http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/05/07/africas-au-a-tool-of-western-rule/
Africa’s AU: A Tool of Western Rule
by Thomas C. Mountain
May 7, 2012
The African Union (AU) has mutated into a particularly corrupt and brutal enforcer of western rule in Africa. When it comes to the interests of Pax Americana, you must start with the crimes committed in the AU’s “War on Terror” in Somalia, a.k.a., the War on the Somali people.
In 2006, the Somalis themselves under the umbrella of the Union of Islamic Courts brought about a miracle in many observers’ eyes and established a functioning government in the former capital of Mogadishu, bringing peace and security to the region for the first time in 15 years.
The diktats of Pax Americana’s International War on Terror require that any truly popular government, especially with the word Islamic in its name, must not be, and the USA soon dispatched its Ethiopian gendarmes to put fire and sword to peace in Somalia.
This was all done with the official blessing and support of the AU and its big brothers in the UN. Unfortunately for them, the brutal nature of the Ethiopian invasion and occupation began a massive upswell of Somali nationalism and the gendarmes from Addis Ababa were forced to flee the land of their historic enemies, for no Ethiopian leader in their right mind had ever picked a fight with the Somalis.
Up stepped the AU in the form of what is today over 20,000 heavily armed soldiers, mainly some 15,000 from Uganda. These mercenaries invaded Somalia in 2008 and quickly turned Mogadishu into a high explosive inferno, destroying much of the city, 30 square miles or so and creating half a million refugees on top of the half a million Ethiopia had already caused.
The AU troops prefer heavy artillery, tanks, heavy armored vehicles and helicopter gunships when dealing with the Somali resistance. The AU has had no qualms about shelling Somali neighborhoods and markets and the monthly lists of dead and wounded residents of Mogadishu swelled into the thousands before the Al Shabab resistance finally withdrew from the city.
And all the while no one seems to ask why? What gives the Ugandan army the right to be fighting a war against Somalis? How does the AU get away with massacring tens of thousands of the Somali people? Or creating a million refugees who are left to slow starvation in the long overflowing refugee camps?
To understand how this has come to be, how a lofty sounding Organization for African Unity became the African Union and started killing tens of thousands of Africans, one must go back to the miscarriage that brought this organization into existence.
In the early 1960’s, and the birth of what quickly became Neocolonialism in Africa, the Organization for African Unity (OAU) was born. Despite all the idealist rhetoric of building a truly Pan-African union, the very birth of the organization took place amidst a contradiction so overwhelming that all good intent was stillborn.
Instead of supporting African Liberation, the OAU located its headquarters in Ethiopia which was already involved in a counterinsurgency against the Eritrean Liberation Front, the independence movement that became the forefather of today’s Government of Eritrea.
After World War II, Ethiopia had colonized Eritrea, with the blessing of the USA, instead of Eritrea getting its independence like the rest of Africa.
A supposedly anti-colonial organization, the OAU, with its headquarters in Ethiopia, a country colonizing another African country?
This was a complete abandonment of any principle and doomed all further prospects for the OAU to help the African people.
As such, matters have been pretty much all downhill ever since. The OAU morphed into the AU as neocolonialism completed its complete sweep of the newly “independent” African nations. Except one, that is: Eritrea, and it wasn’t liberated until 1991.
For the first three decades of its existence the OAU/AU stood by and let the Eritrean people fight their own battles, come USA or Soviet Union interference. And for the first three decades of its existence, the OAU/AU gave open support for the Ethiopian colonial regime occupying Eritrea.
Again, things have only gotten worse since 1991 and Eritrean independence.
Now one must not forget that only one country in Africa is led by a government that came to power by the military defeat and expulsion of their colonizers. Many African independence movements picked up the gun and fought their colonizers at some point, some for many years. But only one actually defeated their colonizers on the field of battle and took power not by negotiation and elections but via the barrel of a gun.
And that country is Eritrea, which today stands as the only African voice in opposition to the crimes of the AU in Africa.
Today, the AU is in the midst of its latest “surge” in Somalia and just as the USA did in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is increasing its occupation army in size and just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting it is “winning the war on terror” in Somalia.
And just as Pax Americana has had to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AU and its African mercenaries will inevitably one day have to admit defeat and leave Somalia for history has shown no one can defeat an entire people. Though not before causing untold suffering to the Somali people and exposing the AU as the tool of western rule in Africa.
Thomas C. Mountain is an independent western journalist based in the Horn of Africa, and has been living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987. Read more articles by Thomas C. Mountain.
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Received on Mon May 07 2012 - 12:38:20 EDT
