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American Morning
Somali Activist Downs 'Black Hawk Down'
Aired January 22, 2002 - 08:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: The big question this hour is is the box office hit "Black Hawk Down" fair? Not everyone is thrilled with Hollywood's version of the failed military mission in Somalia in which 18 Americans lost their lives. The movie is being panned by a group of Somalis living here in the Untied States who say that it isn't a case of art imitating life but distorting it.
Omar Jamal is the director of something called the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, and he is with us from St. Paul, Minnesota.
Thank you for being with us this morning.
The organization is calling for a boycott of this film. What's your disagreement with the film?
OMAR JAMAL, SOMALI JUSTICE ADVOCACY CENTER: One of the first things, actually, we are greatly shocked at is the contents of the message the movie sending to the larger community of the Twin Cities and to the country as a whole. So we are completely shocked.
COOPER: What message do you think this movie is sending?
JAMAL: Basically, the movie actually isn't even sending any message; it's saying Americans (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the Somali people are savages and a hostile, ungovernable society, which is something we completely disagree with.
COOPER: You're saying the movie portrays Somalis as savages?
JAMAL: Yes, as savage, as hostile, beasts --
COOPER: Let me ask you: Basically, this movie -- I've seen the movie and spent a lot of time in Somali -- portrays a firefight which took place over the course of 16 hours in which 18 Americans and several hundred Somalis were killed as well and perhaps as many as 1,000 injured. It is frank and brutal, but does it really show savagery?
JAMAL: It does. If you watch the movie, what you just said that, the movie doesn't give a human or emotional face to the Somali community, Somali militia or warlords involved in this fight against American (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
It is a very sad story, actually. It was a mercy mission gone terribly wrong. But it's one thing to have a movie out based on a true story, it's another thing to stretch and to somehow manipulate the facts we all know. Some of our community here at the time were there, and they watched the movie which is supposedly based on the book, and the book...
COOPER: What is not accurate, though? I mean you have a large number of young Somali men, heavily armed, often high on pot, in a firefight with American soldiers. What is wrong with that portrayal?
JAMAL: Well, first of all, the movie says actually 1,000 Somalis were killed. More than 5,000 have been killed. The fact the movie doesn't even give any portrayal of a human face of the Somalis, it depicts very skinny kids running around without even showing the causes. It lacks the political circumstances surrounding this movie. The movie doesn't...
COOPER: It sounds like your complaint is it's not a movie about Somali society; it's a movie about this firefight, these 16 hours and what happened on those two days in Mogadishu.
JAMAL: This is the problem -- as Americans here, when they see the movie, they think of the Somali people in general, when this happened in a specific area in Mogadishu city, and a specific warlord and his militia. Somalis in general had nothing to do with this.
Actually, this warlord had been a minority in this area at the time of these events.
COOPER: Let me ask you about that: Just this morning, we saw pictures that CNN exclusively had of this film being shown in Mogadishu and the crowd cheering at the depiction of U.S. helicopters going down, of an American being stripped and his body dragged through the streets. Your reaction to that?
JAMAL: Well, that's something we're very shocked by. This is a very inhumane act. We completely disagree with this. We asked, and are still asking, the American government to bring those who are responsible for this act to justice.
One of the things I heard this morning is one of the warlords involved in this fight, Osman Atto, is now thinking of filing a lawsuit against the producer of this film, which is very ironic. We consider him a criminal.
And again, we send our condolence to the families whose relatives fell victims to this senseless act of crimes, and we believe Americans went there to support the starving people. And we completely disagree: We, as the Somali community, have been dealing with the events of September 11 -- we've been telling our community that Americans are fighting against terrorism, not against Muslims. We've been preaching the gospel to them, and now this movie is out depicting the community as savages. It completely caught us off guard; we lost ground.
The War on Terrorism... COOPER: Sorry, let me just ask you: You say that these warlords should be brought to justice, and yet you're critical of the U.S. mission there which was trying to do just that -- these soldiers were killed attempting to arrest members of Aideed's inner circle.
JAMAL: I'm not critical. This mission has always been a mercy mission, which just terribly went wrong. I'm not critical to the mission; what I'm critical of is the fact the movie tells something that we all know what happened. It stretched a little bit far. We expressed our feeling to these families. We're not critical of the mission, actually. We ask at the time the American administration that was in the office at the time -- I think it was Bush Sr. -- to bring those people to justice. And Clinton, who took over office, brought the Americans out of Somalia. We completely disagree with that political step because we believe the warlords brought this country into a situation that caused the intervention of the Americans and UN.
COOPER: Mr. Jamal, thank you very much for being with us this morning. We will continue to follow this story.
JAMAL: Thank you.
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