24/08/2012
For a generation, Somalia has been a byword for the suffering of a failed state. It has lurched from disaster to disaster in the last 21 years, since the central government was toppled by clan militias that later turned on each other. Year after year, Somalia has been ranked as one of the world’s poorest, most violent countries, plagued by warring militias, famine, bandits, warlords and pirates.
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.
The Transitional government has been propped up by millions of dollars of Western aid, including American military aid, but its leaders remained ineffectual, divided and by many accounts corrupt.
The mandate for Somalia’s transitional government was scheduled to end in August 2011 but Sheik Sharif, a former high school teacher who became president in February 2009, refused to step down. A compromise was hammered out extending the government for one more year.
A New Parliament Convenes
In August 2012, Somalia convened a new federal Parliament, swearing in a new government to replace the internationally backed transitional government. More than 200 members of Parliament were sworn in. But while the nation’s transitional government has been dissolved, the new government is still considered a caretaker because it was not directly elected and results from a Constitution that has to be ratified by a public referendum.
The members of Parliament were selected by clan chiefs, and some candidates were rejected by a committee evaluating their qualifications. Several officials described the new Parliament as smaller and more professional than the last one, because of more stringent entry requirements. The hope is that it will be less vulnerable to corruption than previous parliaments. A new president must also be selected.
African Union Peacekeeping Mission
Uganda has taken the lead in the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia. The first Ugandan troops landed in 2007 to a barrage of mortar shells. The Ugandans, joined by Burundians, Djiboutians and smaller contingents from other African countries, have steadily chipped away at the strength of the Shabab.
Analysts say the African Union has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s. Their surprising success has put the African Union in the driver’s seat of an intensifying international effort to wipe out the Shabab.
Beyond the offensive by government and African Union troops, the Shabab are also facing incursions by Kenyan forces in parts of the south and by Ethiopian troops as well.
African Union officials, who have been reluctant to disclose casualties and in the past even provided apparently false accounting of the numbers, revealed that more than 500 soldiers had been killed in Somalia, making this peacekeeping mission one of the bloodiest of recent times.
Helicopters, en Route to Battle Shabab, Vanish Over Kenya
On Aug. 14, 2012, at least two Ugandan military helicopters,crucial assets in a push against the Shabab in Somalia, vanished over Kenya, officials in Nairobi said.
The helicopters, part of a squadron, took off from their base in Entebbe, Uganda, and were flying to Somalia to participate in what officials depicted as a final assault on the port town of Kismayu, the last stronghold of the Shabab. But two of the helicopters abruptly “lost communication” somewhere in Kenyan airspace and may have crashed.
One of the helicopters plunged into the thickly forested slopes of Mount Kenya, in central Kenya, where Kenyan authorities rescued seven Ugandan crew members.
Col. Felix Kulayigye, Uganda’s military spokesman, said, “We have unconfirmed information about the other two, that they did indeed have a hard landing along the highway to Garissa,” a town in northern Kenya.
However, there were conflicting reports regarding this military action.
Another official, who has close contacts in the Ugandan military, said that five helicopters took off from Entebbe and that one landed safely in Wajir, Kenya, which is a refueling stop. Another crash-landed on the way and three were still missing, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Neighboring Countries Move In
In September 2011, militants from Somalia carried out numerous kidnappings across the border in Kenya, apparently targeting Westerners and those affiliated with Western organizations there. Some analysts believed that the Shabab were involved because the militants controlled much of the area along the Kenya-Somalia border.
Many kidnappings have also been conducted by pirates, who operate with total impunity in many parts of Somalia. And as naval efforts have intensified on the high seas, stymieing hijackings, Somali pirates seemed to be increasingly snatching foreigners on land.
The backdrop this all played out against in 2011 was a punishing drought that caused famine, killed livestock, destroyed crops and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Epidemics of cholera and measles then preyed on the malnourished and vulnerable populations huddled in camps.
In October 2011, the Kenyan military sent hundreds of troops into southern Somalia. The governments of Somalia and Kenya signed a joint communiqué calling for “decisive action” against the Shabab. However, after signing the document, Somalia’s president, SheikSharif Sheik Ahmed, criticized Kenya’s military offensive into his nation, which raised questions about how bilateral the military action really was.
In November 2011, witnesses along the drought-stricken border with Ethiopia reported that hundreds of Ethiopian troops had crossed into Somalia with armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery and tanks. A senior official with Somalia’s transitional government stated that Sheik Sharif did not want Ethiopian troops inside Somalia, but that he was powerless to oppose them. Despite the historic enmity between the two countries, many Somalis said they welcomed anyone who could get rid of the Shabab.
Kenya and Ethiopia have blamed Somalia’s instability for hampering their own economic development, and both countries consider the Shabab to be a regional threat. Yet analysts have said the countries may have ulterior motives and are intervening in Somalia to install their own proxy forces who will then serve the interests of Kenya and Ethiopia.
Famine Is Over But Danger Remains For Many
In 2011, a punishing drought killed livestock and turned once-fertile farms into fields of dust. Malnutrition and death rates soared, and hundreds of thousands of impoverished Somalis embarked on desperate treks across the desert, seeking help. Some starving mothers arrived at refugee camps in Kenya with dead children strapped to their backs. The few working hospitals in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, were soon so besieged with dying people that they resembled morgues.
The Shabab were blamed for much of the suffering, as the militant group blocked many international relief groups from bringing food to famine victims.
The situation grew worse 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 preyed upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population.
The famine eased toward the end of the year because Western aid agencies had ramped up operations and scrambled to find ways to obviate the Shabab restrictions, relying on technologies like sending money electronically by cellphone so people in famine zones could buy food from local markets. Western charities also partnered with new players on the aid scene, like Turkish groups and other Muslim organizations that were allowed into Shabab-controlled areas.
In February 2012, the United Nations said that the famine that killed tens of thousands of people had ended, thanks to a bumper harvest and a surge in emergency food deliveries. But conditions in Somalia were still precarious, U.N. officials warned, with many Somalis still dying of hunger and more than two million still needing emergency rations to survive.
An Alarming Increase in Rapes
Somalis have faced another widespread terror: an alarming increase in rapes and sexual abuse of women and girls.
The Shabab, which presents itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of pure Islam, seized women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror in southern Somalia, according to victims, aid workers and U.N. officials. The militants also forced families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often lasted no more than a few weeks and were essentially sexual slavery, a way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale.
But it was not just the Shabab. The famine of 2011 resulted in a free-for-all of armed men preying upon women and girls who trekked long distances in search of food and ended up in crowded, lawless refugee camps where Islamist militants, rogue militiamen and even government soldiers raped, robbed and killed with impunity.
With the famine putting hundreds of thousands of women on the move — severing them from their traditional protection mechanism, the clan — aid workers said more Somali women were raped than at any time in recent memory. In some areas, they said, women were being used as chits at roadblocks, surrendered to the gunmen staffing the barrier in the road so that a group of desperate refugees could pass.
American Strategy
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.
In January 2012, Shabab officials claimed that one of their senior foreign commanders, Bilal al-Barjawi, was killed in an American drone strike a few miles south of Mogadishu. The Shabab officials said he was of Lebanese descent, had grown up in West London and was a close associate of a Qaeda leader who was killed in 2011 in Somalia. British authorities denied that he was a British citizen.
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.
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