Black Hawk Down

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Wed Feb 6 11:17:09 PST 2002


Review by Monbiot from Znet. A good review. I don't quite get why the movie is being compared to "Zulu," which was a pretty good anti-war movie directed by the blacklisted Cy Edenfield and nowhere near as racist as BHD...but that's a minor point. Perhaps it's because both moview were based on real battles...anyway...

Joanna B.

The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood. In contemporary

British eyes, the greatest atrocities of the 18th and 19th centuries were those perpetrated

on compatriots in the Black Hole of Calcutta or during the Indian mutiny and the siege of

Khartoum. The extreme manifestations of the white man's burden, these events came to

symbolise the barbarism and ingratitude of the savage races the British had sought to

rescue from their darkness.

Today the attack on New York is discussed as if it were the worst thing to have happened

to any nation in recent times. Few would deny that it was a major atrocity, but we are

required to offer the American people a unique and exclusive sympathy. Now that demand

is being extended to earlier American losses.

Black Hawk Down looks set to become one of the bestselling movies of all time. Like all

the films the British-born director Ridley Scott has made, it is gripping, intense and

beautifully shot. It is also a stunning misrepresentation of what happened in Somalia.

In 1992 the United States walked into Somalia with good intentions. George Bush senior

announced that America had come to do "God's work" in a nation devastated by clan

warfare and famine. But, as Scott Peterson's firsthand account Me Against My Brother

shows, the mission was doomed by intelligence failures, partisan deployments and,

ultimately, the belief that you can bomb a nation into peace and prosperity.

Before the US government handed over the administration of Somalia to the United

Nations in 1993, it had already made several fundamental mistakes. It had backed the

clan chiefs Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi against another warlord, shoring up

their power just as it had started to collapse. It had failed to recognise that the competing

clan chiefs were ready to accept largescale disarmament, if it were carried out impartially.

Far from resolving the conflict between the clans, the US accidentally enhanced it.

After the handover, the UN's Pakistani peacekeepers tried to seize Aideed's radio station,

which was broadcasting anti-UN propaganda. The raid was bungled, and 25 of the soldiers

were killed by Aideed's supporters. A few days later, Pakistani troops fired on an unarmed

crowd, killing women and children. The United Nations force, commanded by a US

admiral, was drawn into a blood feud with Aideed's militia.

As the feud escalated, US special forces were brought in to deal with the man now

described by American intelligence as "the Hitler of Somalia". Aideed, who was certainly

a ruthless and dangerous man, but also just one of several clan leaders competing for

power in the country, was blamed for all Somalia's troubles. The UN's peacekeeping

mission had been transformed into a partisan war.

The special forces, over-confident and hopelessly ill-informed, raided, in quick succession,

the headquarters of the UN Development Programme, the charity World Concern and the

offices of Medecins sans Frontieres. They managed to capture, among scores of innocent

civilians and aid workers, the chief of the UN's police force. But farce was soon repeated

as tragedy. When some of the most senior members of Aideed's clan gathered in a

building in Mogadishu to discuss a peace agreement with the United Nations, the US

forces, misinformed as ever, blew them up, killing 54 people. Thus they succeeded in

making enemies of all the Somalis. The special forces were harried by gunmen from all

sides. In return, US troops in the UN compound began firing missiles at residential areas.

So the raid on one of Aideed's buildings on October 3rd 1993, which led to the destruction

of two Black Hawk helicopters and the deaths of 18 American soldiers, was just another

round of America's grudge match with the warlord. The troops who captured Aideed's

officials were attacked by everyone: gunmen came even from the rival militias to avenge

the deaths of the civilians the Americans had killed. The US special forces, with an

understandable but ruthless regard for their own safety, locked Somali women and

children into the house in which they were beseiged.

Ridley Scott says that he came to the project without politics, which is what people often

say when they subscribe to the dominant point of view. The story he relates (with the help

of the US Department of Defense and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff) is the

story the American people need to tell themselves.

The purpose of the raid on October 3rd, Black Hawk Down suggests, was to prevent

Aideed's murderous forces from starving Somalia to death. No hint is given of the feuding

between him and the UN, other than the initial attack on the Pakistani peacekeepers.

There is no recognition that the worst of the famine had passed, or that the US troops had

long ceased to be part of the solution. The US hostage-taking, even the crucial role played

by Malaysian soldiers in the Rangers' rescue, have been excised from the record. Instead

-- and since September 11th this has become a familiar theme -- the attempt to capture

Aideed's lieutenants was a battle between good and evil, civilisation and barbarism.

The Somalis in Black Hawk Down speak only to condemn themselves. They display no

emotions other than greed and the lust for blood. Their appearances are accompanied by

sinister Arab techno, while the US forces are trailed by violins, oboes and vocals inspired

by Enya. The American troops display horrific wounds. They clutch photos of their loved

ones and ask to be remembered to their parents or their children as they die. The Somalis

drop like flies, killed cleanly, dispensable, unmourned.

Some people have compared Black Hawk Down to the British film Zulu. There is some

justice in this comparison, but the Somalis here offer a far more compelling personification

of evil than the blundering, belligerent Zulus. They are sinister, deceitful and inscrutable;

more like the British caricature of the Chinese during the opium wars.

What we are witnessing in both Black Hawk Down and the current war against terrorism

is the creation of a new myth of nationhood. America is casting itself simultaneously as

the world's saviour and the world's victim; a sacrificial messiah, on a mission to deliver the

world from evil. This myth contains incalculable dangers for everyone else on earth.

To discharge its sense of unique grievance, the US government has hinted at what may

become an asymmetric world war. It is no coincidence that Somalia comes close to the

top of the list of nations it may be prepared to attack. This war, if it materialises, will be

led not by the generals in their bunkers, but by the people who construct the story the

nation chooses to believe.



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