“Biden’s Incredible Insensitivity to Genocide: Africa Edition” Michael Rubin is asking why the U.S. Mission to the UN, the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, Secretary Antony Blinken, and President Joe Biden, believe it wise to put scare quotes around “Somaliland” in UN report. Encourages proponents of Isaaq genocide?
By Michael Rubin
When Joe Biden took office, many victims of genocide hoped US interest would triumph over indifference. Upon his nomination to be secretary of state, longtime Biden aide Tony Blinken made a great deal of his stepfather’s survival of the Holocaust. Biden himself promised to right the historical wrong and recognize the reality of the Armenian Genocide.
To Biden’s credit, he kept his promise. Many human rights advocates also cheered Biden’s choice of Samantha Power to lead the US Agency for International Development, a cabinet-level post in the Biden administration. Power quite literally had written the book on what she termed “a problem from hell.” Sure, she was disappointed in Libya and Syria, but maybe under Biden, she would have more power than human rights advocates hoped.
Either she did not have power or ambition trumped it. The Uyghur Genocide is the most industrial and wide-scale genocide since the Holocaust. John Kerry, a former secretary of State whom Biden brought into the White House as “climate czar,” urged Biden to downplay Beijing’s incarceration and slaughter of the Uyghurs in order to better win Chinese cooperation on climate talks. If Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said about the alleged death of a half million children in Iraq “We think, the price is worth it,” then Kerry’s slogan might as well be the death of 12 million Uyghurs is worth the price.
Alas, the Biden team’s indifference to the Uyghurs is today the rule rather than the exception. Blinken’s State Department praised Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev for promising “amnesty” to some of the democratically elected members of the Nagorno-Karabakh. Neither Blinken nor Power recognize the anti-Tutsi nature of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, seeking instead to bargain over it. That would be like telling Israeli Jews that the United States would not recognize the Nazis as motivated by anti-Semitism unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first bargained over trade or defense policy. Biden himself saw no problem laughing and relaxing with Muhammadu Buhari, a perpetrator of the Biafra Genocide during the US-Africa Leaders Summit.
Now, Biden and Blinken have taken casual disdain for victims of genocide to a new level. Toward the tail end of his rule Siyad Barre, Somalia’s Cold War-era dictator sought to eradicate the Isaaq clan, one of the five major clans of Somalia. First, the discrimination and then the attempted genocide of the population of the Somaliland region of Somalia was the major reason why Somaliland in 1991 re-asserted the independence it had briefly enjoyed prior to its union with Italian Somaliland.
For the past six months, fighting has occurred in the Sool region of Somaliland. It is not organic. Rather, it is a part proxy war between China and Taiwan, a part effort by Siyad Barre’s Darood clan to reassert supremacy, and a part attempt by al-Shabaab and Somali irredentists to attack the only regional democracy.
Blinken has sided with China, Russia, and Al-Shabaab against Somaliland due to the State Department’s embrace of a “One Somalia” policy. Put aside the fact that such a policy is a unicorn. It is imaginary. It appears nowhere in print and seems instead to be false conventional wisdom passed down through recent generations of African hands.
Perhaps this is why, in a recent UN Security Council press release, the US acquiesced to Russia and China and put “Somaliland” in quotes to report that the Security Council “condemned the violent clashes between ‘Somaliland’ security forces and clan militia.” Not only does such a statement draw moral equivalence between perpetrator and victim, but it also suggests that residents of Somaliland who have rebuilt from the ashes of attempted genocide are somehow illegitimate. No other geographic entity appears to get that treatment.
Put another way, would Biden and Blinken write about Europe’s “Jews,” Rwanda’s “Tutsis,” China’s “Uyghurs,” or Nagorno-Karabakh’s “Armenians?” If they did, observers would recognize it as questioning the legitimacy of those groups as a people.
While this is not the first time the UN has used scare-quotes to delegitimize Somaliland—Power signed off on the calumny when she was UN ambassador—the context of doing so as calls for Somaliland’s eradication escalate should raise serious questions about the morality and judgment of both Biden and Blinken.
About Michael Rubin
Senior Fellow
Research Areas
Arab politics, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Horn of Africa
Bio & Experience
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East.
A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre-and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units.
Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).
Dr. Rubin has a Ph.D. and an MA in history from Yale University, where he also obtained a BS in biology.
Experience
-
- Foreign Military Studies Office: Contract Analyst, 2012–present
- Naval Postgraduate School: Senior Lecturer, 2007–21
- Middle East Quarterly: Editor, 2004–09
- Coalition Provisional Authority (Baghdad): Political Adviser, 2003–04
- Office of the Secretary of Defense: Staff Adviser, Iran and Iraq, 2002–04
- Council on Foreign Relations: International Affairs Fellow, 2002–03
- Hebrew University (Jerusalem): Fellow, The Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, 2001–02
- Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs: Fellow, 2000–01
- Universities of Sulaymani, Salahuddin, and Duhok (Iraqi Kurdistan): Visiting Lecturer, 2000–01
- Yale University: Lecturer, Department of History, 1999–2000
- Iranian Studies: Assistant Editor, 1994–97
Education
Ph.D. and MA in history; BS in biology, Yale University
Contact
Send Email: mrubin@aei.org
Twitter: @mrubin1971
Media Request
Brady Africk
Tell: 202-924-0784
Send Email: Brady.Africk@AEI.org
