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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Aug 26 2010 - 07:51:50 EDT
Somalia solution
Thursday, August 26, 2010
THE HOTEL MUNA lies close to the presidential palace in Mogadishu, in a
district nominally under the control of Somalia's western-backed
"Transitional Government". But "government" is a misnomer. The authorities'
writ runs no more than a few blocks; most of the capital and of the country
are controlled by the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab which made the point
only too effectively on Tuesday in an attack on the hotel that claimed 31
lives, including six MPs. Fighting in the area has taken over 80 lives in
the last few days.
Somalia has been in a state of almost constant war since the collapse of the
government of Siad Barre in 1991. Its weak and incompetent administration
survives by virtue of a 6,000-strong, increasingly unpopular African Union
(AU) force. Al-Shabaab, which was repulsed again yesterday by the AU in an
attack on the presidential palace, killed 76 in a bombing of Kampala last
month in protest at Uganda's involvement in the AU force. And it has made
much of the latest in a long and bloody succession of failed "foreign
intervention", from US marines in the early 1990s, to the UN mission that
followed, and the Ethiopian intervention in 2006.
The AU force was initially appreciated for standing up to al-Shabaab but has
made enemies by shelling crowded neighbourhoods in response to insurgent
fire, killing civilians. The group, which has fought a three-year campaign
against the government, is thought to number up to 7,000 armed men, not a
few of them foreign militants with experience of attacks on western and
other targets in Africa. It has an armed wing, known as the "army of
suffering", and a religious police force, the "army of morality", which has
enforced a severe form of sharia law through its courts.
More than 21,000 Somalis have been killed in fighting since the start of the
insurgency, 1.5 million uprooted from their homes and nearly half-a-million
are sheltering in other countries in the region. The UN's Food and
Agriculture Organisation said in a report on Monday that a quarter of the
country's population - two million people - are in need of humanitarian aid.
The latest attack will reinforce the view held by some international
analysts that Somalia's government should be allowed to fall. Their
rationale is that the country would tire quickly of an al-Sabaab government
which clan militias, less extreme Islamists, and businessmen would
overthrow. The result, they argue, would at least be a government with a
support base. It might, but Somalia's history would suggest it might not
last long.
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