13.
you've got the law of the sea thing, and we've got all of those manganese
nodules down at the bottom of the ocean, with manganese and cobalt and
copper and what else is in there, there's something else, four or five of
them. Untold riches. Sort of windfall. Nobody's had it, and now the technology has been developed to go down there and get it. So, at the
beginning of this process, the U.N. determined that this was the common heritage of all mankind, and they had reached some understanding of how
the goodies were to be divided. You were to have some international
instrument that would fairly divide these goodies once they were mined.
So as to begin to close the gap between the rich and the poor. Now
the Reagan people have scrapped that in favor of the companies, western companies, that have the wherewithal to go down there and get them, and
so the western powers are saying, "Yes, this is the common heritage of
all mankind. If you can get down there, go ahead and get it." Now that's
raw power! But again, it shows how far away the western powers are from
making any sensitive approach to closing the gap. And the thing again,
I believe, is characterized by greed. The rich simply want to get richer,
without respect to the problems of the very poor. And we talk about
stability in countries. The main cause of instability, it doesn't make any difference whether the country's communist, capitalist, or whatever
it is, the main cause of instability in a country is poverty. And as
long as countries are ground into poverty, you're going to have that instability. And you really can't even blame petty elites, who take the
little bit and hog it because that happens in all countries. This country
just happens to be so wealthy that its elites are not focused on, because
the rest of us are anesthesized by having just enough not to focus on
wealth. And then wealth rides in Volkswagons sometimes here, and it makes
you miss them in traffic. But it's different in the Third World where there's not nearly enough to go around, and poverty is really painful.
You're not going to have stability under those circumstances, I don't care
what kind of ideology the government pursues.
X: What is the current U.S. policy regarding Somalia?
R: The current policy, again, is much like the old policy. It is to see
it in the East-West context. This administration, like the Carter administration, wants to make use of Somalia as a launching base into the
Persian Gulf. I remember having lunch with Brezinski and being shocked
that he had no real grasp of the history of that problem--of the disputed
border. He had no sense of the issue and didn't care, because the concern
was not about regional consequences. The concern was about what use we
could make of Berbera, Nogadeshu, in terms of our rapid deployment system
into the Persian Gulf. The current policy is much the same. Now,
Somalia has a million and a half refugees. About as many refugees as
stable population. The economy is in shambles and the last thing in the world they need are weapons. They need economic assistance, but
we're going to give them $20,000,000 in weapons, and they've demonstrated
over the last twenty years what they're going to do with the weapons.
They're going to go back into the Ogaden. I have never met a Somalian
who is not an irredentist, who does not believe that the Ogmaden is a part of Somalia. Not only the Ogaden but also northeastern Kenya and Djibouti.