YESTERDAY, a conference was convened in London to organise the intervention into Somalia by imperialist forces, led by the UK, acting under the cover of an African Union ‘humanitarian’ invasion force.
The conference was attended by the leaders of western imperialism along with representatives of their client states in Africa and various Somali factions supporting the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), a government recognised by the imperialists but whose authority in the country does not extend beyond the country’s capital, Mogadishu.
All the lying posturing from the imperialists about Somalia being a failed state, run by lawless petty-pirates, cannot disguise the fact that this imperialist intervention is to be carried out by the big but bankrupt pirates of French and UK imperialism, following on from their robbing and looting of Libyan oil after a massive bombing campaign which ended with the Libyan leadership being butchered in the streets by Nato thugs.
In fact, official documents that appeared on the Wikileaks website reveal that plans for the invasion of southern Somalia, codenamed ‘Jubiland Initiative’, had been drawn up with US involvement at least two years ago, with the intention of creating an artificial state in the south to be directly controlled by the US and its imperialist allies.
The plan is for the imperialist stooges of the African Union to provide the ground troops while the British and French pirates provide the air cover and bombing campaign to murder thousands of Somalis, so as to seize the oil-rich region.
In 2006, the US sponsored a military invasion of Somalia by Kenyan and Ethiopian troops to depose the popular de-facto government of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU).
The ICU had achieved national popularity through its opposition to the corrupt rule of the warlords who had previously dominated.
The crime of the ICU, as far as the US was concerned, was its opposition to imperialism in the strategically important Horn of Africa region.
Having overthrown the ICU and replaced it with the weak and hated Transitional Government, imperialism is now poised to intervene militarily once again.
Behind the war preparations lies the fact that, far from being a poor, destitute ‘failed’ state, Somalia is a rich prize for imperialism.
It is estimated that there exist up to four billion barrels of oil, making Somalia the second most important country for unexploited oil reserves after Libya.
With bauxite, titanium and uranium deposits, Somalia represents rich pickings for the international capitalist pirates, now bankrupted by the crisis of capitalism but desperate to re-conquer Africa and dominate all its natural resources, from Libya through the Sudan to Somalia, in an effort to prop up their collapsing system.
With Libya, Sudan and Somalia under imperial domination the entire arc of the Horn of Africa region would be secure for exploitation and the creation of a strategic base for the domination of the whole of Africa and the gulf region.
All the cries about ‘piracy’ and lawlessness cannot disguise the fact that the biggest and most murderous pirates are the imperialists who seek to profit out of a war that will cost untold thousands of lives.
The working class must reject the warmongering coalition government which is declaring war on the Somalian people at the same time as it is waging a war to the death against the welfare state, wages and pensions of working people at home.
The answer to this war on two fronts is to bring down the government through a general strike and advance to a workers government and socialism, central to which will be the establishment of fraternal relations with Somalia and all of the countries and peoples of the African continent.