The crisis in the Horn of Africa is an imperialist-imposed crisis that began long before the current drought we experience.
Whilst it is true that there has been a three year drought in the Horn of Africa, It is also true that the U.S. has been bombing Somalia since 2006. The bombing and the invasion of Somalia by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops has made it impossible for any government to organize its people to deal with the current drought.
The U.S. has been waging war against Somalia since the 1960s, but now with the discovery of more oil and the emergence of China as the third biggest trading nation to Africa — or more accurately, third biggest exploiter — the U.S. is adopting more desperate means to maintain its dominant grip in Africa.
Imperialist media have joined the war against Somali resistance group Al-Shabaab, supporting the claim that this group is making the famine worse by not allowing the UN World Food Programme inside the areas it controls. The reality is Al-Shabaab has exposed the UN for what it is — a tool of the imperialists to hide their actions. It gives a true account of Somalia under neocolonialism.
The UN has done nothing to stop the U.S. bombing of Somalia since 2006. Nor has the UN done anything to stop the U.S. backing of the Rwandan, Ugandan and Ethiopian neocolonial armies invading Somalia.
The reason the UN has done nothing to stop the U.S. bombing of Somalia is because politically the UN has no interest in solving the real problems of Somalia, The UN is a buffer, and its immediate goal along with the U.S. is to prevent the self-determination of the people of Somalia and Africa in general.
While the U.S. is murdering civilians from the skies, UN soldiers in collaboration with the imperialist media, like the Washington post or CBS News, paint a picture to the world of a kinder, gentler Imperialism. It tells us that all is being done to send help and money to poverty-stricken Somalia, but famine is something that has just happened to Somalia.
The inescapable dialectic however is that the U.S. destroys the infrastructure of Somalia then asks the question of what the problems of Somalia are and why they are unable to create a viable economy that can meet the needs of the people.
The saying "a stronger UN strengthens America" applies here.
According to a February 23, 2007 article in the Guardian newspaper, "the U.S. military secretly used landing strips in eastern Ethiopia to launch air strikes on suspected Islamists" of the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts in Somalia, because of an alleged Al-Qaida affiliation.
This is a stark resemblance to the situation in June 2011 where the U.S. launched drone strikes with the intention of murdering senior members of Al-Shabaab under the guise of links with Al-Qaida and has murdered civilians in Somalia.
This emphasizes a point that we have always raised, that the U.S. does not attempt to solve any problems for the benefit of the peoples of the world. Its intervention in other countries is merely to solve its political problems in its acquisition of all the global resources.
The "war on terror" is the war against resistance of oppressed peoples fighting for their sovereignty and control of their lives. Through the trend in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, or Yemen, more and more in the face of global resistance the U.S is attempting to impose its military power exposing itself not as the solution to problems of the world but in fact its cause!
Africa can feed the world
Despite the propaganda campaign of constant images of Africans starving, the objective material reality is that Africa can feed itself and the world. In the 1960s, Nkrumah in his book "Challenge of Congo" commented on how Congo alone can feed nine billion people.
In fact, Africa is so fertile that, in 2009, the U.S. think tank Oakland Institute reported how hedge funds and speculators had acquired farming land in Africa the size of France to grow food for Bio-fuels.
One example is the Swiss based Bio-fuel company Addax, which has brought thousands of hectares of farmland in Sierra Leone to grow food to be converted into fuel for vehicle consumption. In 2007, the UK government's agriculture department Defra, commissioned a report by Food Chain Economics Unit, which highlighted the extent of the UK's food imports from Africa.
The UK imported around 0.78 million tons (mt) of fresh fruit and vegetables from African nations in 2005. These goods had a declared value of £495m.
This accounted for 14% of the UK's total food import. We recognize that famine in Somalia, as with HIV/AIDS, malaria and colonial boundaries, is just another form of war the imperialists use to attack and control African people.
In the same week as the food shortage intensified in the Horn of Africa, European Union leaders came together with their best brains and money to resolve their problems as a free people at the expense of the majority of humanity.
A free Africa under the leadership of African workers and peasants (as envisaged by Marcus Garvey, Nkrumah and Chairman Omali Yeshitela today) will solve all the problems of the African community. We will be able to mobilize all the best brains and resources, both human and material, throughout Africa and the African world to end famine, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and anything else that confronts us as a people.
As I write, coffee, tea, bananas and even flowers from Kenya (next door to Somalia) are being shipped and flown out of Africa to feed people around the world. By banning NGOs in its controlled areas, Al-Shabaab is reminding the world that Africans do not need charity, particularly those washed out old stars using our suffering for publicity to rebuild their careers. What we need is one united, single African state and genuine international solidarity!
