The Horn and a dilemma

[Jamster]

The Horn and a dilemma

 

Leader

Thursday June 8, 2006

The Guardian

 

 

Somalia has often been forgotten by the world but the world is starting to remember this anarchic country in the Horn of Africa. On Monday US-backed warlords were driven from Mogadishu by Islamist groups said to be linked to al-Qaida. Hundreds have already died this year and Washington is now paying nervous attention to what it bills as a new front in the "war on terror".

 

Like Afghanistan before the Taliban, Somalia's problems scream neglect. They have lurched from bad to worse since tribal militias overthrew the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and the UN scuttled out a few years later. Mogadishu is so dangerous that the country's transitional government is based elsewhere.

 

Al-Qaida operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania came from Somalia. That is why the CIA has been quietly bankrolling the warlords who make up the grandly-named "Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism" - another echo of Afghanistan. But their Islamist enemies, as elsewhere, have filled the gap left by the absent central government, winning support by running schools, charities and sharia courts - complete with public executions and amputations - that have emerged as an independent power centre.

 

This failed state par excellence - awash with weapons despite a UN arms embargo - is fertile ground for a small but potentially lethal proxy war between Osama bin Laden and George Bush, though that is only a small part of the whole sad story. Ordinary Somalis are hoping that some badly needed peace and stability may now be at hand. Europeans tend to think that it might be.

 

Somalia's crisis proves a familiar point about interconnectedness in a globalised world. The US fled the country after its rangers were killed in an incident made famous by the film Black Hawk Down. But abandonment encouraged lawlessness and collapse. Its security problems are now so serious that they overshadow the disastrous humanitarian situation in the drought-affected south and east. The outside world needs carefully to explore links with the new men in Mogadishu, not to shun them automatically because they are seeking to impose sharia law, and encourage them to work with the transitional government.

 

The dilemma over Somalia is about finding the right balance between nation-building and fighting terrorism. The US has taken a short-term view of security at the expense of the broader effort that is needed to help put this shattered land back together again. Mr Bush should reflect that backing warlords can all too easily backfire.