It just gets worse

[Caano Geel]

It just gets worse

Apr 26th 2007 | ADDIS ABABA

From The Economist print edition

War again, holy and unholy

 

Get article background

 

An Osama boy or just an ordinary gunman?

 

THE UN says that at least 321,000 Somalis have fled their capital, Mogadishu, in the recent weeks of fighting there. Thousands more are trapped along the frontlines inside the city, under fire, packed in with rotting corpses, and unable to find a way out. At least 1,300 have been killed so far this month, most of them civilians. Ethiopian artillery has demolished chunks of the already rubble-strewn city. But it is unclear if the shelling has squelched an Islamist-inspired insurgency. Probably not.

 

The Somali transitional government, backed by Ethiopia, says it is in a do-or-die struggle with al-Qaeda. A few more days of shelling, it says, and it will have the upper hand. But the insurgents are getting stronger, striking with machinegunners, snipers and suicide-bombers, then melting back into their communities. A contingent of 1,000-plus Ugandan peacekeepers under African Union command has remained impotently confined to barracks.

 

Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu's outskirts, where the scenes are medieval. People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter.

 

An additional worry this time is that Somalia may be drawn into the international jihad. Somali Islamists are getting training and arms from Eritrea, which wants to fight a proxy war with Ethiopia in Somalia, and money from Arabs in the Middle East. Radical Muslims around the world are likely to blame supposedly Christian Ethiopia and America for the mayhem in Mogadishu. That ignores the fact that the Ethiopians were invited in by a Muslim Somali government and have been longing to leave ever since.

 

America can be more heavily criticised for subordinating Somali interests to its own desire to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men who may (or may not) have been hiding in Mogadishu. None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened. Western, especially European, diplomats watching Somalia from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya to the south, have sounded the alarm. Their governments have done little.

 

That reflects a feeling of fatigue among outsiders who have been trying for years to persuade the Somalis to negotiate a new deal for themselves. The officially-recognised but feeble Somali transitional government, the elders of the ****** clan (the main one in Mogadishu) and various prominent members of the far-flung Somali diaspora have all failed to accommodate each other and are largely responsible for the present fighting.

 

The Somali government has been particularly weak. It has used the latest offensive partly to settle scores with its enemies. Its description of the insurgents as al-Qaeda is self-serving. In reality, they include disaffected ****** people, profiteers, and nationalists who cannot bear having Ethiopians on Somali soil. There may be a few hundred jihadist fighters and perhaps a dozen or so who can properly be classified as al-Qaeda. But the government's failure to make concessions to the ****** raises al-Qaeda's hope that Somalia may become a hub of instability and a new front in a holy war against Ethiopia—and the West. A ceasefire proposed by America looks unlikely to take hold. A national reconciliation conference has been put off until the summer. Ferocious fighting between clans has broken out in Kismayo, a southern port. More Somalis, trying desperately to reach Yemen across the Red Sea in small boats, are being drowned off Somalia's northern coast.

 

This is all bad for Ethiopia. Morale among its troops is dropping; some have deserted. Another war with Eritrea is in the offing, along with terrorism by separatist and Islamist groups at home. The insurgency in Mogadishu has pepped up the ******* National Liberation Front, an ethnic-Somali group fighting for the autonomy of the ******* region, in eastern Ethiopia; this week it attacked a Chinese oil-exploration facility in the desert there, killing some 65 Ethiopians and nine Chinese, apparently with help from Eritrean intelligence. In sum, the entire Horn of Africa is back on edge.

 

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[Castro]

Difficult as it is to imagine, we've not seen the end of the carnage.

 

Allow sahal.

[Naxar Nugaaleed]

one the government was right and it does not get worst as the title suggests. two, of the many reason the artlicle gives, its says that this all do the government not given the unmentionable clan enough 'concessions'. how false is that? in government equally divided between five unmentionables, what 'concessions' can be given?

[A.J.]

How can a government that divides that divides itself up on clan basis expect to be succesful

[RedSea]

^hmmm, something to give a thought.

[General Duke]

The clan divison is temporary until local election can take place then it will be about districts.

 

Till then this was the best formula in order to get evryone on board.