The Times Newspaper: ''The TFG is a disaster''

[Peacenow]

http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article1712030.ece

 

 

Fantastic effort. The Times of London has placed Somalia in the lead news. Martin Flethcer has written about it today and he wrote another article yesterday.

http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa//article1706367.ece?Submitted=true

 

Guys, the effort to tell the world about the TFG and get the message across to the world, what kind of people these are. Is paying off. It proves that if you send and send, call these people, that the work will pay off. More and more people are being notified of the TFG.

 

Don't forget to post your comments in the section below, to get your input in.

[Ms DD]

It certainly is paying off. I was heartened to see the fruits of our labour

 

May Long it continue.

[NGONGE]

European officials see no choice but to continue supporting the TFG in the hope that it can survive long enough to organise elections due in 2009. “The TFG is deeply flawed, but there is only one horse in the race. It’s not a question of backing it, but just getting it to the finishing line,” said one.

 

Hmmmm.

[Abwaan]

Very interesting articles. I was aware that the Times team of reporters were in Mogadishu and was waiting for what they write when they come back. Thanks for sharing this with us peacenow

[A.J.]

This is very welcome indeed but it still a needle in haystack compared with the other side of the news being spread by pro-government entities

[RedSea]

Peacenow and all of you God bless you.

 

Renegade, because the term 'government' and 'Radicals, terrerists' speak valumes themselves. For them offcourse.

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Editorial from my favourite Western paper.

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Return of the Warlords

The Guardian

Leader

[editorial]

Abriil 26, 2007

 

Once again, the residents of Mogadishu are cowering under the hammer blows of shellfire. Once again, the capital is in the grip of warlords, clan leaders and foreign armies. Once again, the body count is mounting. More than 320,000 civilians, between a quarter and a sixth of Mogadishu's population, have fled. The UN says Somalia is suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises in his history and suspects the transitional federal government (TFG) of stopping aid from getting through to refugees. Have we been here before? The answer, of course, is yes.

 

That brief period when the Somali Council of Islamic Courts restored order, removed the roadblocks and the rubbish from the streets and reopened the airport and the harbour (before being swept away by US-backed Ethiopian forces last December) is starting to look like a golden age. But it is more complicated than that. The Islamic Courts lost a lot of their credibility among the ******, Somalia's largest clan, by sending volunteers to their deaths against an Ethiopian army which was better-trained and -equipped.

 

Having provoked the battle, the Islamists did not stand and fight. They melted away in the city or the heavily wooded areas in the south. Many fled into exile and won no affection among a population left to suffer the consequences. A top military leader has since been told by his clan that he is no longer welcome back in Mogadishu. But if the Islamic courts are a busted flush, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf's transitional government has lost no time in doing the Islamic Courts' propaganda work for them by terrorising the civilian population.

 

There are two main questions that Colonel Yusuf's and Ethiopia's western backers should now ask themselves. What was gained by encouraging the Ethiopian army to topple the Islamic Courts? The US allowed Ethiopia to arm itself with North Korean weapons and also participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border. Washington was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects. But how many did they get and what price have Somalis paid?

 

Six weeks ago the TFG said it would end the insurgency in 30 days. An assessment released yesterday by two Chatham House academics, Cedric Barnes and Harun Hassan, claimed that more than 1,000 people were killed and 4,300 wounded in the offensive that followed. It has still not ended, and this leads to the second question. Why is the EU funding the TFG, when its leader is using the presidential compound to shell civilian areas? Is this what state-building is supposed to mean?

[Fabregas]

Quote:As we sat in his office near the Presidential Palace we heard the whoosh of Katyusha rockets being fired at residential districts controlled by insurgents. The general merely laughed. “This is our music,” he said.

 

On another occasion we met the Environment Minister in a hotel lobby. We asked if he had any civil servants. “No,” he replied cheerfully. “But we have guns.”