After Ethiopia surrendered, Marshall Rodolfo Graziani subjected the people to military occupation and a reign of terror in which a total of 760,000 people died, 300,000 during the occupation.
Following World War II, African colonies achieved independence predominately in the 1960s when 35 new African nations were recognized as sovereign states. But independence did not protect the new nation-states from the plundering and atrocities prompted by European and American greed. Due to its economic and military power following World War II, the United States emerged as the major post-colonial miscreant in Africa.
Considered the worst humanitarian disaster since WW II, atrocities in the Congo can be attributed largely to the United States and to a lesser degree to Belgium.
When nationalist riots threatened Belgium's control over the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was granted independence on June 30, 1960. Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister in the embryonic democracy but was marred with a number of blemishes such as declaring his neutrality during the Cold War and harboring dangerous beliefs such as socialism. His assassination sixty-seven days later remains somewhat of a mystery but it is known that Eisenhower ordered Allan Dulles, Director of the CIA, to eliminate Lumumba.
Mobutu, his replacement, a U.S. hand-picked dictator, was installed as president in 1965 and was heavily subsidized militarily by the U.S. in the amount of $1.5 billion from 1965 to 1991. Notwithstanding his corruption and brutality, American support was forthcoming by virtue of his anti-communism and his penchant for supporting the American agenda in Africa.
A central tenet in American objectives in Africa was to capitalize on its Congolese, Rwandan and Ugandan allies to secure control of central Africa mainly for the rich repository of resources particularly in the Eastern Congo. To strengthen their control over the resource-rich Eastern Congo, U.S. empire-builders first armed Paul Kagame as a Tutsi ex-pat living in Uganda, who had organized a militia, so that he could invade Rwanda in 1990 and ultimately become the President. His ascendancy to president coincided with the end of the genocide in 1994 in which the U.S. bears complicity for delaying the UN from sending a 5,000 strong Chapter Seven force to end the massacres. The American motivation was to obviate any possibility that the Hutus and Tutsis might negotiate a coalition government thus frustrating the U.S. attempt to install Kagame as leader.
In 1996 and 1998, according to U.S. plans, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Congo led by Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni respectively, both allies of the U.S., in order to secure control of the vast resources of the eastern Congo. One of the Congolese strong men who were seeking to replace Mobutu and opposing Rwanda and Ugandan interference was Laurent Kabila who struck alliances with Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The result was a World War in Africa between 1998 and 2002 in which five million people died. Women were raped, villages destroyed, young girls kidnapped to be concubines and young boys were recruited to serve as soldiers.
U.S. actions in the Congo led to monstrous violations of human rights and an unconscionable level of suffering. Although the violence has subsided, the Congo people are still experiencing violations to their human rights and widespread suffering.
Since independence, Somalia was ravaged by war for which the U.S. bears some complicity thereby compounding natural disasters such as famine. Somalia was ruled either by a dictator or the absence of a central authority from 1977 to the present triggering atrocities, starvation and danger from various armed forces.
Successive American administrations since President Carter have coveted the potential for oil and the unrestricted access to strategic ports in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.
IN 1977, when the USSR abandoned the corrupt and brutal dictator Siad Barre in 1977, the U.S. became his protector supplying him with weapons, military training and economic aid. Between 1982 and 1987, U.S. military aid amounted to $192.6 million. Despite American support, domestic resistance led to the formation of rebel groups who eventually overthrew Barre who had the worst human rights record in Africa.
After the fall of Barre, American strategy shifted to ensuring that only a government subservient to American interests would survive to lead Somalia. The absence of a strong central authority led to chaos and was exacerbated when the United States abandoned the goals of a 1993 peacekeeping and humanitarian UN mission in Somalia when President Clinton ordered a force of army rangers and Delta force operators to locate and capture Mohamed Aidid, a possible candidate for president who lacked the subservience required of a leader in an American post-colonial nation.
Throughout the 1990s, conflict and strife between rival warlords created chaos and exacerbated the humanitarian disaster. In October 2004, Somali warlords formed the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) with funding from the CIA who feared that an Islamic government might gain control of Somalia. They formed a government in 2004 but were unable to control much of the country and proved to be corrupt and incompetent.
They were finally defeated in 2006 by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) who were established in 2000 and comprised of members of Islamic Sharia Courts who administered justice to maintain law and order. The UIC's popularity and strength grew in 2006 as they gained control of Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia promoting stability and order.
The Bush administration could not tolerate an Islamic state in Somalia where vital resources and strategic locations were at stake. To oust the UIC, Bush planned an attack on Somalia through its proxy, Ethiopia, but at the same time, American forces were involved in the assault on the UIC with U.S. Navy warships and AC-1130 gunships. The purpose of the invasion was to drive the UIC out of power and to install the more American-friendly TFG.
Ethiopia's U.S.-supported invasion of Ethiopia deepened an already tragic humanitarian crisis triggering a war between al-Shabaab, the radical wing of the UIC, and the Ethiopian forces and their allies, the TFG. As a result of the invasion, Ethiopian forces indiscriminately shelled civilian areas in the capital and moved from house to house kidnapping hundreds of men. TFG forces also kidnapped children to serve as soldiers in their army.
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