Monetary Illegalism and Civil War: The Case of Somalia

Abstract

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, the prestigious Washington Post carried a headline tying al-Qaeda to Liberia’s President Charles Taylor,¹ mentor of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a Sierra Leone rebel movement that in the Anglo-Saxon imagination was viewed as the worst possible guerrilla, almost relegating the Khmers Rouges to the rank of mere predators. The journalist Douglas Farah alleged that Charles Taylor sold blood diamonds to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization right after the August 1998 attacks perpetrated in East Africa. A few months later, the same journalist explained on the basis of equally indisputable proof that al-Qaeda actually also bought gold.² What a sudden and astonishing coincidence: the various forms of Evil had merged and had to be dealt with on two fronts: Afghanistan and Africa. Never mind that the claims in the articles providing material for such arguments had never been borne out by other investigations.³ The very official congressional commission on September 11 explicitly stated that it had never managed to verify these allegations (“We have seen no persuasive evidence that al-Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds”⁴), but Douglas Farah refuted this rather undiplomatic denial by claiming to be a victim of CIA and FBI machinations.⁵