Saturday - December 23, 2006

Road To Somalia

All hell is about to break loose in the Horn Of Afirca. But first, a little background ....

In 1991 dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown and the country fell into total chaos with fighting between seven or eight warlords for control. An interim government was appointed and support was provided by the UN. In the latter part of 1992, President Bush (41) tried to help hold the country together with aid and transport for Pakistani troops who comprised the main UN peacekeeping force.

In 1993, the UN asked the US to take over military operations and President Clinton sent in the troops. Then in October 1993, the Black Hawk Down incident took place and after seeing American soldiers bodies dragged through the streets on CNN, Clinton got cold feet and pulled all troops out. It was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and a decision was made to cut-and-run. All US troops were out by mid-1995.

Oddly enough, John Kerry and the NY TIMES didn’t object to the intervention in Somalia and praised President Clinton for his wisdom while Secretary of Defense Les Aspin took the blame and resigned.

In recent years, a radical Islamic group, the Islamic Courts, has taken control of most of the country with the interim government boxed up in one small corner of the country next to Ethiopia. Ethiopia is providing aid and military advisers to the interim government as a sort of buffer between them and the Islamic militants because (1) Ethiopia is mostly Christian and (2) North of Ethiopia is Islamic-dominated Sudan and the holocaust in Darfur. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

Which brings us up to current events. Oh, did I forget to mention that Ethiopia has one of the most advanced armies and air force in Africa with thousands of tanks and jet fighters. They are being challenged by a ragtag “army” of teenage boys armed with AK-47’s and led by older warlords who have no qualms about throwing kids into the meat grinder. To further complicate matters, Islamic mercenaries are arriving on the beaches of Mogadishu in droves.

Like I said ... the Horn Of Africa is about to explode ....

In the Third Day of Fighting in Somalia,
Worries of a Sharp Escalation by Ethiopian Forces
_{ZANZIBAR, Tanzania (NY TIMES) — December 23, 2006}

Any hope of a quick peace in Somalia vanished in a burst of artillery shells on Friday, as fighting between rival forces raged for a third straight day. Residents of Baidoa, the seat of the internationally recognized transitional government, said they saw columns of Ethiopian tanks chugging toward the front lines, heightening worries that Somalia’s internal problems could soon become regional ones.

Meanwhile, residents in Mogadishu, the battle-scarred traditional capital and the base of Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement, said they saw sailboats packed with foreign mercenaries landing on the city’s beaches. According to United Nations officials, the transitional government, with the help of thousands of Ethiopian troops, has inflicted heavy losses on the Islamists, who rely on teenage boys to do much of their fighting. On Friday, the fighting was concentrated in towns ringing Baidoa, where witnesses said bodies were piling up in the streets.

As the two sides continued to blast each other with machine guns and artillery, an exodus began, with thousands of residents from the battle zone squeezing into aged trucks with pots, pans and sacks of clothes and fleeing to safer areas. Ethiopia has acknowledged that it has dispatched several hundred military advisers to help the transitional government repel the Islamists. But on Friday, Ethiopian officials continued to deny that their troops were engaged in combat.

“Tanks? What tanks?” said Zemedkun Tekle, spokesman for Ethiopia’s Information Ministry. “We have not sent any heavy arms into Somalia. Such talk is just propaganda to stir up the people.” The realities of waging war in a desperately poor country are setting in. At a hospital in Burhakaba, a town near Baidoa, a doctor stood in a filthy waiting room crowded with wounded and listed all the things he did not have: “No X-ray machines, no operating tables, no nothing.”

Islamist leaders have tried to frame the escalating conflict as a nationalist struggle, one aimed at evicting Ethiopian troops, whom they call infidel invaders. While Somalia is almost purely Muslim, neighboring Ethiopia has a strong Christian identity, even though it is actually about half Muslim. The two countries are longtime rivals and have fought over contested border areas before.

All schools in the Islamist-controlled areas have been closed indefinitely so more young people can be funneled to the front. On Friday, recruitment centers were swarming with teenage boys begging for guns. In Mogadishu, mosques blared out a call for retired soldiers to lend their expertise to the new jihad. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement late on Friday warning the Islamists to end their “hostile anti-Ethiopian activities. The situation in Somalia has turned from bad to worse,” the statement said. “Ethiopia has been patient so far. There is a limit to this.”

Ethiopia has the most powerful military in the region, and many analysts fear that Ethiopia may be only days away from unleashing its helicopter gunships and jet fighters. Somalia has been mired in crisis since 1991, when the central government collapsed, setting off a long, nasty interclan war. While the United Nations and donor countries have struggled to get a new government on its feet, a grass-roots movement of Islamic courts has steadily gained power.

The Islamist movement defeated the last of Mogadishu’s warlords in June and immediately restored a sense of law and order unheard of in the capital for 15 years. Then the Islamists began pushing outward, eventually reaching the outskirts of Baidoa, which their troops are now attacking from two sides. The transitional government, meanwhile, has never been popular and its leaders spend much of their time outside Somalia. American officials have said that if it were not for Ethiopian protection, the transitional government would have fallen months ago.

The fighting began near Baidoa on Wednesday, as European diplomats were meeting with leaders from both sides in an effort to strike a peace deal. The diplomats were initially upbeat. But as the fighting has intensified, the diplomats have become more pessimistic, saying that the rank-and-file Islamists seem bent on war even if their leaders are conciliatory.

Posted by The Skipper     on 12/23/2006 at 08:16 AM   
Filed Under: • Africa • RoPMA •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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