08/31/12 – Thomas C. Mountain – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Scotthorton.org is my website.
The perpetual phone drive is ongoing at Scotthorton.org/donate.
So feel free to drop by there if you like what you hear.
Our first guest on the show today is Thomas C. Mountain.
He writes from Eritrea about, well, Horn of Africa issues.
Talked to him a couple of weeks ago about Ethiopia.
This article is about Kenya.
Kenya is in trouble, serious trouble, reads the headline at ModernGhana.com.
Welcome to the show, Thomas.
How are you doing?
Great to be back, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Everybody in the chat room, and I got a few emails.
Everybody's really impressed with the last interview.
It's very hard to find anybody who, one, knows what they're talking about on Africa issues, and two, is willing to really state them as well as you do, and three, isn't part of some agenda to justify something horrible.
So it's a nice combination to have.
So Kenya is in trouble, serious trouble, starting with food prices.
What's going on?
Well, you know, there's been a lot of news about the drought in the United States, and the hunger speculators, people like, from the financial terrorists like Goldman Sachs, are using the drought in the United States to drive staple food prices sky high.
You know, they're speculating and making a fortune.
They did this back in 2000, early 2011, which, you know, I mean, it's no coincidence that the Tunisian explosion, followed by the Egyptian explosion, were coincidental, you know, exactly when food prices hit record highs.
I mean, there's a lot of talk about Facebook and all this other stuff.
What it was was people were hungry.
People were getting desperate.
The situation that caused the explosions in Tunisia and Egypt is facing the Kenyan people right in the face.
In Africa, the staple food crop is maize or corn.
Most Africans live off of corn or maize.
And Kenya is maize-dependent.
They do grow some of their own, but they have to import a lot of their maize.
And the hunger speculators are driving the price of maize or corn up.
Sometime early next year, it's expected to be the price that will have doubled.
Now, there's a combination of body blows happening here, where the hunger speculators, the financial terrorists are driving food prices up to the point where people can't afford to eat and feed their children.
And on top of that, Queen Christine, No Maize, Let Them Eat Cake, Lagarde of the IMF is putting a hammerlock on African countries, Kenya in particular, forcing them to pass laws cutting food price subsidies.
In other words, the Kenyan government has been subsidizing food for the poor people, the poorest of the poor, so that they can afford to eat.
And Queen Christine, Lagarde of the IMF is coming in and saying, no, you've got to stop all this.
You can't spend money on feeding your people.
You've got to pay back the IMF.
So you've got food prices spiking.
You've got the Kenyan government being forced to cut food subsidies.
And on top of that, you've got a series of other problems, starting, one, with the fact that the Kenyan army, at the instigation of the United States, invaded Somalia, supposedly to fight terrorism, and al-Shabaab is stuck in a quagmire.
And the basic brutality of the Kenyan army against the Somali people that inhabit not only Somalia, but northeastern Kenya, is igniting a firestorm.
We've seen the Kenyan death squads in Mombasa murder, assassinate a leading Somali nationalist cleric in Mombasa, sparking riots, demonstrations against the government, and even now attacks on, armed attacks on police stations.
So this Americans forcing Kenya into Somalia has turned into a disaster.
On top of that, you've got this ethnic warfare threat.
Back in 2007, Kenya had an election.
Now, a little bit of background on Kenya.
Kenya was, quote-unquote, given its independence by the British back about 50 years ago.
And what the British did was, they put an ethnic minority group called the Kikuyu tribe, like Jomo Kenyatta came from, in power in Kenya.
There's a much larger tribe called the Luo who had been basically shut out of power by the Kikuyu elite for the last 50 years.
Now, if the elections had been free and fair, the Luo would win.
But the Kikuyu, you know, they've made them enrich themselves at the trough of government largesse, and they're not about to turn all that over to the Luo.
So they've been stealing election after election for the last 50 years.
In 2007, things got out of hand in terms of the Luo got fed up, and they just said no, and they started an ethnic warfare in the Rift Valley and the African highlands outside of Nairobi.
Now, you know, Kofi Annan came in and negotiated something called a power-sharing deal, basically.
They went from 25 to 50 cabinet members in the Kenyan government, and the Luo got...their leaders got some power.
The problem is they got another election coming up.
It's supposed to be in December.
They postponed it twice now, at least through March.
And if this next election, if the Luo don't win, which they know they should, a free and fair election, if the Kikuyu steal it again, then there's likely to be an explosion.
And this is coinciding right with their predicting the maize, the staple food prices are going to hit its peak after all the food subsidies are going to be cut.
So the last time there was an election, in 2007, there was tribal warfare, ethnic cleansing.
A couple thousand people got slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were driven off the land through the ethnic warfare there.
But it was mainly warfare done with hand weapons, like knives, and this time the reports are coming in that the militias of both the Luo and the Kikuyu are going into Somalia and buying weapons on the black market that are being sold by basically the African Union troops occupying Mogadishu and the Ethiopian army in Somalia.
So now you've got an even bigger problem.
You're going to have armed conflict with automatic weapons in the Rift Valley.
Okay.
So now you've got to- and this isn't all.
You see, historically, the coast is a Muslim community in Kenya.
The highlands is more Christian and traditional religion.
And the Muslim community in the coast around the port of Mombasa- now, the Kenyan port of Mombasa is the largest, busiest port in East Africa.
And most of the eastern and central African economies basically do their business through Mombasa.
Historically, Mombasa was a semi-autonomous shaketown under the sultan of Zanzibar.
The island of Zanzibar now is part of Tanzania.
So the people there were historically separate from the people in the highlands.
The British basically turned over Mombasa and the Muslim communities on the coast to the highlands, controlled by the Kikuyu.
And the people never wanted to be there.
And on top of that, the Kikuyu have come in and stolen their land and built some of the most- the biggest, most famous hotels in Africa on the beaches of Kenya around Mombasa.
This land was traditionally owned by the Muslims there.
And now, lo and behold, it seems that this land is owned by the president of Kenya and his cronies.
They just stole it fair and square.
And on top of that, there's nepotism, there's corruption, there's marginalization.
The Muslims on the coast are completely fed up.
And the latest opinion polls I've shown show that 95 percent of the coastal residents around Mombasa and the region, Kenya's coast, want independence from the highlands.
And there have already been some armed attacks going back to March.
They formed an organization.
A former cabinet member in the Nairobi government, who's from Mombasa, has said that the uprising is almost inevitable.
So you've got all this sort of almost a perfect storm brewing in Kenya, where, you know, you've got this, you know, food price spikes, starvation's staring the people in the face.
You've got these ethnically warfare about to break out around the elections.
There may be some sort of a power-sharing deal.
You've got the Somalis in the northern part of Kenya up in arms against the brutality and counterinsurgency, really, that the Kenyan army's been raging in Somalia and against the Somalis in Kenya.
And you've got this independence movement on the coast in Mombasa.
Now, Mombasa is, you know, the main port.
The people that live there say, well, what do we need the highlanders for?
We've got the biggest port in the east of Africa.
We've got a 60,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery, which produces much of the oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene that the people of the east of Africa use.
And we've got some of the biggest, most famous hotels in Africa on our beaches.
What do we need the highlands for?
So, you know, there's a problem there.
I mean, Kenya could blow up.
It's like a powder keg waiting for a spark.
And I think the food price spike, along with the IMF subsidy cuts, could be what sets it off.
This is the thing.
Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and much of east Africa, including Tanzania, does their business, their import and export business, through Mombasa and Kenya.
And especially for Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, that all has to pass through the Rift Valley in the highlands of Kenya.
In the 2007 ethnic warfare that broke out around the election, the stolen election there, all the commerce between Kenya, between Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Mombasa got blocked by the warfare.
At one point, gasoline was like $10 a quart in Kampala.
So there's been a lot of talk about petrol industry, oil industry coming into the Great Lakes region of Africa.
They're all going to be, Museveni and all these leaders are going to get rich off of oil.
And Museveni's been betting the house on this, he's been borrowing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars with the hope that he's going to get an oil industry coming into Uganda and pay off all these debts and keep him in power.
If there's a warfare breakout in the highlands of Kenya or Nairobi, all that's up in smoke.
Because what oil company is going to come and invest billions of dollars in an oil pipeline from Central African regions to Mombasa if there's warfare in the highlands and there's an independence movement in Mombasa.
So the whole Eastern African coast is potentially, you know, I was talking last time about how Ethiopia is going to, the regime is crumbling and there's going to be major changes in Ethiopia.
Well, I've been predicting a year, year and a half.
Kenya may be six or eight months in Kenya before things go up in smoke, literally up in smoke.
And people say, well, you know, what does that have to do with us?
You know, East Africa is, Barack Obama has been on the TV, say, talking about Africa is critical to the United States national interest.
And so this whole region here, you know, is next to Kenya, is next to the Horn of Africa.
Somalia is a major nationalist independence movement, I mean, a re-liberation movement of Somalia in the works, led by this resistance they call Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab.
But, you know, Kenya is right there involved in all of that.
Uganda's got 15,000 soldiers in Mogadishu trying to keep Somalia under control.
You know, Ethiopia has been involved.
That regime is crumbling.
So the power and the control of Pax Americana in the Horn of Africa, whether it's Ethiopia, whether it's Somalia, and particularly now in Kenya, is all coming up for, yeah, big question.
Now, one of my next articles I'm writing is called The U.S.'s Bahrain Migraine, about how the Bahrain uprising, the people there, eventually these people are going to get fed up with taking all the casualties, and they're going to take up weapons against their king that was imposed upon them by the British in independence.
And if they drive the king of Bahrain out and the Shia population of Bahrain, which is originally administered by Iran under the British, have true independence in Bahrain, they're going to want the American naval base, the 6th Fleet, out of Bahrain.
Now, that's right smack in the middle of the Persian Gulf.
Americans have got two aircraft carrier task forces there now, you know, threatening Iran.
If they lose their base in Bahrain, where are they going to go?
It's going to be a major migraine for American imperialism, because where they've got the only plan being...
Well, that's why Obama keeps sending weapons to the king there.
And Saudi.
But see, they've got a problem, because, you know, America would just as soon as Bahrain be able to...
The Saudis, who are now their military is in and occupying Bahrain, will just come in and wipe out the resistance.
The problem is, the Bahrainis are Shia, and their cousins are the Shia in eastern Saudi Arabia, where all the oil fields are.
And every time the Saudi-backed mercenary police in Bahrain...
Because the police in Bahrain aren't even Bahrainis.
Most of them are Pakistanis, Jordanians, or Yemenis, from Yemen.
Okay?
They're doing the dirty work.
Even the Saudi, a lot of the Saudi military, like the pilots are Pakistanis.
They don't even trust their own population to hold critical positions in the military.
The people that do the dirty work on behalf of the Saudi royal family and the Saudi military police are not even really Saudis.
Okay?
So they're in Bahrain.
If they clamp down and they start shedding a lot of blood in Bahrain, that spills over into the Shia population of Saudi, because the population of Bahrain in Saudi, they intermarry.
They're practically cousins.
So every time they've come in and started killing a lot of people in Bahrain and cracking down too much, it's ignited up protests and uprisings in eastern Saudi.
Now, that's where all the oil is.
And these oil pipelines are extremely vulnerable, and there are millions of Shia living there.
So, you know, the Americans are caught in a dilemma.
They can't just drown the Bahraini uprising in blood, because that threatens to ignite an even bigger firestorm in Saudi Arabia.
Okay?
So, you know, the Americans have really got to migrate in Bahrain, and they're going to have to, most likely, in my opinion, eventually the Americans are going to have to pull their base out of Bahrain.
Where are they going to go?
How are they going to control all this Persian Gulf oil and gas and all of this, see?
You know, so they've got Djibouti there, the Horn of Africa.
That's their plan B.
Right.
They're already working on a pipeline that goes around the gates of Hormuz and exits at Yemen, I think, right?
Well, they've got a lot of grandiose plans in the region, but, you know, I mean, they've got Yemen up in flames, and they've got Ethiopia regime crumbling, and, you know, they've got no matter what, how they try to sell it, the asymmetrical warfare being waged by the al-Shabaab resistance, the guerrilla warfare in central and southern Somalia, is giving them fits and nightmares, because they've got 20,000 African Union troops, heavily armed African Union troops with tanks and helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, and they still can't defeat al-Shabaab.
They'll never be able to defeat al-Shabaab.
Eventually, even if Kenya goes up in smoke, that's going to make it extremely difficult for the Ugandans and these other occupational armies from the African Union to continue to occupy Mogadishu.
If they have to pull the AU out, al-Shabaab is going to win a victory, and it's just a matter of time al-Shabaab, especially with the Ethiopian regime crumbling.
Ethiopia is the main supporter of what's called Puntland and Somaliland in northern Somalia, which is basically their warlords that are allied with the gangster regime that's been in power in Ethiopia.
Now, al-Shabaab can come in and clean these guys out and reunite Somalia, and Somalia is right there at the mouth of the Red Sea, where the Bab al-Mandeb and all the Persian Gulf oil and gas going west passes through, and all the trade between China and Europe passes through.
Now, Europe's got the biggest economy in the world now, and all of Asia and Europe's trade passes through the Horn of Africa, so it's an extremely critical area.
Now, there's so much there to go back over for detail, but I guess one of the first things I want to ask you here anyway, might as well start with, to what degree is the Obama administration at least attempting to pick winners in Kenya?
And in fact, if you could kind of mix in that same answer, when you say that the Kenyan invasion of Somalia was instigated by the US, I was just hoping you could kind of fill in some more data there, because the best I knew was that at least it was a consequence of American policy in the first place, building up al-Shabaab to the point where now Kenya had these resort communities or whatever right near the border that were being threatened and people were being kidnapped, and that was what had provoked them into invading.
But I certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear if JSOC ran the whole damn thing, but I'd like to hear from you.
Yeah, well...
And we've got eight minutes, so...
The Kenyan police and the Kenyan military are pretty much like a mafia.
I mean, the Kenyan police are notoriously corrupt and notoriously poorly paid, and have got a sidelined business doing things like kidnapping for ransom.
So, you know, the proof that, I mean, al-Shabaab is denied ever being involved in any of these kidnappings, and most of the evidence I've seen points to basically rogue elements within the Kenyan military and paramilitary and police that have done these kidnappings.
You know, plus that there's some pretty lawless elements in northern Kenya among the Somali community and southern Kenya among the Somali community that are looking to make some money.
Times are bad.
There's been a drought.
People are starving.
They're coming across the border and kidnapping people, and, you know, great, it's great.
Okay, let's...
The Americans wanted to...
They're having...
The African Union has pretty much been tied down in Mogadishu.
It's having a very difficult time expanding out of Mogadishu, despite what claims they make.
But every time they capture an area, the supply lines are being constantly harassed by the al-Shabaab guerrilla fighters.
So the Americans wanted the Kenyan army to get involved and help them pacify southern Somalia.
Now, there's the...
One of the main ports that al-Shabaab uses to raise money and to bring in their supplies they need for their population is the port of Kismayo.
And Kismayo is, you know, on the coast there, and Kenya said, we're going to capture Kismayo and shut it down and keep al-Shabaab's main lifeline.
Okay, well, that was, like, last year.
And the whole Kenyan army, with their helicopter gunships and fighter jets and tanks, it launched an invasion and stuck in a quagmire, and fighting a lightly armed al-Shabaab.
I mean, we're talking about al-Shabaab's got rifles, machine guns, and RPGs, fighting tanks, helicopter gunships, heavy artillery.
And the Kenyan navy still has not been able to capture Kismayo, in spite of repeated boasts that they're about to do so.
The Kenyan army's stuck in a quagmire there.
Americans thought the Kenyan army's going to come in and join the African Union, and they're going to help wipe out...
You know, because they need help, right?
I mean, there's been 20,000 so-called peacekeepers from African countries in Mogadishu, and they're still not able to, basically, every time they say, oh, we're winning, babe, we need a surge, right?
We need more troops.
Well, if you're winning, why do you need more troops?
You know what I'm saying?
So they've got problems there.
And the Americans' biggest nightmare is seeing a...
One of their biggest nightmares is seeing an independent, nationalist, Islamic government come to power in Somalia.
Now, you see, the thing is this, al-Shabaab was the youth wing of the Union of Islamic Courts that basically brought peace to Mogadishu for the first time in 15 years in 2006.
Al-Shabaab was basically a subsidiary, you know, a following movement among the Union of Islamic Courts.
Americans didn't want a nationalist Islamic government in Somalia, so what did they do?
They sent Ethiopia's army in to do their dirty work and drive them out of power.
Well, the old guys that were running the courts had to flee, okay?
And that left the young people in, you know, the resistance to fight, and that's how al-Shabaab got born.
Al-Shabaab means the youth in Arabic, al-Shabaab, the youth of Somalia, fighting against the Ethiopian invasion, their historical enemies in Ethiopia.
So basically, al-Shabaab is a creation of the U.S. in the sense that if the U.S. hadn't sent the Ethiopian troops in, there would not be an armed force called al-Shabaab today that some of whom...
Now, Thomas, let me ask you about that real quick, because I know in 2008, I think, Condoleezza Rice cried uncle after the Ethiopians had been defeated by al-Shabaab and driven out, and she said, basically, the old men can have the government after all, as long as they made the deal that they would, instead of being the Islamic Courts Union, they would be the transitional federal government created by the U.S. and the U.N., and the old men made the deal, and the young men called them sellouts and kept fighting now against them, when it's basically the government that America intervened and overthrew in the first place is now the government we're fighting for, and saying that, oh, gee, well, al-Shabaab is the reason we're going to have to intervene over there in the first place now.
Well, the president of Somalia, the transitional federal government, which is now supposedly being replaced, is one Sheikh Sharif.
I spent many afternoon in hotel lobbies here sharing cappuccinos with Sheikh Sharif when he was the head of the alliance for the reliberation of Somalia, and was officially al-Qaeda-linked, according to the U.S. State Department.
I literally went to bed one night with Sheikh Sharif being al-Qaeda-linked terrorist and woke up the next morning and found out that Sheikh Sharif was now the democratically elected president of Somalia, elected in Djibouti under the watch of the U.S. special secretary.
That was in 2008.
Do I have that right?
Yes.
So, I mean, you know, when they talk about the democratically elected president of Somalia, this guy was literally one day an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist and the next day a democratically elected president.
And, you know, we've had this rather bogus U.N. monitoring group for Somalia in Eritrea putting out a lot of fabrications about what's going on.
But one of the things they leaked, and the head of the group actually got sacked for leaking it, was the fact that all these hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.N. has turned over to the so-called transitional federal government in Somalia has been stolen by Sheikh Sharif and his cronies, so that people in Somalia are starving, all this aid money and all this supposedly developed money, hundreds of millions have been siphoned off and sent off to their bank accounts in London and Switzerland.
So this Sheikh Sharif is not only a former al-Qaeda terrorist, he's now officially a massive thief.
Any case.
So, you know, I mean, this is, this whole region out here, it's like America's just done one stupid thing after another.
One evil thing, anyway.
Let me ask you this now, as long as we're on Somalia.
Thomas, tell me about Somalia, about the famine there.
Is the worst of that over, or it's just going to start?
Is it mostly inflation-related or weather-related or war-related?
The drought was broken.
The drought was broken.
See, the drought that took place was the worst drought in 60 years, and it wasn't only in Somalia.
It stretched across northern Kenya and into southern Ethiopia, and as a matter of fact, most of the victims of the drought were in southern Ethiopia.
There's something like 15 to 20 million people in southern Ethiopia were affected by this drought, but something like 6 or 8 million people in Somalia were affected by the drought.
All we heard about was Somalia.
Southern Ethiopia is where there's armed insurgencies against the U.S.
-backed regime in Addis Ababa, formerly headed by the now-deceased Mullah Sanawi, and they're suffering from a food and medical aid blockade going back to 2007, with no food and no medicines being allowed into a region that's being afflicted by the worst drought in 60 years.
Now, we hear about the famine in Somalia, not a word about what's going on in southern Ethiopia.
And this is a U.S.
-funded genocide that's going on there, where the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have been expelled for five years, they're not allowing any food or medical aid in the region, and they're the worst drought in 60 years because there's an armed insurgency against the Ethiopian government.
I'm sorry, we're over time and we've got to go, but let me just ask you real quick, and I know you can only give me a ballpark or something, maybe not even that, but when we spoke with Human Rights Watch on the show, must be two, could be even three years ago now, I'm thinking it was 2010, two years ago, they said, Leslie Lefkow said there were approximately a million and a half people on the brink of starvation.
Is that less now?
Well, it's rained, and the drought's been alleviated somewhat.
The problem is, it's not so much the drought, it's the counterinsurgency and warfare.
Well, yeah, the war completely destroys all the division of labor and trade, so.
And the scorched earth policy being carried out by the Ethiopian militias in southern Ethiopia, deliberately destroying all the cattle and the agriculture.
The worst part isn't so much the drought, it's the war.
Well, thank goodness Pat Robertson and them are wrong about God holding nations accountable collectively for what they do, because, boy, America would be doomed.
Hey, I gotta go.
Thank you so much for your time, Thomas.
Good to see you, man.
You keep up the great work, Scott.
You're doing great work.
Don't give up the fight.
We'll talk to you again soon.
That's the great Thomas C. Mountain.
I really like this guy.
He writes for Counterpunch, also ModernGhana.com.
And I think that's the most I've ever let a guest go without interrupting him.