Black Hawk Down a hit in Mogadishu

BY BUSTER SOUTHERLY

Black Hawk Down, the first of the wave of patriotic US war and action movies being rushed to the screens following the September 11 incidents, opens across Australia on February 21. The film's Pentagon advisers hope that Black Hawk Down will soften us up for Washington's next military adventure against a poor Third World country. In Somalia's capital Mogadishu, where the 1993 events portrayed in the movie took place, the reaction was not what Washington's warmongers wanted.

According to a BBC report, Somalis formed long queues outside more than a dozen halls to watch pirated copies of the film. In the Dualeh Cinema, in the Bulo Hubey neighbourhood, the capacity audience crowded onto the sandy floor, glued to director Ridley Scott's version of one of the most violent episodes in the city's history. The audience gave the film a rapturous reception, but not for the reasons that Scott intended.

The film centres on an incident during the 1993 US intervention in Somalia in which Somali militia shot down two US army helicopters as US troops were attempting to capture a Somali "warlord". While the fact that 19 US soldiers were killed is well known, that the US troops slaughtered more than 1000 Somalis in the same incident is largely ignored.

In Dualeh cinema, young spectators clapped and cheered every time they saw a US soldier killed or wounded. The downing of each helicopter was met with even more enthusiastic applause, the BBC recounted.

"In this fighting, I lost nine of my best friends on one spot", Warsameh Abdi, a former militia member told the BBC. "It was that very helicopter. It hovered on top of us and shot us one by one."

From Green Left Weekly, February 20, 2002.

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From GLW issue 481