Farah Abdi Warsameh/Associated Press
For a generation, Somalia has been a byword for the suffering of a failed state. It has been without an effective central government since 1991, when the former government was toppled by clan militias that later turned on each other.
Since 2006, the country has faced an insurgency led by Al Shabab, one of Africa’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups. Al Shabab controls much of southern Somalia and has claimed affiliation with Al Qaeda since 2007.
In August 2011, the Shabab receded from several areas at once, handing the Transitional Federal Government an enormous opportunity to finally step outside the capital and begin uniting this fractious country after two decades of war.
But the government was too weak, corrupt, divided and disorganized to mount a claim beyond Mogadishu, the capital, leaving clan warlords, Islamist militias and proxy forces armed by foreign governments to battle it out for the regions the Shabab was losing.
Then in October, an enormous truck bomb was detonated outside the gates of a government compound, killing dozens of people and sending the signal that the Shabab was making a comeback after several months of losing ground. At about the same time, hundreds of Shabab fighters poured into Dhobley, a market town on the Kenya border, setting off an intense battle.
And there were the kidnappings. Starting in September, gunmen from Somalia carried out a spate of kidnappings across the border in Kenya, apparently targeting Westerners and those affiliated with Western organizations there. Some analysts believe that the Shabab have been involved because the militants control most of the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, though others point to pirates and bandits in the area.
Invasion by Kenya
In October, the Kenyan military sent hundreds of troops into southern Somalia with the goal of attacking the Shabab. The governments of Somalia and Kenya signed a joint communiqué calling for “decisive action” against the Shabab. However, after signing the document, Somalia’spresident, Sheik Sharif, criticized Kenya’s military offensive into his nation, which raised questions about how bilateral the military action was.
Kenya has said the purpose of the operation was to support Somalia’s government in its battle against the Shabab and that it plans to stay in Somalia until the threat of the insurgents has been “reduced.” A Somali government spokesman said that while Somalia welcomed assistance from Kenya, the Somali government’s territorial sovereignty must be ensured.
The Shabab have threatened to retaliate against Kenya for the offensive, much as they struck Uganda in 2010 for sending peacekeepers to Somalia.
France has said it would send equipment and logistical support to Kenya in its operation. The American ambassador to Kenya, Scott Gration, indicated that the United States might also help in the operation.
2011 Drought and Famine
In the summer of 2011, the country was hard hit by a famine that extended across much of East Africa. A combination of drought, war, restrictions on aid groups and years of chaos have pushed 4 million Somalis — more than half the population — into “crisis,” according to the United Nations. Agricultural production is just a quarter of what it normally is, and food prices have soared.
The Shabab were blamed for much of the suffering, as it blocked many international relief groups from bringing food to famine victims. The Shabab, which had taken a beating in steady urban fighting against a better-armed, 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, abruptly pulled out of the bullet-ridden capital of Mogadishu, in August 2011, leaving the entire city in the hands of the government for the first time in years.
The situation had only worsened by mid-August, when the United Nations confirmed that a cholera epidemic was sweeping across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis had fled into Kenya, Ethiopia and to camps in Mogadishu, where cholera and measles are preying upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population.
A Lack of Intervention
Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death? The rains will start pounding down in the fall, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, aid agencies say, killing countless malnourished people.
In a way, this is all déjà vu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was hit by famine, precipitated by drought and similarly callous thugs blocking food aid and producing similarly appalling images of skeletal children dying in the sand. In fact, the famine back then was in the same area of Somalia, the lower third, home to powerless minority clans that often bear the brunt of this country’s chronic troubles.
But in the 1990s, the world was more willing to intervene. The United Nations rallied behind more than 25,000 American troops, who embarked on a multibillion-dollar mission to beat back the gunmen long enough to get food into the mouths of starving people.
But foreign military force, analysts say, has never succeeded in solving Somalia’s problems and it is not going to solve them now. This famine is not just about the Shabab’s blocking food aid. It is about a broken state and the human wreckage it is causing.
Somalia’s politicians have been too busy squabbling with one another to build institutions like a functioning health ministry or a sanitation department that would help drought victims. Some of the informal clusters of people in Mogadishu camped out for aid are already breaking up, and it is not clear where the displaced people are trudging to. Many aid agencies — and Western militaries — are justifiably wary of this environment, and so far the response to the famine has been well short of what is needed to stem the crisis.
In the 1990s, the American-led operation and the attendant relief effort saved around 110,000 lives, while 240,000 were lost to the famine. It is grim math, especially considering how enormous the aid operation was. The Refugee Policy Group study has a graph showing famine casualties, which tend to come in two spikes: one at the onset of the crisis, before the bulk of aid arrives; the other when the rains come. For the current famine, analysts are now bracing for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Mired in Chaos and Violence
Few experienced aid workers believe that all, or even close to all, of the emergency food in Somalia reaches the people it was intended for. Because much of Somalia has been mired in chaos and violence for the past 20 years, large aid organizations tend not to base their own staff members there and instead appoint local groups to monitor aid deliveries, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
In 2010, United Nations investigators said that a web of corrupt contractors and their cronies were skimming off as much as half of the food aid, though later internal United Nations investigations did not find evidence to support that. Back in 1991 and 1992, during Somalia’s last famine, warlords and their militias were notorious for commandeering food shipments.
One way the United Nations and its local partners are trying to combat the pilfering of food is by serving individual portions of porridge at special centers, as opposed to just handing out sacks of grain. The World Food Program, which has said that it will not cut back on aid deliveries because of the allegations of theft, is also asking contractors to pay them back for any food that was not delivered.
The transitional government promised to do whatever it can to help famine victims and denied that large amounts of aid had recently been diverted.
American Strategy
Over the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, American officials acknowledge. The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.
The fight against the Shabab, a group that United States officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send American troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.
According to officials, the State Department has been at odds with some military and intelligence officials about whether striking sites suspected of being militant camps in Somalia’s southern territories or carrying out American commando raids to kill militant leaders would significantly weaken the Shabab — or instead bolster its ranks by allowing the group to present itself as the underdog against a foreign power.
The Shabab has already shown its ability to strike beyond Somalia, killing dozens of Ugandans in 2010 in a suicide attack that many believe was a reprisal for the Ugandan government’s decision to send troops to Somalia.
Some critics view the role played by contractors as a troubling trend: relying on private companies to fight the battles that nations have no stomach to deal with directly. Some American Congressional officials investigating the money being spent for operations in Somalia said that opaque arrangements — where money is passed through foreign governments — made it difficult to properly track how the funds were spent.
In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight the Shabab.
Somalia’s Transitional Government
Somalia’s transitional government, initially considered to be the country’s best chance for stability in years, is faring poorly. Feckless and divided, it is holed up in a hilltop palace in Mogadishu, unable to deliver services, mobilize the people or provide a coherent alternative to the insurgents, who hold much of Somalia in a grip of fear.schedul
The mandate for Somalia’s transitional government was scheduled to end in August 2011 but Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a former high school teacher who became president in February 2009, refused to step down. A compromise was hammered out in June 2011, but led to the dismissal of popular Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. Abdiweli Mohamed Ali is the current prime minister.
African Union troops are in Somalia protecting the weak but internationally recognized transitional government. If the peacekeepers were not guarding the port, airport and the hilltop presidential palace called Villa Somalia, many Somalis believe the government would quickly fall.
On Oct. 20, heavy fighting on the outskirts of Mogadishu resulted in the death of numerous members of the peacekeeping force. An official with the United Nation estimated the number of peacekeeper deaths at around 20, making it one of the deadliest days for African Union peacekeepers since they arrived in Mogadishu in 2007. Fighting centered in the neighborhood of Deynile, a center for Shabab resistance.
Even if the rebels were to depart entirely from the capital, there is no guarantee that Somalia’s weak transitional government, which has let innumerable other opportunities slip through its fingers, would be able to gain control of Mogadishu, or that the city’s population would rally behind the government. The Transitional Federal Government has been propped up by millions of dollars of Western aid, including American military aid, but its leaders remain ineffectual, divided and by many accounts corrupt.
Conflict with Islamic Militants
Not since 2007 has the government had such an opportunity to assert itself in Mogadishu. In late 2006, Ethiopian troops stormed into Somalia and pushed out a grass-roots Islamist movement that was ruling much of the country, and for a brief spell the transitional government was in control. But within months the Shabab was waging hit-and-run attacks, and by 2008, it had seized several towns across the country and neighborhoods in Mogadishu.
Ethiopian troops pulled out in January 2009, setting Somalia more or less back to where it had been in 2006, with 17,000 people killed in the process (according to Somali human rights groups).
The Shabab have succeeded in internationalizing Somalia’s conflict and using their jihadist dreams to draw in foreign fighters from around the globe, including the United States. The Shabab, whose name means youth in Arabic, are a mostly under-40 militia who espouse the strict Wahhabi version of Islam.
A String of Kidnappings
On Oct. 25, an American aid worker and two colleagues were kidnapped by Somali gunmen in the region of Puntland, a Danish organization said. Three staff members from the Danish Refugee Council — an American woman, a Danish man and a Somali man — were abducted near the town of Galkayo, the organization said, adding that it had suspended all of its activities in the area.
The American and Danish aid workers were the fifth and sixth Westerners to be kidnapped in a series of abductions in Puntland, a semiautonomous region which is relatively stable compared to the rest of Somalia, though it still experiences kidnapping, piracy and human trafficking.
In the summer of 2011, the country was hard hit by a famine that extended across much of East Africa. A combination of drought, war, restrictions on aid groups and years of chaos have pushed 4 million Somalis — more than half the population — into “crisis,” according to the United Nations. Agricultural production is just a quarter of what it normally is, and food prices have soared.
The Shabab were blamed for much of the suffering, as it blocked many international relief groups from bringing food to famine victims. The Shabab, which had taken a beating in steady urban fighting against a better-armed, 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, abruptly pulled out of the bullet-ridden capital of Mogadishu, in August 2011, leaving the entire city in the hands of the government for the first time in years.
The situation had only worsened by mid-August, when the United Nations confirmed that a cholera epidemic was sweeping across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis had fled into Kenya, Ethiopia and to camps in Mogadishu, where cholera and measles are preying upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population.
A Lack of Intervention
Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death? The rains will start pounding down in the fall, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, aid agencies say, killing countless malnourished people.
In a way, this is all déjà vu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was hit by famine, precipitated by drought and similarly callous thugs blocking food aid and producing similarly appalling images of skeletal children dying in the sand. In fact, the famine back then was in the same area of Somalia, the lower third, home to powerless minority clans that often bear the brunt of this country’s chronic troubles.
But in the 1990s, the world was more willing to intervene. The United Nations rallied behind more than 25,000 American troops, who embarked on a multibillion-dollar mission to beat back the gunmen long enough to get food into the mouths of starving people.
But foreign military force, analysts say, has never succeeded in solving Somalia’s problems and it is not going to solve them now. This famine is not just about the Shabab’s blocking food aid. It is about a broken state and the human wreckage it is causing.
Somalia’s politicians have been too busy squabbling with one another to build institutions like a functioning health ministry or a sanitation department that would help drought victims. Some of the informal clusters of people in Mogadishu camped out for aid are already breaking up, and it is not clear where the displaced people are trudging to. Many aid agencies — and Western militaries — are justifiably wary of this environment, and so far the response to the famine has been well short of what is needed to stem the crisis.
In the 1990s, the American-led operation and the attendant relief effort saved around 110,000 lives, while 240,000 were lost to the famine. It is grim math, especially considering how enormous the aid operation was. The Refugee Policy Group study has a graph showing famine casualties, which tend to come in two spikes: one at the onset of the crisis, before the bulk of aid arrives; the other when the rains come. For the current famine, analysts are now bracing for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Mired in Chaos and Violence
Few experienced aid workers believe that all, or even close to all, of the emergency food in Somalia reaches the people it was intended for. Because much of Somalia has been mired in chaos and violence for the past 20 years, large aid organizations tend not to base their own staff members there and instead appoint local groups to monitor aid deliveries, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
In 2010, United Nations investigators said that a web of corrupt contractors and their cronies were skimming off as much as half of the food aid, though later internal United Nations investigations did not find evidence to support that. Back in 1991 and 1992, during Somalia’s last famine, warlords and their militias were notorious for commandeering food shipments.
One way the United Nations and its local partners are trying to combat the pilfering of food is by serving individual portions of porridge at special centers, as opposed to just handing out sacks of grain. The World Food Program, which has said that it will not cut back on aid deliveries because of the allegations of theft, is also asking contractors to pay them back for any food that was not delivered.
The transitional government promised to do whatever it can to help famine victims and denied that large amounts of aid had recently been diverted.
American Strategy
Over the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, American officials acknowledge. The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.
The fight against the Shabab, a group that United States officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send American troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.
According to officials, the State Department has been at odds with some military and intelligence officials about whether striking sites suspected of being militant camps in Somalia’s southern territories or carrying out American commando raids to kill militant leaders would significantly weaken the Shabab — or instead bolster its ranks by allowing the group to present itself as the underdog against a foreign power.
The Shabab has already shown its ability to strike beyond Somalia, killing dozens of Ugandans in 2010 in a suicide attack that many believe was a reprisal for the Ugandan government’s decision to send troops to Somalia.
Some critics view the role played by contractors as a troubling trend: relying on private companies to fight the battles that nations have no stomach to deal with directly. Some American Congressional officials investigating the money being spent for operations in Somalia said that opaque arrangements — where money is passed through foreign governments — made it difficult to properly track how the funds were spent.
In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight the Shabab.
Somalia’s Transitional Government
Somalia’s transitional government, initially considered to be the country’s best chance for stability in years, is faring poorly. Feckless and divided, it is holed up in a hilltop palace in Mogadishu, unable to deliver services, mobilize the people or provide a coherent alternative to the insurgents, who hold much of Somalia in a grip of fear.schedul
The mandate for Somalia’s transitional government was scheduled to end in August 2011 but Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a former high school teacher who became president in February 2009, refused to step down. A compromise was hammered out in June 2011, but led to the dismissal of popular Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. Abdiweli Mohamed Ali is the current prime minister.
African Union troops are in Somalia protecting the weak but internationally recognized transitional government. If the peacekeepers were not guarding the port, airport and the hilltop presidential palace called Villa Somalia, many Somalis believe the government would quickly fall.
On Oct. 20, heavy fighting on the outskirts of Mogadishu resulted in the death of numerous members of the peacekeeping force. An official with the United Nation estimated the number of peacekeeper deaths at around 20, making it one of the deadliest days for African Union peacekeepers since they arrived in Mogadishu in 2007. Fighting centered in the neighborhood of Deynile, a center for Shabab resistance.
Even if the rebels were to depart entirely from the capital, there is no guarantee that Somalia’s weak transitional government, which has let innumerable other opportunities slip through its fingers, would be able to gain control of Mogadishu, or that the city’s population would rally behind the government. The Transitional Federal Government has been propped up by millions of dollars of Western aid, including American military aid, but its leaders remain ineffectual, divided and by many accounts corrupt.
Conflict with Islamic Militants
Not since 2007 has the government had such an opportunity to assert itself in Mogadishu. In late 2006, Ethiopian troops stormed into Somalia and pushed out a grass-roots Islamist movement that was ruling much of the country, and for a brief spell the transitional government was in control. But within months the Shabab was waging hit-and-run attacks, and by 2008, it had seized several towns across the country and neighborhoods in Mogadishu.
Ethiopian troops pulled out in January 2009, setting Somalia more or less back to where it had been in 2006, with 17,000 people killed in the process (according to Somali human rights groups).
The Shabab have succeeded in internationalizing Somalia’s conflict and using their jihadist dreams to draw in foreign fighters from around the globe, including the United States. The Shabab, whose name means youth in Arabic, are a mostly under-40 militia who espouse the strict Wahhabi version of Islam.
A String of Kidnappings
On Oct. 25, an American aid worker and two colleagues were kidnapped by Somali gunmen in the region of Puntland, a Danish organization said. Three staff members from the Danish Refugee Council — an American woman, a Danish man and a Somali man — were abducted near the town of Galkayo, the organization said, adding that it had suspended all of its activities in the area.
The American and Danish aid workers were the fifth and sixth Westerners to be kidnapped in a series of abductions in Puntland, a semiautonomous region which is relatively stable compared to the rest of Somalia, though it still experiences kidnapping, piracy and human trafficking.
No comments:
Post a Comment