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Brett Popplewell
Somalia, noun: the embodiment of a failed state.
Apr 18, 2009 – It is a modern-day pirate kingdom known for banditry,
shootouts and kidnappings.
For the past 18 years, Somalis have had a closer relationship with the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse than they have with the notion of good
government. Pestilence, famine, war and death are a part of everyday
life, while the current president barely controls more than a few city
blocks of Mogadishu and has little ability to govern 9 million Somalis.
Films such as Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, which
left countless Somalis dead, have told only part of the tale, as have
recent reports of piracy along the Gulf of Aden.
Somalia has no national institutions, and one-third of its population
relies on food aid, provided by other countries and manipulated by rival
warlords who use food as leverage in their fiefdoms.
Clan rivalries have eroded any overarching Somali-state apparatus for
centuries. But unlike residents of other African countries where
colonialism clumped multiple ethnicities together, Somalis are not
divided along tribal lines. They share the same ethnicity, language and
religion. Yet they, like the Scots of yesteryear or the Greeks of
antiquity, are divided into clans that fight over sparse resources.
Arab tribesmen arrived in Somalia in the 7th century A.D. A strong
Islamic state, the Sultanate of Adel, formed later, but by the 1500s the
Sultanate had disintegrated, its lands carved up by warlords.
In the colonial era, the country held strategic importance because of
its proximity to the shipping lanes between Britain and India. The
French and Italians also set their eyes on the region, and the lands
that now comprise Somalia were fought over and partitioned – with the
Italians occupying the southern region, including the capital city of
Mogadishu, and the British holding on to the shores along the Gulf of
Aden, from where they watched over the same shipping lanes that are now
infested with pirates.
By 1960, the remnants of Italian and British Somaliland were granted
independence.
For the next 31 years, Somalia had a central government in Mogadishu,
but the years were marked by border disputes with Kenya and Ethiopia,
and by misfortunes such as drought and famine. The government of
post-colonial leader Muhammad Siyad Barre (president from 1969-1991)
brought Somalia into the Cold War by first making friendly with the
Russians before turning to the Americans.
Though a militant dictator, Barre was never able to unify the warlords
and fell to the clans in 1991. With his removal from power came the
disintegration of any sort of government in Somalia. Mogadishu was
razed, lawlessness took over, and the remnants of the central government
were destroyed.
An American-led intervention force tried to restore order in 1992. But
the following year, when photographs of a dead U.S. soldier being
dragged through the streets of Mogadishu made their way into the press,
America's will to restore order was broken.
The Star's Paul Watson took those infamous photos and later wrote that
"the mission to save Somalia from itself was a tragicomedy from the
moment" it started.
The Canadian military took a battering of its own in the aid effort when
members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment tortured and murdered a Somali
teenager caught lurking around UN food aid.
Since then, few leaders in the international community dared to care
about Somalia – that is, until al Qaeda named the country an ideal area
for expansion.
Source: The Star
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