Disaster in Somalia

Newsweek online has a piece about how bad things are in somalia. The largest indicator seems to be that farmers are charging refugees from Mogadishu who want to take shelter under their trees. Newsweek calls it "renting trees." The article is worth reading, but contain the simplistic clan-based analysis that the Western press always resorts to:

And that's the internationally recognized government, which enjoys U.S. support, although it is widely unpopular in southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu. That's not surprising, since the prime minister is from a clan that's hostile to the clan that dominates the capital, and the president, Abdulahi Yusuf, is from Puntland, in northern Somalia, a breakaway region that is best known as the homeland of Somalia's pirates, who once again are on the prowl, bedeviling aid shipments even further.