Donald Trump’s anti-Somali racism is ugly. US violence there, with Canadian support, is uglier.
The US president recently declared (repeatedly) that Somali immigrants are “garbage.” He’s also claimed they “contribute nothing” to the US and “have taken billions of dollars’’ to Somalia.
One of Trump’s Canadian acolytes took up their anti-Black, Islamophobic anti-Somali rhetoric. Yesterday on X Dahlia Kurtz posted:
“About 49% of Somalians are the product of inbreeding.
“The average IQ is 67. Mental impairment in America is anything less than 70.
“And Ilhan Omar is married to her brother. So there’s that.
“Civil war Somalia is a great investment, Minnesota!
Anyone wanna vacation there?😎”
Kurtz is an aggressive supporter of Israeli crimes and has instigated various legal claims against me, including an outstanding defamation suit.
Kurtz and Trump’s racist comments are intertwined with justifying significant violence in the horn of Africa country. The US has bombed Somalia more than 100 times this year. Largely ignored by the media, Trump has ratcheted up the strikes, which have led to dozens of civilians killed.
Alongside hundreds of troops in the country, the US has regularly bombed Somalia for two decades. In December 2006 US forces attacked that country after the Islamic Courts Union won control of Mogadishu and the south of the country from an assortment of CIA -backed warlords. Simultaneously, the US pressed, armed and paid for 50,000 Ethiopian troops to invade its coastal neighbour.
As I detail in Canada in Africa: 300 years of Aid and Exploitation, Ottawa supported this aggression in which as many as 20,000 Somalis were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. Canadian naval vessels patrolled the region and government comments on Somalia broadly supported Ethiopian/US actions. Ottawa did not make its aid to Ethiopia contingent on its withdrawal from Somalia but rather increased assistance to that country.
The 2006 US/Ethiopia invasion of Somalia has spiraled into ever more foreign intervention/local radicalization, which has caused a great deal of human suffering.
Foreign military intervention in Somalia dates to the early 1990s. Following the collapse of Siad Barre’s government in 1992 much of Somalia was gripped by civil war and famine. Ostensibly to alleviate the suffering, Canada deployed 900 military personnel as well as a naval vessel and transport aircraft as part of a US-led humanitarian intervention, which later came under UN command.
When Somalis failed to rejoice at the foreign intervention, it turned violent. On March 4, 1993, Canadian troops fired into a crowd of between 50 and 300 demonstrators, killing one of the protesters and disabling at least two. Later that day, Canadian soldiers lured two Somalis near a Canadian base and shot them in the back, one fatally.
The most disturbing incident of Canadian abuse in Somalia took place two weeks later. Sixteen-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone was tortured to death by several Canadian soldiers with dozens of other members of the Airborne Regiment in the know. As many as 80 soldiers heard Arone’s screams, which lasted for hours. In Dark Threats and White Knights, Sherene Razack writes: “What is evident more than anything else is how absolutely unremarkable the violence seemed to be to the men who enacted it, witnessed it, or simply heard that it was happening.”
The Somali mission brought to light disturbing levels of overt racism within the military. Corporal Matt Mackay, a self-confessed neo-Nazi who declared he’d quit the white supremacist movement two years before going to Somalia, gleefully reported “we haven’t killed enough N– yet.” Another Canadian soldier was caught on camera saying the Somalia intervention was called, “Operation Snatch Nig-nog.” Yet another soldier explained how Somalis were not starving; “they never were, they’re lazy, they’re slobs, and they stink.”
Canadian military leaders in Somalia believed the natives had to be kept in line, often through violence. The problem for the US and its allies was that many (if not most) Somalis did not see the UN intervention, which was sanctioned as a peace enforcement rather than peacekeeping mission, as a humanitarian endeavour. At the time of the intervention The Nation referred to Somalia as “one of the most strategically sensitive spots in the world today: astride the Horn of Africa, where oil, Islamic fundamentalism and Israeli, Iranian and Arab ambitions and arms are apt to crash and collide.”
In 1993 Project Censored Canada found the prospects for extracting oil in Somalia the most under-reported Canadian news item that year. A 1991 World Bank/United Nations Development Program study pointed to significant hydrocarbons in the north and in January 1993 the Los Angeles Times reported that it had obtained documents revealing that Siad Barre had given four major US oil companies — Chevron, Amoco, Conoco, and Phillips — exploration rights over two-thirds of the country.
Somalia became a scandal for the Canadian military. Details of the cruel training rituals and racism within the force were widely derided, leading to the disbandment of the Airborne Regiment. Yet few individuals in positions of authority were punished.
Donald Trump and Dahlia Kurtz’ anti-Somali racism is wrapped up in years of violence meted out against the people of the Horn of Africa nation.
Support Yves’ work. Donate Now.
You must be logged in to post a comment.