Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThree elders assisting local aid workers with the distribution of food to refugees in a camp on the fringes of Mogadishu were shot to death today. From Reuters AlertNet:
"Suspicion has often fallen on Islamist insurgents, whom the government says have links to radicals including al Qaeda.
"But insurgent leaders accuse government hardliners of masterminding the attacks in a bid to scare the international community and hasten the arrival of a peacekeeping force." [1]
Whose accusation would you believe?
It may be time for Somalia's transitional government to lead by posting its investigative notes on the Internet and inviting insurgents and all of literate and logged-on Somalia to respond. In terms of having verifiable information, essentially truthful data, valid and reliable, it is now so dark in Somalia that violence has lost its meaning and much of the warfare its purpose.
The People, writ large, are being made refugee into the millions rather than the vanguard of Somalia's Next Society, and while ordnance goes off, it communicates less and less as it does.
Another 'graph from the Reuters Alertnet reportage: "In typical violence rocking Mogadishu virtually daily, a stray mortar landed on a shack on Thursday, killing a mother and her three sons, during an Islamist attack on Ethiopian troops, who are supporting the Somali government, witnesses said."
Was that mortar part of the Islamist attack?
Does Allah care not for old men, women, and children?
Whodunit?
"Why" has been well defined for the parties at war in Somalia; "who", however, has become a mystery; and "what" seems always too clear.
References here 1. Reuters AlertNet. "Gunmen kill Somali elders aiding refugees." July 18, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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