From Peacekeeping Violence in Somalia to Prisoner Abuse at Abu Ghraib: The Centrality of Racism

Sherene H. Razack is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This article draws on her book Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004).

Few can forget the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: the naked prisoner led around on a leash by a woman, the hooded, bound and naked detainees, the pyramid of naked men posed to simulate having sex with each other, and most of all, the grinning American soldiers, smug and victorious captors of both genders. For me, fresh out of a four-year study of the racial violence of Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993, when soldiers also took trophy photos, in this case of hooded, bound Somalis whom they had tortured, what came out of Abu Ghraib was deeply familiar. Such photos can be found in every peacekeeping encounter since the 1990s between troops of Western nations and the non-Western peoples they supposedly came to help. When I saw the Abu Ghraib photos and I considered what I knew about peacekeeping violence, my stomach contracted and I knew in my body that what I was seeing was racism.

Confronted with the Abu Ghraib photos, very few commentators talked about racism, and few as directly as the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif. She said simply that the abuse reflected the “deep racism underlying the occupiers’ attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally”.¹ Significantly, although they were not prepared to say anything about racism, few people were able to dismiss the photographs altogether. One exception was National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, who declared on the Canadian television show Counterspin on 12 May 2004 that the photos portrayed isolated events. At last report, United States lawmakers investigating Abu Ghraib were asked to view 1,800 photos and an undisclosed number of videos, which makes for a lot of “isolated events”.

Explaining Racism Away

For most observers, however, the extent and nature of the abuse were hard to ignore. Early on, even CNN began to use the word “systemic”. But the common use of the word “systemic” rarely means “racist”, and rarely explains the grins of the torturers. It’s not surprising that CNN found the photos “hard to explain”. Struggling to keep the West on high moral ground, journalists spun out articles daily reminding us that anyone can become a torturer under the right circumstances. Here, racial abuse disappears into the generic. One abdicates responsibility by saying that something is simply part of human nature. After all, who can be held accountable for something that is simply human nature? We might believe that Americans were simply expressing baser human instincts when they participated collectively in the lynching of African Americans, but who among us would deny that the violence of slavery was racially structured?

The bid to turn the grins into something we could live with invited a number of functionalist explanations. My personal favourite was one that declared that the abuse merely represented a legitimate, culturally specific but slightly over-zealous interrogation policy. Prisoners had to be made to talk (war and Arabs are brutal), and what better “psychological tool” than to humiliate them culturally? Buying completely the US military line that sexual humiliation, especially by women, is the best way to degrade Arab men (in this patriarchal world, isn’t this the best way to degrade anybody?), the media, long accustomed to the orientalist line that “they” are simply not like “us”, asked few questions about this so-called culturally specific form of interrogation.

More thoughtful explanations, such as Susan Sontag’s, still hesitated to declare outright that any kind of race-line runs through these photos. Sontag saw the Abu Ghraib photos as telling us something about “the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality” and the mania to record life as it happens (television’s reality shows). While she noticed parallels to lynching photographs, Sontag ended up concluding that “America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are, increasingly, seen as good entertainment, fun”.² This is all true, but there is so much more to be said if we are to understand what we are confronted with in these photos. At the risk of stating the obvious, we need to say something about who is doing what to whom, and what the intensely public aspect of these acts of brutality means.

In November 2004, generic explanations were once again offered when a US marine was captured on film shooting to death a wounded Iraqi. Perhaps anticipating that Westerners would be bothered by this, headlines exhorted readers to empathise with the marine.³ Canadian columnist Rosie Dimanno urged us to remember “the chaotic reality of combat” and to keep in mind that the soldier might have been weary and scared. US generals filled the airwaves with solemn pronouncements that war was after all war, a dangerous and nasty business but a necessary one. The letter-writer who insisted that rules of combat should be followed, and who suggested that explanations stressing “the negative effects of war on the psyche” would mean that it would be okay to gun down everybody, was an exception.⁴ For the most part, there was tremendous public sympathy for the marine who had so deliberately killed an Iraqi.

Where is there racism in what happened at Abu Ghraib and in Fallujah? Where is it in how we respond to such acts of violence? A study of peacekeeping violence suggests that generic arguments of the type that “anyone can be a torturer under the right conditions” and that “war is war” which now fill our airwaves and newspapers depend upon racism even as they disavow it. As Andrew Austin put it so clearly in his study of lynching, racism makes it permissible to murder and torture people.⁵ And it makes it possible for us to forgive such acts of violence and to call them by another name. We in the West cannot easily imagine that the man being humiliated, sodomised or executed is of the same moral order as ourselves—a hierarchy equally evident in peacekeeping.

Posing for the Camera

Three features of the violence enacted by white militaries in peacekeeping are also evident in Iraq. The violence is openly practised (dozens witness it), recorded on film and in diaries, and sexualised (rape and sodomy, both real and simulated). In Somalia, as in other peacekeeping encounters, the victims often included children and youths of both genders. Belgian troops tied young children to trucks and raced at top speed (something that still happens to black men in the United States). They roasted children over open fires. Western troops frequently tied up children as young as six or eight and left them to sit in temperatures of 100 degrees (to the point where some of these children under Belgian care died). Italian troops gang-raped Somali women, and their commanding officers told them not to worry because bruises don’t show on black bodies. Western troops, including Canadians, hooded detainees, beat them, applied electricity to their genitals, and urinated on them. Canadian soldiers tortured to death sixteen-year-old Shidane Arone, reportedly employing some of the practices we know from lynchings and police brutality against black men—the use of a stick as an extended phallus, for instance. Nearly eighty soldiers watched or heard what was going on and did nothing about it.

We have often learned of these acts of violence through the photographs, videotapes and diaries of the men who engaged in them. It was in fact the sixteen photographs taken by Private Kyle Brown of a bloodied, tortured Shidane Arone and a grinning Corporal Clayton Matchee that sparked what we in Canada came to know as the “Somalia Affair”. And it is videotapes—of soldiers uttering racist remarks while on duty in Somalia and engaging in racist and degrading “hazing” rituals prior to being sent there—that first alerted Canadians to the overtly racist dimensions of peacekeeping. The photographs and the large number of perpetrators made it difficult to avoid the obvious: these individual acts of violence are public rituals. The soldiers who engage in these rituals are enacting a publicly shared and approved practice, a practice that consolidates who they are as a collective.

The collective nature of these acts of violence is also evident in the “home front’s” response to them. When photos of Canadian peacekeeping violence emerged, Brigadier General Ernest Beno ordered their destruction. If the Canadian public ever saw them, he reasoned, it would not understand.⁶ On this point, General Beno was wrong. We saw the gruesome photos and we forgave the soldiers, just as the Abu Ghraib photos were forgiven. In both instances, the nation understood that such things are bound to happen when a “civilised” West encounters “savages”. In Canada, we made prolific use of the line about “a few bad apples”. We said that the heat and the dust, and most of all the hordes of ungrateful rock-throwing Somalis, made the men lose their self-restraint—a military version of the old colonial line about “going native”. Insisting that the mission was peacemaking and not peacekeeping, we maintained that such things happen in war-like conditions and when one is dealing with duplicitous, murderous peoples. In the end, we decided that the real violence was that we were duped as a nation, betrayed by a few undisciplined men (only a few of whom were punished) who unfairly tarnished our stellar reputation as global peacekeepers.

White Knights, Dark Threats

To find the collective will expressed in these acts of violence and in our responses to them, it is indeed necessary, as the media counsels us, to try to imagine what US marines, and Canadian, Belgian and Italian soldiers were thinking when they raped, shot, tortured and photographed their victims, gleefully e-mailing their souvenir moments to loved ones at home, or tacking up the pictures on the unit’s refrigerator door, as Canadian soldiers did in Somalia. It is necessary to consider where they thought they were and what made such acts so permissible.

What kind of world is it in which Western peacekeepers and their folks back home imagine themselves to be menaced by a dark threat, one that must be met with these individual acts of violence? Here is how the encounter between the West and Iraq is being imagined in the mind of National Post columnist Andrew Coyne. On the aforementioned broadcast of the television show Counterspin, Coyne angrily asked me, “How is it racist to rescue people from the most bestial dictator?” Likewise Ruth Wedgewood, a Georgetown University law professor who also appeared on the show: she saw the American presence in Iraq as nothing other than “the attempt to make it possible for Iraq to survive” and to help the Iraqis “make a decent transition to democracy”. If abuse occurs it must be put down to “young soldiers getting out of hand”. Someone has to stop brutal dictators, warring tribes and fundamentalist regimes where a woman cannot even go to school, she reasoned. It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.

These are narratives about white knights to the rescue, a collective fantasy about bringing a people from darkness into light. When President George W. Bush refers to an “axis of evil”, and a Canadian peacekeeper understands what he is doing as having an encounter with absolute evil,⁷ both see the world as a place where civilised peoples of the North go to the South to do battle with evil. Evil, in this dream, has no history. It is instead a property of certain places and certain people. White knights believe that the dictators, warring tribes and fundamentalist regimes have arisen out of thin air and not out of a history in which the West is heavily implicated. You can follow this racial fantasy in books about a fateful “clash of civilisations” between the West and Islam, books that are uncritically discussed in political science courses on many university campuses and that inform many a journalistic account of the “War on Terror.”

It is a simple story in which much is forgotten, but it is a powerful story. The storyline provides a racial togetherness. I would go so far as to say that stories of encounters with unfathomable evil are intelligible only through race. That is to say, the stories require a racial logic: we in the West, with our superior values and morality, can help those in the non-West who are mysteriously still stuck in the pre-modern or dark ages. All imperial powers see themselves as white knights confronting dark threats. And buried deep under this fantasy is history—the history of dictators such as Saddam Hussein, whom the United States supported, the Taliban trained by the CIA, the oil the West took, the aspirin it wouldn’t allow to reach the children of Iraq because the United States insisted that aspirin could be used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

We in Canada subscribe to a specific version of the white racial fantasy that so often accompanies peacekeeping. We believe that we are the hero’s friend, as one of our writers, Robertson Davies, once put it, and that peacekeeping is our national calling. Ours is a middle-power narrative, one that suggests we are especially good at being the go-between. Peacekeeping is represented in the Canadian imaginary as a sorting out of Third World conflicts when the Third World has inexplicably descended into bickering and savagery.

The most dangerous aspect of this fantasy is that it enables us to believe we are not implicated in the crises we set out to solve. History is taken out of peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions, leaving in its place a much simpler and more powerful racial story about our civility and their descent into barbarism. We can see this logic at work when we try to decide whether or not to send troops to crisis-spots such as Darfur, Sierra Leone, Haiti and so on. Sometimes the logic enables us to go (we must save them); sometimes it does not (this has nothing to do with us). Either way, we have insisted on forgetting about any Western implication in the histories of the regions whose crises we set out to solve. We forget, for example, about Canadian mining activities in Sierra Leone that have contributed to the abuse of human rights there. White middle powers are especially at risk of these fantasies of innocence because they can believe that only the United States is the bad guy.

What happens when Western troops go to Africa steeped in these kinds of stories of innocence? Peacekeepers who are caught in these civilising narratives of instructing and disciplining the Third World carry around in their heads those ideas in European novels and other writings that Edward Said has analysed:

notions about bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric peoples, the disturbingly familiar ideas about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when “they” misbehaved or became rebellious, because “they” mainly understood force or violence best; “they” were not like “us”, and for that reason deserve to be ruled.⁸

In the nineteenth century, white men understood themselves to be bearing the white man’s burden. In America, the national fantasy, as Joane Nagel has shown, was one of civilised white men taming or defeating savage men of colour, a dream that began with aboriginal peoples and was extended to Africans, Filipinos, and so on.⁹ In Britain, there was the Lawrence of Arabia figure, “the image of the lone dashing Englishman, dispensing justice, wisdom and righteous retribution on his brown subjects”.¹⁰ At a time when Europe laid claim to three-quarters of the globe, it was widely believed that Northern peoples had a racial genius for self‑government, a special capacity for democracy, truth and justice, and an obligation to instruct the lesser races whose territories they occupied. These sentiments are echoed domestically today in the complaint that Canadians’ true values are being undermined by new immigrants whom we shall have to instruct. And they are echoed internationally when the same imagined fraternity of white men sets out to save the world for democracy.

Today, we have Rambos and humanitarian soldiers, both of whom see themselves as morally superior men bringing civilisation where previously there was none. Rambos, as James Gibson describes, are drawn to tremendous savagery against racial Others, a savagery understood as a defence of an imperilled home and nation.¹¹ We can see something of the mythic universe of the Rambos in the popular 2001 movie Black Hawk Down, men who imagine themselves as “the baddest boys on the planet” sent to clean things up in Somalia. These are men who thought of themselves as being in “Indian country”, a phrase that was used both by American GIs in Vietnam and peacekeepers in Somalia.

When Canadian soldiers got to Somalia intending, as one put it, “to kick ass”, they reported feeling considerable frustration because the Somalis appeared not to be grateful for their help. Driven by the idea that they were in Somalia to save Somalis from the excesses of their own society, they had little information to enable them to understand the “ungrateful natives” who threw rocks at them and engaged in petty thievery. Soldiers recalled feeling profoundly at risk even from the children and teenagers with whom they mostly came in contact. They thought they were, as they put it, “in Som”, an allusion to “Nam”, which none of the Canadian soldiers would have actually experienced, but the popular mythologies and Hollywood language surrounding which they drew upon anyway.

It is not surprising that violence soon followed. From orders given to “shoot between the skirts and the flip flops”, language which both degrades and feminises, to bait (food and water) set out to entrap Somalis, Canadian soldiers were very quickly on imperial terrain. From beatings intended to teach the natives a lesson, to killings because the rules did not apply in Somalia as they did back home, some soldiers expressed with their bodies the racial terms of the peacekeeping encounter. Even men of colour were drawn into this project. As I discuss in Dark Threats and White Knights, it is inaccurate to describe the participation of men of colour in peacekeeping violence as simply a bid to “outwhite the white guys”. While men of colour may be trying to gain acceptance through engaging in acts of violence, their participation was no greater than that of others and in many instances was less. The civilising mission out of which violence is born is sufficiently powerful to cause many to succumb to its appeal, regardless of their own personal experience of racism. What the legal transcripts I read conveyed most strongly was how ordinary so many soldiers and their leaders thought this violence was and how pervasive was the feeling that peacekeeping in Somalia was above all a civilising mission.

On 22 May 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired “Fall Out”, a television documentary by Mike Smith, a former soldier of the now disbanded Airborne Regiment which had been in Somalia. Smith challenges Kyle Brown, the soldier who eventually blew the whistle on the violence (his own and others), as to why he “spilled the beans”. After all, says Smith (whose eyes fill with tears for the disbanded Airborne Regiment), “Why didn’t you just get rid of these pictures? Life is cheap for those people.” Nothing could have better conveyed why this kind of violence must be considered racial violence. In the data I examined, one finds many instances of peacekeepers refusing or failing to imagine the natives to be of the same legal and moral order as themselves. As one Italian solider put it, Somalia was the uncivilised world, a world where you can no longer find Saturday and Sunday.

Imagine for a moment soldiers who feel themselves to be surrounded by savages. Imagine, too, the heady feeling of bringing civilisation to the masses and of fulfilling the national imperative to keep the natives in line. Imagine the fear of being overcome by blackness.

The German scholar Klaus Theweleit writes of the fascist who survives his own fears by beating others to the pulp he threatens to become.¹² The violence dissolves the threat of engulfment the fascist fears from the alien race, and from women. The recording of the violence tells the men and women who do it, as nothing else can, that they have survived an encounter with savages. They have remained hard, organised, phallic bodies and male egos (even when female), defending themselves against the flood. It is the body that has to express racial arrangements of domination. Words will not do the trick, so powerful are the fears of people who must constantly avoid being overwhelmed by the racial Other. When Canadian soldiers on peacekeeping missions and American soldiers at Abu Ghraib posed for trophy photos, as German fascists did before and during the Second World War, they preserved for posterity their moment of superiority and, crucially, control. Photos, Patricia Vettel-Becker reminds us, “are hard items that will not fail; they hold out the promise of continual erection”.¹³

The ‘Home Front’

Canadian schoolchildren are required to learn about what happened in Somalia largely through reading a prize-winning book written by a teenager, Harvey Smith, especially for the seven to fourteen age group. Siad of Somalia relates the encounter between Canadian peacekeeping troops and Somalis through the eyes of Siad, a twelve-year-old Somali boy. Siad’s family is starving and must line up for food donated by the West, an ordeal made intolerable because of the cruel Somali militiamen who patrol the distribution and who hit Siad’s mother on the head. Things get much better for Siad when Canadian peacekeepers arrive to guarantee food distribution and provide medical aid.

Siad makes friends with Private Merrick Flynn. Readers are invited to share Private Flynn’s homesickness and his desire to do good in Somalia. We relive with him the torment of having to keep the peace under dangerous conditions, including facing young armed militiamen who attempt to steal food. Recoiling at the thought that he might have to shoot a teenager for stealing food, Private Flynn is ultimately thankful that such dangerous situations are resolved and that “the young looters had been arrested and brought in with no loss of life”.¹⁴

The young author tells us at the end that he wanted to write a novel about Canadian peacekeepers helping people who come from entirely different backgrounds, a challenge he invites us to imagine as a particularly difficult one owing to Somali cultural differences. Significantly, from this perspective, Somalis have culture while Canadians simply possess universal values, a marking of the racial Other that works handily to confine it outside the boundary of civilisation. There is no room in this narrative for the story of Shidane Arone, and although we might believe that children ought to be protected from such brutal truths, we adults cannot allow ourselves to be similarly deceived. There was loss of life in Somalia. Our peacekeepers humiliated, shot and tortured Somalis, and although not every soldier acted this way, many watched and encouraged the violence, believing all the while in our legendary niceness and compassion and most of all in our obligation to assist “tribal” Somalis into modernity.

We, the “home front”, are implicated in the racial violence prevalent in peacekeeping and occupations. We are implicated when the story of the violence comes back home and our media, inquiries and courts consider that we were its principal victims. We are implicated when we view ourselves as nice, compassionate people who have nothing to do with the state of the world and when our schools teach that we simply go to help people from different cultures. Canadians find it especially difficult to think of our complicity in the crises we set out to mediate. While we congratulate ourselves that at least we were not a member of the coalition which invaded Iraq, our factories are busy churning out the bullets and guidance systems required to accomplish the task. We eagerly seek membership in the fraternity of white nations.

At the end of my book I ask, “How do ordinary, thinking, caring people come to believe in a world of dark threats and white knights?” I believe that we are seduced into the story through racism, that the story and the practices that make it real, including the violence, give us a racial and national sense of identity as morally superior people who assist lesser breeds into modernity. To return to the grins of the soldiers humiliating, torturing and killing, these are the grins of white supremacy. The grins are meant to convince the soldiers themselves that they have conquered, and have successfully managed to deny the humanity of racial Others. Perhaps we might take comfort in the thought that such projects of domination are inherently unstable. After all, it took 1,800 photos and an undisclosed number of videos to vanquish the Other at Abu Ghraib.

Endnotes

1. Ahdaf Soueif, “A Profound Racism Infects the US and British Establishments”, Guardian (London), 5 May 2004.

2. Susan Sontag, “What Have We Done?”, Guardian (London), 24 May 2004.

3. See, for example, Rosie Dimanno, “Try to Imagine the Way US Marine Was Thinking”, Toronto Star, 17 November 2004.

4. Jarrod Hone, “Claim of Moral Superiority More Laughable Now”, letter to the editor, Toronto Star, 18 November 2004.

5. Andrew Austin, “Review Essay: Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide”, Journal of Black Studies 34, no. 5 (May 2004), p. 721.

6. See Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 5, n. 9.

7. See Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights, p. 15, n. 2.

8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), p. xi.

9. Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998), p. 247.

10. Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), p. 13.

11. James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994).

12. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

13. Patricia Vettel-Becker, “Destruction and Delight: World War II Combat Photography and the Aesthetic Inscription of Masculine Identity”, Men and Masculinities 5, no. 1 (2002), p. 87.

14. Harvey Smith, Siad of Somalia (Brampton, Ontario: The Kids Netword, 1997), p. 52.