apr
25
History of Somalia (2) – Hunger is the biggest weapon
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Emily Tsang
The only famous film in history which has a background on Somalia is Black Hawk Down. It was based on true event happened in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993.
Mohamed Farrah Aidid, one of the warlord in Mogadishu started to attack peacekeeping force within the country and seized all food aid which was intended to distribute to Somalia who were suffering from famine. He openly declared that “hunger is the biggest weapon”, “white people should gets out of Africa problems” and “guns is our way of negotiation”.
The Battle of Black Sea (The Day of the Rangers) was about 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market in the heart of the city of Mogadishu. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of Aidid and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, the miscalculation and misinformation among the US had caused their entire team being pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city. Thousands of heavily armed Somalis surrounded American rangers who fought for their lives. Eighteen soldiers were dead and more than seventy badly injured.
The images of Somali mob abusing American corpses shown on CNN and Somalis media, which bodies of dead US soldier being dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu, are among the most disturbing and horrible in US history. As Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, puts it, “such images made all the worse by the good intentions that prompted our intervention”.
There were no American reporters in Mogadishu on the day of the battle, and after a week or so of frenzied attention, the world events soon summoned journalists elsewhere. It is a history that the American would preferred to forget together with Somalia. The Battle of the Black Sea was perceived by the government as a failure. President Clinton accomplished what he had intended to slammed the door on the Somalis episode. “In Washington a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia”, said Bowden.
Along with American, the larger world seemed to have forgotten Somalia since then. “The great ship of international goodwill has sailed” as Bowden puts it. The war has, not only discouraged the invincible American army to jump off Africa’s affair, it also aborted a hopeful and unprecedented UN effort to salvage a nation so lost in anarchy and civil war that millions of its people were starving.
Without natural resources, strategic advantage, or even potentially lucrative markets for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and rebuilding. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the international muscle. They have been effectively written off the map of globalization and modernization.
