Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteSomalia's militant Islamist al Shaabab group has taken credit [1] for the recent bombing that targeted two Ethiopian restaurants and killed at least 20 and wounded more than 100 people.
Reuters reporter Aweys Yusuf has described al Shaabab as "the hardline military wing of the Islamist movement that briefly controlled Mogadishu in the second half of 2006 and wanted to put Somalia under Islamic law until the government and Ethiopia defeated it."
Acknowledgment of the event helps lift it out of the mysteries, if you will, of violence in one of the most war torn regions of the world and returns it to tit-for-tat state security vs. terrorist rules, familiar territory worldwide.
I don't recall whether I hit the "Send" or "Submit" (quite appropriate) button on what follows in relation to a question on a Reuters AlertNet blog repost, but the question addressed, naively, roughly, was how to keep soldiers from killing civilians.
My answer:
The very best way of keeping soldiers from killing civilians is to keep peace installed and politicized street violence at bay.
Once conflicts start, otherwise uninvolved persons bear the brunt of the horror.
Gangs and mobs kill unmindful of legal or logical niceties in determining the supposed culpability of those of a kind elegible as targets.
For terrorists, the bomb's the message, of course, and there's no accounting for any in the vicinity of its detonation.
For patrols and raiders, wrong place, wrong time, sorry.
Once conflicts become "conventional", so-called "collateral damage" and escalation take civilian lives. At the state level, there may be quite a disconnect between the extent of sanctioned murder and its political effects.
Dresden did not end WWII. [3]
If there's a mission as regards sparing civilian lives, it may be to undermine and kill wars before conflicts reach their flash points.
The prevalence of guerrilla warfare and terrorism as the predominant modes in contemporary warfare (knock on wood) may actually reflect success as regards the world's ability to fend off war between determined states.
War by proxy, war pursued by small organizations, and warfare practiced by private interests (warlords) require alterations in culture and language both, an issue I'm not going to drone into here.
Nice words.
Civilians who get butchered every which way in Hollywood movies get paid for showing up, get fed, and get to walk away.
In the conflict zones, all of them, civilians seem often more respected for their public relations value, at best, and are found otherwise in the way of assorted, self-appointed warriors whose campaigns would reflect their glory in war were they more inclined to confront their peers among men in the field.
It's a rare occasion in history when authoritarian and nominally proto-democratic state authorities prove more concerned with the lives of mere civilians--i.e., disinterested and unarmed men, women, and children--than the freedom fighters risen to save them, and that from something, who knows what, because it's certainly not disease, hunger, poverty, disenfranchisement, displacement, fear, desparation, degradation, or death.
2. Abdiquani, Hassan. "At least 20 killed in Somali port blast: Governor." Reuters, February 5, 2008.
3. "Bombing of Dresden in World War II." Wikipedia, as experienced February 7, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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