And now we are treated to the spectacle of partisan claims that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar is "disrespecting veterans" by saying that children in war zones - including herself - can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder!
These are clearly bad-faith arguments. I sincerely doubt that Representative Jim Banks (R, Indiana) or anybody like him would get up and denounce advocates for children who have been kidnapped, or physically abused or caught up in human trafficking. No, they really dislike Representative Omar: she is a woman, she is Muslim, she is Black, and she won’t shut up or be intimidated. Their lies about her go on and on. They insist on circulating a photo of a soldier in the Somali regular army (from before her birth!) claiming that it shows her in a terrorist training camp. They insist that she is a homophobe who wants to punish gay people with public stoning despite her long-standing and very public support for LGBTQ rights. And they are quite certain that she is an antisemite despite her warm relationship with the Minneapolis Jewish community.
But I come back to the disbelief that a Somali child could experience PTSD and I think there is more to see than just party hacks lobbing a denunciation that they hope will stick. It has to do with how we view African children. It has to do with our myopic insistence on seeing the rest of the world in terms of their governments’ alignment for or against the US State Department and American capital. It has to do with our insistence on centering ourselves in every narrative, regardless of where it is taking place.
Somalia has been without consistent central government since the successful coup against President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 when Omar was nine years old. All that most Americans know about the country is what they saw in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when Omar was already living in a refugee camp in Kenya. But the violence and civil war of her childhood began before she was even born. It was the aftermath of a 1977 war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a war that became one of those proxy battles between the US and the Soviet Union that so characterized the Cold War.
When Siad Barre took power in a military coup in 1969 he declared the Somali Democratic Republic as a Marxist-Leninist state and allied it with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were happy to have naval and military bases in the strategically-important Horn of Africa, between the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea and adjacent to Ethiopia, which was then ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie and was allied to the United States. Then the Marxist-Leninist Derg ousted Haile Selassie in 1974 and established the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking this would have brought peace to the region. But that is the great-power chauvinism we have to avoid, the idea that all these countries exist to be bit players in our story. Siad Barre still had the ambition of taking over a large border region called Ogaden which was primarily inhabited by ethnic Somalis. He sent in his military and had enormous early success, occupying most of the area.
Do you see a dilemma for the Kremlin here? Do you wonder how they negotiate a war between two allied and explicitly Marxist-Leninist regimes? I don’t. At that time the Somali Democratic Republic was a nation of 3 million people; Socialist Ethiopia had a population of 46 million. 16,000 Cuban troops, 1500 Soviet advisors and two brigades from South Yemen turned the tide of battle. Somalia was driven out of Ogaden after the loss of one-third of their soldiers and half their air force.
Do you see a dilemma for the State Department here? Do you wonder how they respond to this war among avowed Communists? The United States traded its old bases in Ethiopia for old Soviet bases in Somalia. Somalia continued to be a one-party Marxist-Leninist state under the leadership of the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party and Mohamed Siad Barre. But now it was allied with the United States, along with the People’s Republic of China.
I hope the reader understands that I recount all this history of changed allegiances to show that neither ideology nor history - whether of alliance, enmity, or friendship - can outweigh geopolitical concerns for powers like the US and the Soviet Union. And I hope the reader understands that regional rulers, like those in Somalia and Ethiopia, have their regional concerns and recruit whatever stronger allies they can in order to promote their own interests.
The Ethiopian victory in Ogaden did not bring peace in either country. We are concerned here with the childhood of Ilhan Omar, so I will continue without a discussion of Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea. In Somalia, Siad Barre’s giant and costly misstep left him struggling to retain control. He reacted as dictators do, with violence and repression. In the northeast he moved against the Majerteens, Ilhan Omar’s dad’s people. The Red Berets murdered 2000 clan leaders, raped an untold number of women, killed livestock in the hundreds of thousands, and smashed reservoirs. Thousands died of thirst. When Omar’s family left the increasingly-unsafe capital it was not to their devastated homeland, but to Baidoa, about 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu. When the civil war made that unsafe, too, they fled across the border to a refugee camp in Kenya.
It is worth noting that the United States did not abandon Siad Barre because of the massacre mentioned in the previous paragraph. The United States did not abandon him when his regime killed 50,000 in an aerial bombardment of the city of Hargeisa. Much of the army deserted to join tribal militias that formed to protect their people from his army. He replaced them with Marehan tribal militiamen, whose salary consisted of what they could loot. And this didn’t lead the US to abandon Siad Barre, either. It was the fall of the Soviet Union. Once the USSR ceased to be a global adversary, the United States didn’t need Somalia as a counterbalance. In fact, without Soviet support, the Ethiopian Derg was thrown out of power with the support of the United States. If you wonder how the US press dealt with all of this you can go back into the archives of all the newspapers and discover that they barely covered it at all. Occasional feature stories appeared, always reported from the safety of Kenya, and usually with cryptic references to Marxists fighting “hardline” Marxists.
Before summarizing all this I want to return to Black Hawk Down. The events covered in that film took place in Mogadishu in 1993, after Ilhan Omar and her family left the refugee camp in Kenya and arrived in New York City, so they technically have no part in this story. But several things make that movie important nevertheless. When I first sat down to write this I was thinking that anybody familiar with Black Hawk Down would, of course, understand how a Somali child could suffer from PTSD. But then I remembered that this was only true of the 1999 book, not the 2001 movie. The book was based on interviews on all sides of the conflict: members of Delta Force, Army Rangers, helicopter pilots, yes, but also fighters in Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s Somali National Alliance and in rival Somali militias. If you read that book you get to know individuals on all sides as people. The movie, by contrast, is only about Americans. If you see the movie you know Somalis only as an endlessly-increasing number of anonymous enemies. No matter how many of them the protagonists may kill, more pop up with RPG’s and AK47’s. The only thing I can compare it to is The Walking Dead. How could the viewer ever empathize with them? How could the viewer ever imagine their trauma at having heavily-armed Americans dropping suddenly into the middle of their city, covered by aerial gunships, to kidnap their leader?
Then there is that leader. We remember the Battle of Mogadishu and the 19 American servicemen who lost their lives there, but who today remembers why it was so important that Aidid be captured? Mohamed Farrah Aidid was a general in the Somali Army who served in the Ogaden War and later became chief of intelligence. He was also one of the generals who deposed Siad Barre. By the time of the events in Black Hawk Down, one of the other generals, Ali Mahdi Muhammad, had declared himself president and been accepted as such by the UN, despite the fact that he didn’t even control all of Mogadishu, not to mention the rest of the country. Armed UN troops were backing Ali Mahdi Muhammad’s militia and they had clashed with Aidid’s militia, so the UN wanted Aidid to be arrested. Even at the time Americans wondered why this was worth the lives of so many Americans and - to be honest - the humiliation of seeing Somalis on television celebrating over their bodies and the wreckage of $20-million helicopters. Democrats and Republicans bickered over whose fault it was. Then, when Clinton withdrew the troops because this debacle was so unpopular, they bickered again about whose fault that was.
That is what most Americans know. We have a limited attention span in this country so I doubt that many are aware that the Somali Civil War continues to this day. Moreover, I doubt that many people know that it began before Representative Omar was born. So when her Republican opposition isn’t calling for her hanging (yes, that’s exactly what her opponent in the last election advocated!) they’re on some other BS, like how could she be traumatized when she was already in New York when all this (meaning all they know about) happened.
Now I would like to summarize. For most people in Washington - Democratic or Republican, Bill Clinton or either Bush - Somalia only ever mattered insofar as it related to the worldwide confrontation with the Soviet Union. Even Somalis like President Mohamed Siad Barre and General Mohamed Farrah Aidid and President Ali Mahdi Muhammad were only ever meant to be pawns, not real people. Even our anticommunism never mattered; we were all too happy to align ourselves with the communist Siad Barre once he lost his alliance with the Soviet Union. We aren’t even able to imagine Somalis as people in a movie based on a book that did.
Now a Somali child who was a refugee from the violence that was tangential to that Cold War (a violence fueled with huge numbers of heavy weapons provided by the superpowers to their client states) enters the United States House of Representatives. She dares to tell her own story. She dares to treat her story as if it matters, as if she matters, as if a pawn of a pawn is a real person! And that is why partisans like Indiana Republican Jim Banks think she is “disrespecting veterans” by describing her PTSD.
I have said elsewhere that Representative Omar is everything that the Washington elite of both parties hate. She is a woman. She is smart. She is Black. She is African. She is an immigrant. She is Muslim and shows it by covering her head with a hijab outside her home. But what they hate most is her refusal to be bossed and her refusal to shut up. She insists on telling her own story and she insists on telling her truth. When you believe the bullshit about her, when you repeat the bullshit about her, you say more about yourself than you do about Ilhan Omar.
#IStandWithIlhan
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