NomadNet

Dilemmas of the Horn

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0000

Washington wanted to keep Somalia from turning into another Afghanistan. Now it's an African Iraq.
Scott Johnson
NEWSWEEK

The jihadist leads a double life. By day he's a government functionary in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Standing in the shade of a crumbling, Mussolini-era balcony, a phone headset clipped to his ear, he affects a casual, corporate air. But then he pulls his blue oxford shirt aside to reveal a fresh bullet scar. He spies on his co-workers, he admits, and feeds information about them to the Islamist rebels who are laying siege to Mogadishu. "God willing, we'll take over the country soon," he tells a NEWSWEEK reporter, one of the few Western journalists who have ventured into Somalia in months. The State Department recently added al-Shabaab (meaning "youth") to its list of terrorist organizations, making the group a target for attacks by U.S. forces operating in the Horn of Africa. The jihadist is unconcerned. "We're like a centipede," he says. "You cut off one of our legs, we just keep going."

Unfortunately, he's probably right. In late 2006 the United States backed Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia, designed to oust the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist coalition that had taken over much of the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. (Al-Shabaab was the Courts' military wing.) Washington accused the Islamists of harboring Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Courts had also brought more stability than Somalia had enjoyed in years. Somalis could walk the streets and do business again, and many welcomed the Islamists just as war-weary Afghans hailed the Taliban in the 1990s.

Now, by trying to prevent another terrorist haven like Afghanistan from developing, America may have helped create another Iraq, this one in the volatile Horn of Africa. "Every year this fighting continues, the situation worsens," says Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Abdul Salaam of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government. The Islamists' eviction in 2006 left a power vacuum that the U.N.-backed government still hasn't managed to fill. Ethiopian troops are loathed as occupiers and rarely leave their heavily fortified bases. And al-Shabaab has broken off from the Courts to wage a brutal and effective insurgency. The guerrillas have overrun at least eight Somali towns this year and control parts of the capital. Where once they brought order to Somalia, they now gleefully spread chaos.

Mogadishu looks like Baghdad during its darker days. Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers are hunkered down behind sandbags, concrete barriers and heavy artillery. Whenever they go out on patrol, their heavily armored convoys are blasted by roadside bombs, rockets and small arms fire. In recent weeks, al-Shabaab has stepped up a suicide-bombing campaign; an attack last week targeted a compound housing African Union peacekeepers, wounding nine and killing one. Leaflets warning of death to government collaborators likewise recall Iraq.

For ordinary Somalis, violence is ever-present and random. Mogadishu is cut up into fiefdoms more than neighborhoods, divided by checkpoints and patrolled by militias that claim varying degrees of loyalty to the government. Death can come from many quarters. Two weeks ago, when insurgents attacked the presidential palace with rockets, Ethiopian troops responded with a mortar volley into the crowded Bakara market. Seventeen people were killed and nearly 50 others were injured. Shrapnel struck shopkeeper Abdul Rashid, 25. "In your country, do you throw mortars at your own people?" he asked from his hospital bed, wincing from a clear plastic tube inserted into his ribcage. Some 600,000 have fled the country in the past year, and 750,000 are now trapped in squalid camps for the internally displaced.

Whereas in Baghdad the surge is beginning to have an effect, the violence in Somalia is increasingly random and getting worse. Noor Muktar, 35, was living in Mogadishu's sports stadium with other refugees when a fire fight broke out two months ago. She fled with her daughters—"I couldn't even get our bedding," she says—and now lives on the outskirts of town in a teetering shelter of twigs and plastic. Aid workers are being driven out of the country. Three staff members from Doctors Without Borders were killed earlier this year by a roadside bomb. As of last week two humanitarian contractors, a Brit and a Kenyan, remained hostage after being taken at gunpoint on April 1. Foreign U.N. officials are prohibited from overnighting in Mogadishu. Aid agencies stopped delivering bulk food shipments in many areas of the capital after a Somali government official told radio listeners to seize food from convoys by force. A recent U.N. report declared Somalia's humanitarian crisis the worst in Africa.

The government nominally in power, fractious to begin with, is more fragile than ever. More than 60 government employees have resigned in the past year after receiving death threats—many of them broadcast live on Mogadishu's privately owned Radio Simba. An estimated 40 senior officials and intellectuals have been assassinated by insurgents in the past year and a half. A group of Shabaab fighters recently called up Mogadishu Mayor Mohammed Deerhe on his cell phone and threatened to kill him, too. (They recorded the exchange: "I'm sure you're not a Muslim," the caller taunts the mayor. "You're just talking, it's not in your heart." Deerhe shouts back: "F––– your mother!")

With a budget of less than $10 million, the government is essentially bankrupt. Somali troops haven't been paid in eight months. One soldier in Mogadishu, a gaunt, khat-chewing sergeant wearing camouflage and a pair of ragged sandals, says government forces are near collapse. "The insurgents right now are very strong," he says. "If the Ethiopians were not here with us, the insurgents would destroy us quicker." The soldier, asking not to be named for fear of retribution, says he no longer receives a salary—only pocket money when a fight is brewing.

Like America since the invasion of Iraq, Ethiopia is rethinking the wisdom of its incursion. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi spoke to NEWSWEEK last week about the possibility of a unilateral pullout. "It's not an option we will take lightly," he said. "But it is an option." Critics ask whether Washington was too blinded by its hunt for terrorists to foresee the likely pitfalls in Somalia. U.S. intelligence agencies believe fewer than a dozen high-value Qaeda targets are holed up there, including Haroun Fazul, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Issa Osman Issa—the men accused of helping to carry out the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Since the invasion, at least one target, Abu Talha al-Sudani, has been killed in a missile strike. Others have been driven into hiding or out of the country, at least temporarily. But other strikes have misfired: on March 4, the United States targeted an Islamist militia leader named Hassan al-Turki. Six people were reported killed and 10 others injured, but the object of the attack was in another village near Kenya at the time. "In the short term [the strategy] may work for us," says Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. "But in the long term it's sowing seeds of radicalism and anti-Americanism that we're going to deal with for generations to come."

Shabaab fighters say being targeted by America only helps their cause. "What we are sure about is that adding us to the [terrorist] list will bring many young people to us," the group's spokesman, Sheik Mukhtar Robow, said in a rare phone interview. "Al Qaeda became more powerful after it was added to the list. We hope that it will be the same with us." Robow claims that the guerrillas "had no official links with Al Qaeda before," but that now "we're looking to have an association with them."

That's probably just braggadocio. But there's no question that the insurgents are growing more radical. The Islamic Courts Union included several civilian leaders who might be described as moderates: the senior leadership, including a figure named Sheik Sharif, met with U.S. officials in Nairobi last week and disavowed any connection with al-Shabaab. They have advocated dialogue and emphasized that their fight is with the Ethiopian invading force, not all "infidels." Some of them are horrified by the tactics of their onetime allies in al-Shabaab. In towns that they've conquered the insurgents have opened the jails and killed local officials before melting away again. In Mogadishu, they've begun to target more moderate Islamic leaders. Sheik Mohammed Adham, a 48-year-old madrassa teacher, says the radicals assassinated one of his colleagues and closest friends last month. "These extremists, they're mad," he says, shaking. "I try to explain to the kids what good Islam is, but when they go home they hear someone has been killed, or shot, they see the bodies and they don't understand the value of life. I tell them good things and they go out and do bad things."

Abdul Rahim Ali Moudi, a spokesman for the civilian wing of the Courts, says Washington should have worked with their more moderate leaders earlier rather than tacitly greenlighting the Ethiopian invasion. "It would have been better if the Americans had listened to the Islamic Courts. But the problem is America hears only with one ear," he says. That may be starting to change. Somalia's current prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, has opened the door to talks with "any Somali," regardless of background. (He's also blasted his own security forces as "looters" preying upon the populace.) The United Nations has appointed a new, optimistic special representative for Somalia who is aggressively working to bring both sides to the same table. "We have to have a solution," says Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah. "I'm going to organize it in the next few weeks or days." Last week Ould-Abdallah met in Nairobi with representatives of the Courts' moderate wing.

The State Department is backing such efforts, and embassy officials in Nairobi met with Courts moderates last week. "We remain committed to resolving the ongoing political and humanitarian crises in Somalia," says Greg Garland, a State Department spokesman. There's one problem: the jihadists may have their own plans.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/131836

Kenya's Sad State of Affairs

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:27:00 +0000

Many years ago, when I was first living in Kenya, back when Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was barely alive but still propped up in the office of the presidency -- (He was literally propped up, sort of like Weekend at Bernies. They would drag him from place to place and have him photographed. My favorite ever headline in Kenya's Daily Nation was "Mzee Looks at Birds.") -- I met with a group of Kikuyu students at the University of Nairobi. These were, presumably, Kenya's best and brightest, a generation beyond the tribal prejudices that had torn their parents generation apart. This group of young Kikuyus, preparing for the day when Kenyatta, the Kikuyu president would die (it was actually illegal to speculate that Mzee might die)told me that they had been hoarding weapons, preparing for the war that was sure to come when the old man was gone. Kenyatta died shortly thereafter, and despite some real tensions, the serious violence never came.

It is now 30 years later. Yet another generation has adopted the destructive tribalism of the past. And though, I don't foresee Kenya becoming another Rwanda, it certainly has the potential to get much worse than it is now.

Yes, it is tribalism. But it is not, as some news reports have stated, age-old tribal antagonism. It is freshly minted tribal antagonism, the result of the fact that in Kenya, as in much of Africa, control of the government means control of the country's wealth and resources. It is the government, not the people nor the farmers nor the business community that control resources. So the stakes involved in running the government are much higher than they should be.

Part of the problem is the result of foreign aid. (It is the very definition of a resource that comes from the top down.) Aid causes corruption by empowering bureaucrats, not workers and farmers. Governments dole out the resources to their supporters in order to maintain a power base. In turn, their supporters are willing to kill an pillage on behalf of their government sponsors. Welcome to Africa.

Here's what you can do in the short term. Buy only Fair Trade Coffee. Especially if it's Kenyan coffee. Right now most Kenyan coffee is making the government's political cronies rich while keep farmers working just above a subsistence level. Starve the patronage system, and you'll be feeding the people.

On Strike!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:58:00 +0000

I know that I've done a crappy job maintaining this web site. The reality is that most of the issues that it deals with are from my past life as correspondent in Africa, specifically Somalia. I put NomadNet up in 1993, and programmed the HTML using MS Word. So I've kept it running largely because NomadNet is in fact one of the oldest continually operating sites on the web. It still gets several hundred hits a day, mostly people searching for humanitarian information on Google. And every once in a while I get a burst of energy and a little free time and make an honest effort to update things and clean up some of the pages and repair damaged links.

So what am I doing now? I'm a screenwriter, which means I'm on strike! If the strike goes on long enough I'll have enough free time to really fix up this site, but in the short term I've a few things to do, like walk the picket lines.

In the meantime, if you're wondering what the writers' strike is all about, watch this:

The West also fails Muslim women, freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:08:00 +0000

By Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.

The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Hirsi Ali first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know. Once there, in hiding from her family, she began working as a cleaning lady. But this cleaning lady spoke Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English and was quickly learning Dutch, so she soon found work as a translator for other Somali refugees, many of whom, like herself, were casualties of Islam. These women had been abused, mutilated, denied medical care and proper educations and forced into lives of sexual subjection and compulsory childbearing.

After attending the University of Leiden, where she studied political science and philosophy, Hirsi Ali began speaking publicly about the repression of women under Islam, and shortly thereafter she started receiving death threats from local Muslims. Her security situation eventually became so dire that she moved to the United States in 2002. However, she was soon contacted by Gerrit Zalm, then deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who urged her to run for the Dutch parliament. When Hirsi Ali voiced her security concerns, Zalm assured her that she would be given diplomatic protection wherever and whenever she needed it. She returned to the Netherlands with this assurance, won a seat in parliament and became a tireless advocate for women, for civil society and for reason.

The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film "Submission," which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The uproar from the Muslim community confirmed both the necessity of Hirsi Ali's work and the reasonableness of her fears. Van Gogh, having declined bodyguards of his own, was soon gunned down and nearly decapitated on an Amsterdam street, and a letter threatening Hirsi Ali was staked to his chest with a butcher knife.

Hirsi Ali was immediately forced into hiding and moved from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day, for months. Eventually, her security concerns drove her from the Netherlands altogether. She returned to the U.S., and the Dutch government has been paying for her protection here -- that is, until it suddenly announced last week that it would no longer protect her outside the Netherlands, thereby advertising her vulnerability to the world.

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international best-seller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."

The Dutch parliament will be debating Hirsi Ali's case this week. As it stands, the government's decision to protect her only within the borders of the Netherlands is genuinely perverse. While the Dutch have complained about the cost of protecting Hirsi Ali in the United States, it is actually far more expensive for them to protect her in the Netherlands, as the risk to her is greatest there.

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament, and to become the world's most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Gerrit Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands, while refusing to grant her even a week's protection outside the country during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

The Dutch government should recognize a scandal in the making and rediscover its obligation to provide Hirsi Ali with the protection she was promised.

There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.

More U.S. Military for Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:41:00 +0000

US Opens Africa Command HQ in Germany

Oct 1st, 2007 | BERLIN -- The U.S military's contentious new command covering Africa began operating on Monday from a base in Germany, and will be gradually brought to full capacity over the next year, a military spokesman said.

But several African leaders have expressed doubt about the command's necessity, saying they want to avoid foreign troops on their soil.

The U.S. Africa Command headquarters, known as Africom, is being created to help African security forces tackle regional crises and terrorist threats — a nod to the continent's increasing strategic importance.

The command begins with a staff of 120 under Gen. William E. "Kip" Ward and will increase to about 800 over the next year, said Air Force Maj. John Dorrian, a spokesman for U.S. European Command in Stuttgart.

It will initially operate from the U.S. Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, but diplomatic efforts are still under way to find a permanent location in Africa, Dorrian said.

"No final decisions have been made about the final location of the headquarters," he said.

Liberia is the only country to publicly offer to host the command, though U.S. officials say other nations have made private offers.

Still, the plans have met with sharp resistance from many other African nations, most recently Nigeria, which angled to block the headquarters from being established in the Gulf of Guinea region.

"The Africom initiative has raised a lot of interest and attracted a lot of attention because ... Africa has to avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil," South African Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said in August.

Last month, however, senior Pentagon official Ryan Henry denied the new command represented a "militarization" of U.S. relations with Africa. "This represents no change in policy," Henry insisted. "There are a lot of myths and rumors out there."

Under the U.S. military's system of regional headquarters, responsibility for Africa has been split between the Pacific Command, Central Command, and European Command.

Over the next year programs currently overseen by those commands — like joint training exercises and humanitarian operations — will be taken over by Africom, Dorrian said.

The U.S. plan foresees a small headquarters, and five regional teams spread around the continent. The Pentagon has emphasized it is not building new bases.

"Plans call for the footprint of U.S. forces to be small," Dorrian said.

Africom is a so-called "unified combatant command" that will be made up of all branches of the military, as well as civilians from not only the Defense and State Departments, but also the Agriculture, Treasury and Commerce Departments, as well as USAID.

Why We Don't Hear About the Conflict in the Ogaden

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:51:00 +0000

In recent months, reports have begun to spill out of Ethiopia detailing human rights abuses and misuse of food aid in its eastern Ogaden region. Human Rights Watch issued a report urging Ethiopia to stop "abuses [that] violate the laws of war."

The U.S. government considers Ethiopia an important ally in the war on terror, since it shares borders with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, the latter invaded by Ethiopia this past Christmas with Washington's approval. Ethiopia has not been able to extricate itself from Somalia, and the military has been accused of possible war crimes there. Mogadishu even has a new nickname: "Baghdad on the Sea."

Read the article in Slate.

Old war not working? Start a new one!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:47:00 +0000

Toward an American Theocracy

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:35:00 +0000

The march toward an American theocracy continues, led by a bunch of fundamentalist self-labeled patriots who have more in common with the Taliban than with America's founding fathers. In AlterNet, Hanna Rosin reports on Patrick Henry College, an institution that was considered to be a joke when it opened. But now, as Rosin reports:

I first visited Patrick Henry College in September 1999, a year before the school opened its doors. The "school," that afternoon, consisted of founder Michael Farris, a Christian homeschooling activist, manning an excavator on a construction site just off a Virginia highway exit. Farris was affable, his usual manner with reporters, as he laid out the plans for his revolution. The school would enlist the purest of born-again Christians in a war to "transform America" by training them to occupy the highest offices in the land." Year after year, it would churn out future congressmen, governors, and federal judges, until they finally had the majority. "Few students will know more about the political ramifications of reinforcing homosexuality through special rights than ours," he told me. One day, he bragged, he would introduce the ultimate graduation-day speaker: "President So and So, an alumnus of Patrick Henry."

Scares the shit out of me.

Somali clan elder shot dead

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:08:00 +0000

A Somali clan leader and key player in efforts to bring reconciliation to the country's warring factions has been assassinated in Mogadishu.

Maalim Harun Maalim Yusuf was shot twice in the head by three men armed with pistols outside his house on Saturday, according to Madina Guled Mahamed, his wife.

"One of the bullets penetrated through his head," she said. "He was shot as he knocked on the gate. We don't know why they killed him, he was a delegate at the peace talks."

He was a negotiator for a sub-clan of the Abgal clan at a government-backed reconciliation summit that began last month.

Yusuf was from the same sub-clan as Ali Mohamed Gedi, the Somali prime minister.

Delegates at the talks said he had been playing a crucial role.

"Maalim Yusuf was a peace-loving elder. We will badly miss him. His death will negatively impact the talks," Abdirahman Ahmed, one of the delegates, told Reuters. "This is a big blow to peace."

Haji Abdi Iman, the senior delegate for the Hawiye clan, said: "I don't care who committed this heinous crime but I can say this is a black day for the supporters of peace because he a dedicated negotiator despite his old age."

Local residents have said that this was the first time a senior clan elder had been killed in living memory.

The capital had experienced a short period of relative calm after a security crackdown coinciding with the July 15 opening of the talks.

Heavy fighting had erupted in Mogadishu's neighbouring Horuwa district hours after Yusuf was killed.

Mortars were fired at police who had taken up positions near a children's hospital.

"Two guards and a man were wounded after mortars landed at the hospital. The insurgents attacked the police from two sides and we were caught in the middle," a security guard said.

"The police responded with heavy artillery - it was really terrifying."

CARE Still Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:56:00 +0000

It just looks good because Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children and World Vision are worse. Some thoughts:

The aid group CARE should be applauded for their decision to stop distributing U.S. surplus food, and other charities, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision in particular, should be encouraged to follow suit. However, the lessons that CARE has "learned" in recent years, were apparent to them and to thousands of others, aid workers, economists, and African farmers, decades ago. Over that time, CARE vigorously denied that their "aid" was harming people at all. And given that the organization has seen the light, why wait two more years to end a policy that they now admit is causing harm in an already vulnerable region of the world? The answer lies in the economics of aid and relief charities: Their very existence depends on their continued functioning as a U.S. government contractor. CARE and others wishing to end destructive food dumping must first find sources of income to replace the taxpayer subsidies that they are currently receiving. This fact underlines the sad truth about relief-and-development charities: Their primary purpose is to raise funds to ensure their own survival, even if that means undermining the very causes they purport to champion.

The Uncharitible Charity

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:29:00 +0000

The key point here is that Americans ought to do whatever possible to encourage Africans to grow enough food to meet their needs. Taxpayers should not be funding a program that essentially only helps Americans farmers get rid of food that they can’t sell on the open market and probably shouldn’t have grown in the first place. Charities such as CARE have long been willing co-conspirators in a vast fraud that harms poor African farmers while benefiting much richer ones — all under the guise of doing good. CARE is wise to end its complicity in this morally-tainted system of turning charities into food peddlers on behalf of fat-cat American farmers. But why not end the practice now? Why wait? The harm to African farmers continues.

From Africa Works

Applause for CARE's Decision

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:53:00 +0000

Here's a very instructive post about food aid and the damage it causes: BioPact.

Imagine the immensity of the following contradiction: a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo can produce food for an estimated 3 billion people, but today it is a net importer of food, and a large part of its 60 million inhabitants receive food aid distributed by an army of NGOs from the West. The example can be replicated across Sub-Saharan Africa.

CARE finally decides to stop killing people

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:31:00 +0000

The Aid organization CARE has finally admitted that they have been harming people for the last 50 years or more. The article from the New York Times begins:

CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

Read the whole article from the Times here.

CARE -- and Save the Children and others -- have been attacking their critics. (and by that I mean me) for decades now. I think they owe me an apology, or at least an acknowledgment. Come on, throw me a crumb.
The article ends:

“What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,” said Mr. Odo of CARE. “That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.”

Those words are taken directly from by book, published ten years ago. Better late than never, and I suppose that CARE is to be congratulated.
Other food-dependent charities, such as the execrable World Vision, are naturally sticking up for food aid. For them it's about the bottom line. Without dumping U.S. surplus abroad they would probable go out of business. That would be a good thing. No, a great thing.

Other bloggers have weighed in: See Buy The Change You Want to See in the World: In Praise of...CARE?

See Time Magazine as well.

An Evangelical Coup in America’s Military

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:29:00 +0000

Tikkun has a fascinating interview with Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

"We are facing a national security threat in this country that is every bit as significant in magnitude, width and breadth internally as that presented externally by the now-resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda. And it is the destruction of the U.S. constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state, in the technologically most lethal organization every created by humankind, which is our honorable and noble military. I’m here to report to you today that that wall is nothing but smoke and debris. We are facing an absolute fundamentalist Christianization—a Talibanization—of the U.S. Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Air Force."

The Other Failed Invasion

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:06:00 +0000

This article on Somalia from the current issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC. The excerpt is beyond fair use, but what the hell. What I find curious here is the repeated assertion that al Qaeda was behind the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" episode. I still find that claim to be dubious, as if the wretched Somalis could not have possibly shot down the helicopters themselves. Likewise, the mayhem in Iraq is being officially attributed to al Qaeda, when clearly much of it is locally generated.

The Other Failed Invasion
Occupational Hazard
by Eliza Griswold
Post date: 08.01.07

Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.

Photo Courtesy Clockwise from top: Shabelle Media, Nasser Nuri, Reuters TV, Reuters/Newscom; Photo illustration by Anastasia Vasilakis"I just want a juice," she pleaded. Except for a handful of armed soldiers, the only other person on the deserted street was a man selling mango juice from behind a table. (A few weeks earlier, the stall he had operated for 14 years had been blown up.) The woman held up her empty palms and backed away. The soldiers let her be and hustled back to their waiting Jeep.

We were in Tawfiq, the most contested neighborhood of Mogadishu, where soldiers of the current Somali government are busy trying to root out militia members of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which ruled Mogadishu for six months last year and managed to bring relative peace for the first time in 16 years. It was overthrown late last year by a force sent by neighboring Ethiopia with America's tacit blessing. Now the UIC's military wing, the shebab ("youth"), has retreated into a maze of shallow bunkers and sandy berms in the Tawfiq neighborhood from which the Islamist group drew most of its local support. A sign on a daub wall nearby advertised the (now closed) new falluja café--named after the Iraqi city razed by the Americans in late 2004 where the insurgency continues to simmer.

The government soldiers' overreaction to the woman buying juice is at least somewhat understandable. The first real suicide bomber in Somalia's history blew himself up last September, in a failed attempt to assassinate President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, whom many Somalis see as a puppet of Ethiopia and, by proxy, the United States. Since then, suicide bombers have detonated every few months.

During its brief tenure, the UIC had defeated Mogadishu's U.S.-backed warlords and quelled the clan divisions that riddle Somali life. It also set up sharia courts to administer justice and instill order in the name of Islam. To some degree, it worked. Somalis backed the UIC less for religious reasons than because, for the first time in almost two decades, Mogadishu wasn't a free-fire zone.

But the UIC had a much darker side: The shebab dug up and tossed out the bones of more than 700 dead Italians from an "infidel" cemetery and forced men to shave their heads as punishment for un-Islamic hairdos. They banned watching the World Cup and chewing the popular leafy stimulant qat. The head of the UIC's shura council, Sheik Hassan Aweys, was the military leader of Al Itti- had Al Islami, which launched several attacks against Ethiopia in the 1990s and had links to Al Qaeda. Also, in the second half of 2006, hundreds of foreign fighters reportedly arrived in Somalia to fight alongside the shebab. The UIC harbored several members of Al Qaeda, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the elusive mastermind reportedly behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

And so, last Christmas Eve, the Christian-led government of Ethiopia invaded and--supported, later, by U.S. air strikes--successfully dislodged the Islamist UIC, largely because it believed (correctly) that rebels backed by its enemy, Eritrea, were using Somalia as a staging area for attacks. The result is an occupation by Ethiopian soldiers that fuels the local insurgency, threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa, and offers Al Qaeda an additional talking point in its campaign to persuade Muslims that the West has declared war upon them. Many of the region's Muslims saw the Ethiopian invasion as a Christmas present from Ethiopia's leaders to America's. "When the Americans started backing the Ethiopians around Christmas," one woman who supported the courts said, "we started calling the Ethiopians kafir, or infidels."

"The occupation in Somalia is having roughly the same effect as in parts of Iraq," John Prendergast, an analyst at the International Crisis Group and founder of the enough Project, says. "We know by now that the one thing that unifies Somalis and brings them into the streets for guerrilla-style operations is occupation." In other words, Somalia is shaping up to be a third blundered front, after Afghanistan and Iraq, in the war on terrorism.

As in Iraq, the overthrow of the UIC government has left widespread chaos in its wake. In the streets of Mogadishu, grazing cows and children sniffing glue compete to eat from piles of garbage. Qat is back too: Few dare to travel after 3 p.m., the hour at which government soldiers begin to chew. While qat is ostensibly a stimulant, the glassy, pink eyes of soldiers in the late afternoon, and their indifference to pulling the triggers of their automatic weapons, make it seem a soporific.

Casualties from the occupation and insurgency fill the 60 beds of a local hospital. When I visited, I met Abdi Ghani Mohammed Ali, a 30-year-old English teacher who clutched the drainage tube protruding from his abdomen. Out of work since war shut his school some months ago, Abdi sold mobile phones to Ethiopian soldiers to support his family. One day, he told me, the Ethiopians shot him, stole $1,000, and left him in the street to die. An 18-year-old boy had been admitted to the hospital several days earlier bleeding from his rectum. He had been gang-raped by government soldiers who belonged to one of Somalia's rival clans. ("It's not sexual; it's about power," an onlooker said.) A woman in intensive care was waiting for her sister, shot during a carjacking, to wake from a coma. "Under the Islamic courts," she said, "it wasn't possible for anyone to do this." Meanwhile, in the crowded room next door, a woman named Rogia poked at the cast on her right knee, where she had been shot by an Ethiopian sniper. "The Ethiopians hate our religion," she said. The hospital's one doctor was slightly embarrassed but translated for her nonetheless: "Muslims wouldn't do anything like this."

This is certainly how Al Qaeda would like the world's 1.3 billion Muslims to view what's happening in Somalia. In early 2007, Ayman Al Zawahiri called for attacks against the occupying Ethiopian soldiers using "ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking campaigns to devour them as the lions devour their prey." But his message wasn't meant merely for Somali ears; it was also intended to inflame Muslims worldwide by suggesting, once again, that the Christian West is at war with Islam.

Al Qaeda's interest in Somalia dates back to the early '90s, when, according to a recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, an "Africa Corps" made up of a dozen or so Al Qaeda members set out for Mogadishu from nearby Sudan. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as being really crucial long before the U.S. did," explains Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower. "They look at the Horn of Africa as the gateway to the Red Sea: Egypt and Saudi Arabia are their main prizes." But, like the American peacekeepers sent by President Clinton in the early '90s, Al Qaeda's Africa Corps members found the failed state too problematic to build the infrastructure they needed. Their jihad ideology, moreover, was a tough sell among the Sufi-influenced Somalis, and it was hard to tear militants away from their clan loyalties and salaries. The Africa Corps letters make fascinating reading, tracing the evolution of Al Qaeda's mission from combating Somali communism to confronting "crusaders."

Al Qaeda has claimed some public relations victories in Somalia, notably Osama bin Laden's boast that his foot soldiers helped to bring down a Black Hawk helicopter and kill 18 American Rangers in Mogadishu in October 1993. That attack, he bragged later, set the "paper tiger" of the United States alight. And, as terrorism expert (and tnr contributor) Peter Bergen notes, Al Qaeda's first act of terrorism, the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, targeted American soldiers staying there--soldiers on their way to Somalia. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as part of the American grab for Muslim lands that began in Saudi Arabia," Bergen says. "When you talk about cutting off the head of the snake,' where do you begin? Somalia."

In the end, though, resentment toward the U.S.-backed occupation may prove to be a greater destabilizing force for the entire region than Al Qaeda ever was, especially in Kenya, where the war on terrorism is directly linked to the rise of radical Islamic identity. In the name of chasing a few bad men, the Christmas invasion played into millennia of distrust between predominantly Christian Ethiopia (4050 percent of the population is Muslim) and Somalia, which is almost 100 percent Muslim. "The popular perception is that Christian soldiers are occupying a Muslim land," says Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris.

Ethiopians see Somalia as a haven for Islamic militants and insurgents backed by Eritrea, which would like to overthrow the repressive Ethiopian regime. But they also play up this analysis to encourage U.S. backing for their efforts to destroy the rebels. In 2002, during a visit by Senator Arlen Specter, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi called the U.S. war on terrorism "something of a godsend." As Ethiopian Envoy to Somalia Fesaha Shawal recently explained, "Ethiopia and America have a common strategy, a common thinking, and a common enemy."

It's a point on which both sides concur. Ahmed Mohammed Hashim, an emaciated 25-year-old shebab foot soldier, told me, "Ethiopia is our first enemy. Right now, they go into our mosques with their shoes on; they shit and pee there." Second is the Ethiopia-backed interim government, "because it is illegitimate." And third: "America. America is the father of our enemy. America is using the Ethiopians to take over our country, and we're against them."

When I visited one head of the interim government, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, at his home, he argued that the de facto alliance between Ethiopia and the United States would eventually work to everyone's benefit. Surrounded by armed, glowering teenagers belonging to his clan in the heavily fortified Mogadishu neighborhood that one Somali journalist called the Lime Zone (to Baghdad's Green), Gedi told me: "The United States government is very cooperative. ...Somalia is a very important country from a geopolitical point of view in the war on terror."

A few hours later, a suicide truck bomber crashed through the gate of his compound, killing six people and injuring ten more. The prime minister was rushed to an undisclosed location. It was at least the third attempt on his life, and a great opportunity for spin. Soon after, my phone rang. It was the prime minister calling me directly--apart from the photographer Seamus Murphy, I was evidently the only Western journalist in Mogadishu. "This bombing will make the international community pay attention," he told me. "It is the mark of Al Qaeda."

Eliza Griswold is currently a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field, has just been published.

Disaster in Somalia

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:06:00 +0000

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.

How much failure will they take?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:11:00 +0000

It's almost like an American coup d'etat. The military has long opposed Bush in private and one gets a sense that the public outcry from our uniformed services is just beginning. The irony is that Bush's staunchest defenders on Iraq don't necessarily support his policies there; they are just protecting that flank in defense of their real concerns: opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, gay rights. The question is, how much death, destruction and abysmal failure will the religious right wing accept in defense of their primary concerns? The answer is that there's no limit. Like their fundamentalist brothers in the Islamic camp, Christian fundamentalists are value their petty pieties more than life.

The Curse of Oil in Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sat, 05 May 2007 20:03:00 +0000

Why does everything turn to shit in Africa? Events that would seem to indicate a positive outcome in other places inevitably bring pain and suffering to Africa and a windfall to a couple of Africans (and a bunch of outsiders)

The discovery of oil in Africa has been, almost without exception, a disaster for the host countries. The reasons are partly economic, partly having to do with the lack of well-developed institutions in many African states, partly owing to colonial legacies, and partly the fault of Western oil companies all too willing to turn a blind eye to corruption while the getting is good.

This article in Salon is about "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil," by John Ghazvinian. A quote from the book:

That oil wealth could be a curse seems counterintuitive. When an oil bonanza is discovered in a struggling African country, the instinctive assumption is that it can only be a good thing; that it will result in a rapid improvement in the lives of the people; that suddenly there will be money for hospitals and vaccines and schools and roads; and, even more than that, everyone will be rich. To the contrary, however, studies suggest that real GDP and the population's standard of living nearly always decline where oil is discovered. Between 1970 and 1993, for example, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil.

Part of this is the legacy of colonialism. The systems that remain in Africa were designed to extract wealth and to only invest the bare minimum in infrastructure and society while enriching a very few. The system, 50 years after independence seems immutable. It devours everything -- including and especially aid -- and turns it into the monster that continues to devour the continent.

Darfur, Oil, Money

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:11:00 +0000

This is from the LA Times today:

In Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have perished in what the United States calls a genocide, the killing has been supported by profits from companies helping the government of Sudan tap its vast reservoirs of oil, according to services that research corporate conduct for investors. The firms include China's Sinopec Corp., Malaysia's Petronas, and Schlumberger, based in the Netherlands Antilles — whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation's most significant connection to the Sudanese oil industry, however, is through Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Bill Gates is a Berkshire director, and Berkshire's chairman, Warren E. Buffett, is a trustee of the Gates Foundation. Berkshire holds a $3.3-billion stake in PetroChina Co., a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, the biggest player in Sudanese oil.

Buffett has pledged $31 billion worth of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation in annual installments, beginning last year with $1.6 billion. In 2009 and afterward, the foundation expects Berkshire's wealth to fund about half of its charitable awards — which have included more than $34 million for emergency refugee and health services in Sudan, plus a share of at least $167 million more in regional health grants.

But some of Berkshire's wealth comes from PetroChina, whose parent company supplies a large part of the money that underwrites Sudan's military — as well as the janjaweed, according to the United States and the United Nations. The infusion of Berkshire stock places the Gates Foundation in conflict with its own efforts to help victims of the Sudanese civil war.

It's hard to keep your hands clean in this world. But that's the way things go in the aid business. And it's not just oil companies. Pharmaceutical companies, grain processors and others fuck over Africa every day but then invest in aid projects. Industry always hedges its bets and supports both sides in a conflict. Support Hitler, support the Janjaweed but make a show of helping the victims.

Republican Fundamentalists

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:02:00 +0000

One of the questions put to John McCain in the Republican "debate" last night was "Do you believe in evolution?" Do you believe in evolution? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you believe in gravity? Do you believe in DNA? Evolution is a fact. Gravity is a fact. The appropriate question is: Do you have your head totally up your ass, or are you pandering to the slobbering mass of Christian fundamentalists who live in fantasy land? The thought that in the 21st century we could possibly have a president who will not or cannot accept scientific fact is positively frightening.

For the record, McCain does "believe" in evolution. Three or four of the republican candidates do not. (There was a show of hands, and I couldn't say who raised them or not.)

Qat Flight to Mogadishu

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:48:00 +0000

I found this video recently. I shot it while I during a landing at the K50 airstrip, 50 kilometers south of Mogadishu. The airstrip was at the time under the control of Aydid they younger. The plane had been packed with bags of qat, and I had to purchase my weight in qat in order to get myself onto the plane. So did my friend, a journalist who you catch a glimpse of in the back of the plane.

God is Not Great

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:52:00 +0000

I've long tried to reconcile Christopher Hitchens' irrational and pigheaded support of the war in Iraq with his clear, rational, and resolute dismissal of religion. God is not Great is great. Of course, Hitchens' newly converted fans on the right with will disavow or ignore it. Their crusade against "terrorism" and Islam comes from the same blind impulse that fuels bin Laden and his followers. God is the problem, not the solution.

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:15:00 +0000

Mahmood Mamdani questions those who would call for humanitarian intervention in Darfur by putting it in the context of other colonial adventures.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

U.S. hires military contractor to back peacekeeping mission in Somalia

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:03:00 +0000

... which means that the Americans are back. And doesn't the company DynCorp sound like something from a Philip K. Dick novel? Or some CIA invention? Here are the highlights:

NAIROBI, Kenya – The State Department has hired a major military contractor to help equip and provide logistical support to international peacekeepers in Somalia, giving the United States a significant role in the critical mission without assigning combat forces.

DynCorp International, which also has U.S. contracts in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, will be paid $10 million to help the first peacekeeping mission in Somalia in more than 10 years.

The support for the Ugandans is part of a larger goal to improve African forces across the continent and promote peace and stability in a region that's often lawless and a haven for terrorists, including some tied to al-Qaeda. The U.S. has also begun to depend more on African nations for oil and minerals, and wants to expand its influence.

The State Department has committed $14 million for the African Union peacekeeping mission to Somalia and has asked Congress for $40 million more. DynCorp's work force includes many former U.S. troops who frequently work in hostile areas. (Aren't they called mercenaries?)

DynCorp, whose services range from equipment maintenance to paramilitary security forces to training police, provided logistics for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia from 1992-95. It was not immediately clear if DynCorp employees would work inside Somalia under the new contract, signed three weeks ago.

Other company operations in Africa include a program to disarm and rehabilitate former soldiers in Liberia, while advising the government on the reconstitution of the army. The company also supports peacekeepers in southern Sudan, and is working with the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia to help the African Union create a standby military force to respond to emergencies, according to the company Web site.

Dyncorp is not the only U.S. security company working in Africa. Northrop Grumman Corp. has a similar contract, worth up to $75 million, to support the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program, which aims to train 40,000 African peacekeepers over five years.

KBR Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., provides services to at least three bases in Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia used by the U.S. Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.
The contracts come at a time when the Pentagon wants to develop closer relationships and provide greater military assistance to Africa.
A small number of U.S. Special Forces troops fought alongside Ethiopian troops in Somalia in December when they drove out a Somali extremist group that the U.S. has linked to al-Qaeda, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the mission.
In January, U.S. Special Operations aircraft staged two airstrikes against suspected al-Qaeda forces hiding inside Somalia, the official added.
The United States is not the only country seeking to provide private military services in Africa.
In 2005 the Somali government signed a $50 million contract with New York-based TopCat Marine Security to help create a coast guard to protect its coast and shipping from pirates. The State Department blocked TopCat from deploying because of a U.N. arms embargo, Hassan Abshir Farah, Somalia's marine resources minister said.

Here we go again

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:38:00 +0000

Does anyone really think that the UPDF troops in Somalia stand a chance to succeed where the U.S., UN and others have failed? Remember Victor Gbeho, the Ghanaian who attempted to lead UNOSOM after the Americans began pulling out? The mission is already off to a very shaky start. Do we expect it to improve? History has show that humanitarian interventions reach their peak of effectiveness at the moment of the incursion and then go rapidly downhill after that.