08/20/14 – Thomas Mountain – The Scott Horton Show

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Uh, hey, let's talk about Somalia.
Uh, it's our friend Thomas Mountain.
You can find him a lot of times at Counterpunch, and he's got one here about the real dirty war in the Horn of Africa.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great to be back.
It's been a long time.
Yeah, yeah.
Good to talk to you again.
Uh, good to have you writing about Somalia.
It's a very important, uh, topic because as I like to try to point out on the show all the time, it's all America's fault.
It's all the empire's fault.
It's unbelievable the consequences for the people of this, uh, I don't mean to be mean, but just pathetic little land where they just never have gotten a leg up in their whole damn history, dominated by somebody or another, never really had a chance.
And then here comes the most powerful power in the history of the solar system.
Just been beating the hell out of from now more than eight years running.
And I mean, you know, directly.
So it's just, it's such a hell of a story.
I don't know.
Um, I don't want to ask you to go too far back cause we've talked about all that.
Go ahead and, and, and, and start with your criticism of Scahill if you'd like, cause it's important.
Well, I'm glad you think that, um, it's, I was a bit harsh, but, uh, uh, basically what happened was there was the worst drought and famine in the Horn of Africa in 60 years, beginning in the beginning of 2011, running for the end of 2012, about two years.
Now in Somalia proper, uh, the UN has publicly announced that at least 250,000 people died from starvation in that time period.
And the one thing that they're not talking about is next border Somalia, or the Somali people at the Ogaden, which is still part of Ethiopia and they comprise the population of almost as much as the Somali people, maybe 75% of Somalia.
There was a job in famine there as well.
The only difference was in Somalia, there was some food aid being distributed, even though the UN budgeted only 10 cents a day to feed the Somalis that were, that were affected by the drought.
And, uh, in the Ogaden, actually there was a food and medical aid blockade for the Ethiopian regime, which is a client state of the United States, whose former prime minister was eulogized at his funeral by the present national security advisor to Barack Obama, Susan Rice.
She got up and praised this guy who put in a food and medical aid blockade for the worst drought and famine in 60 years.
He'd expelled the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
But what country in the world expels both Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders during the worst drought and famine in 60 years, and yet their prime minister gets eulogized at his funeral by a senior US official.
Well, you know, the thing is, this, this, the crimes that are being, the dirty wars that have been committed in the Horn of Africa aren't just restricted to Somalia.
Ethiopia is, you know, they invaded Somalia back in 2006 and did some serious damage to the country, destabilized the new government that had brought peace to Somalia, evicted the new government that brought peace to Somalia for the first time in 20 years, the union, or 15 years, the union of the Islamic court.
Ethiopia is also involved in South Sudan.
The Ethiopian regime is supporting this rebel leader named Rick Machar that's going out and carrying out all this murder and mayhem in South Sudan, trying to do a coup against the government.
All the reports are coming out talking about tens of millions of dollars of weapons pouring into South Sudan, but nobody's telling you where they're really coming from.
And the fact is, for a year now, well, eight months now, the Rick Machar-led rebellion has been going along, you know, continuing to fight, and nobody's explaining where they're getting their support from, where they're getting their funds from, where they're getting their weapons from.
And so, you know, this is coming from the Ethiopian.
And who's behind all this?
It's Americans are behind this, because the United States wants to see China out of the African oil business.
The Sudanese oil fields are the only U.S. I mean, the only Chinese majority-owned oil infrastructure in Africa.
And the United States gets about half of its imported oil from Africa, and it's in the U.S. national interest to see China shut out of the African oil supply.
And Sudan is the only Chinese-controlled oil field.
And again, the Chinese oil fields are shut down because of this war.
So the only winner from all this brutality and mayhem and murder in South Sudan is the United States, because they got China out.
Now, that should point people somewhere, because the United States government is an organized crime outfit.
They're a crime syndicate that's at the forefront of these major crimes.
I mean, the guy that headed up the UN when a quarter million Somalis were starving to death, who's the head of UNICEF, is Anthony Lake, former national security advisor to Bill Clinton, and failed nominee to head the CIA.
And he's the guy that oversaw this famine, made sure that only 10,000 a day got to the Somalis when they were starving.
And 250,000 starved to death, at least, and that's just in Somalia.
Maybe another 200,000 died in Ogedan.
Okay, now...
Hang on one second, Thomas, because I want to interrupt you just to clarify one fact here, that when you say a quarter of a million people died, that's according also to the UN, or basically a sort of pseudo-NGO break-off of the UN that is funded by the US and the UK, the guiltiest parties here.
It's their fuse net, F-E-W-S-N-E-T, is the Famine Anticipation Research Institute, whatever the hell.
They're the ones who say 260,000.
They're the ones who say most of them were children under five years old.
So sorry, I just want to make sure we had your footnote there.
Yeah, good.
Yeah, no, that's a very important point to make in there.
No.
I mean, a quarter of a million people, a quarter of a million people just basically laying down and starving to death.
Yeah, we're talking about an average, in a two-year period, of 250,000.
That's 10,000 people a month who are dying of starvation.
That's 300 people a day who are dying in the Horn of Africa, and that's just in Somalia.
That doesn't include the ones that were starving to death in Ethiopia under this enforced food and medical aid blockade.
All right, now wait a minute.
We're going to have a whole other segment, but let me, before you go on, let me try to follow up another couple of things here real quick.
Now, when the famine hit, Somalia was hit especially hard because it had been a war zone the whole time.
And so even if anybody could grow anything, all the markets were just completely disrupted, and no one was able to distribute food, that kind of thing.
But in the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, was that also a war zone?
I mean, you said that they were deprived of the emergency food aid that the Somalis got, although, like you said also, Tony Lake hardly gave them anything.
You know, here's a silver dime, have fun, kids, kind of thing.
So why was it so bad in Ethiopia?
Is that because of civil war inside Ethiopia?
There's a counterinsurgency against the independence movement in the Ogaden.
The Ogaden people are Somalis.
They don't consider themselves part of Somalia.
They consider Ogaden to be a separate nation, and they've been fighting for quite some time now for independence from the Ethiopian regime.
And it just so happens that the Ogaden holds much of the natural gas reserve that Ethiopia has planned.
All right, sorry, Thomas, we got to stop.
We got to stop right there and take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Thomas Mountain, counterpunch.org.
All right, y'all.
So now, I admit, I don't know nearly enough about Ethiopia's war against the, it's the Amoros is what they call themselves, right?
The Somalis, they're sort of Somali, sort of Ethiopian, something like that.
Thomas, please, I'm sorry we were interrupted by the break there.
Go on.
Are you there?
Oh, I lost him.
God dang it, Bobby.
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