Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 09:30:27 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: A Fitful Apocalypse:  Sudan and the IMF


        
Richard writes:

>...Mostly a financially privaleged elite is aided to power, and kept there
>by a military which needs them because of their access to imperialist
>funds. When this breaks down due to fights within the ruling class, or
>because their corrupt lifestyles have made their continuation
>impossible, imperialism supports whoever it sees as the "best bet"... 

Yes.   I am reminded of news reports from Mogadishu during the height of the
fighting (October 1992 - February 1993),  when about one hundred residents
were being killed each day.    It was still possible to get one's car
repaired,  buy vegetables in the market place,  take a ride in a bus,  and
get one's shoes shined.    Every morning, hundreds of people crossed the
"green line" that separated the territory of the contending militias,  to
carry on trade or visit relatives.     There was "anarchy" only in the
strict sense of no central government,  otherwise the "chaos" was remarkably
structured.

Foreign correspondents who write of "random violence" (or "black on black
violence" as in the recent history of South Africa) refer to violence they
either do not understand or violence whose true causes would be discomfiting
to dominant interests in the West.    If a Somali herder,  finding himself
in Boston,  were to complain of the dangers of "random traffic",   we would
quickly set him straight on the traffic laws.    Similarly,  streetwise
Somali traders continued to operate in parts of their country where the most
intrepid Western journalists feared to venture, not because they were
braver,   but because they could read the danger signs.

The criteria for what constitutes a "crisis",  what prefigures "anarchy",
at what stage "chaos" demands foreign intervention,  is of necessity
class--based.     If economist's statistics were to be believed,  all Somali
should have starved to death in the 1980s,  the national income had fallen
so low.    The official figures for the economy pointed to an unremitting
decline.    Yet for most of the decade,  the shops of Mogadishu were full of
consumer goods,  and the roads were jammed with new Toyotas.    Signs from
the street indicated that a boom --albeit a somewhat erratic one--  was in
full swing.

It was after the fall of the Soviet Union,  and American aid was cut back to
less than a fifth of what had flowed previously to the Adid "government"
(the de facto rulers of the country),  that real "chaos" obtained.    The
shortfall in aid (coupled with the suspension of IMF loan status --at the
urging of the U.S.) resulted in the elites of Mogadishu becoming "armed
looters" to replenish that which had been previously obtained by "pencil
looting" of their international sponsors during the Cold War.    The ensuing
political instability provided the needed impetus to establish a U.S.
military presence in east Africa,  the geo-political designs of which had
little do with the actual situation in Somalia.    There is,  of course,  a
similar logic at work re the IMF and its shibboleths concerning
"conventional economies" being applicable everywhere in Africa.

Another source or two from Alex de Waal which I neglected to mention in my
original post.    See his provocative *Famine That Kills: Darfur,  Sudan,
1984-1985* (Oxford, 1990: Oxford University Press) ,  as well as his review
of Richard P.C. Brown in *Times Literary Supplement* (March 26, 1993).

Louis Godena

 



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