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It was cold now and Ahmed ordered his assistant to switch off the air- conditioning. "You can say that the idea of a state is non-existent in Somalia. We have to teach people what a state is." [1]
The "Ahmed" quoted above is Somalia's President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
1. Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith. "Somalia: one week in hell -- inside the city the world forgot." Medeshi, May 29, 2009: http://www.medeshi.com/2009/05/somalia-one-week-in-hell-inside-city.html
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Somali sources tell VOA an increasing number of foreigners from Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya, among others, have been arriving in Somalia in recent months on chartered planes, landing at an airstrip near Mogadishu. The unconfirmed reports say some of the foreigners came by road from neighboring Kenya, crossing the poorly-guarded border into al-Shabab held territories in southern Somalia.
The sources say many come to Somalia not to fight, but to work as instructors at more than half a dozen training camps set up by al-Shabab in Lower and Middle Jubba and the Lower Shabelle regions. There, young Somali boys, often recruited at gunpoint, are usually given three months of combat and terrorism training. [1]
Cosmopolitan readers understand some things: lack of coherence and context in the reception of information among Somalis--one day, they're suffering invasion from America via Ethiopia and a worldly "Transitional Federal Government; on some other day, it's terrorist with 7th Century Arabia in their hearts and not much feeling for any they drive out, pillage, rape, or kill (or whose hands or feet they may amputate).
Somalis seem alternately graced by businessmen and warlords who appreciate peace and by clerics and young men who promote war.
In this most Islamic of Islamic countries or regions, the bereaved, grief stricken, disposessed, and injured may enjoy now the spectacle of a UN-backed Islamist government fighting an Islamist insurgency backed by parties less known and producing an Islamic society to which few, if any, of 1.25 million displaced Muslims would seem to care to return.
What may one do with this neat turn of phrase: "The sources say many come to Somalia not to fight, but to work as instructors at more than half a dozen training camps . . ."?
Are training camps not part of the fighting?
When the little boys have become bigger boys, will they continue doing as today's big boys do by killing with as little wherewithal those in closest proximity to themselves?
One would think Somalis tiring of the war so many others--small in numbers, varied in motives--would seem to be waging on their backs.
1. Ryu, Alisha. "Suicide Bombing in Somalia Raises Concerns About Foreign Support." Medeshi, May 26, 2009: http://www.medeshi.com/2009/05/suicide-bombing-in-somalia-raises.html
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Revised Page: I've enjoyed the penguins but not the "boom boom" every time I open my blog, so to see what was here, lol, I've elected to maintain the entry with reference to the video that it featured.
Reference: Jagadish. "Mentor kurtishi vs Ibrahim Tatlesis Kush te ka than Dj Bici": http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=3044897
Wikipedi. Ibrahim Tatlises: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0brahim_Tatl%C4%B1ses
I don't really know what the National Security Agency is doing or how, but often when I set out to crawl across the magic carpet, no cloak either, and search out its darkest corners to lift the material and illuminate so much unswept dust (and, frankly, if at home, kitty litter, still), I as often wind up in a clean, well lighted place despite myself.
From early on with this blog,I've pulled in this entertainment.
Sometimes there's an odd juxtaposition: Andre Bocceli sings to a Muppet in between commentary on the latest and most obscene misery out of Somalia.
Sometimes there's a point, and you may listen to a sampling of Pashtun folk music while I bring up examples music retail shut down or the punishment of folk dancers by the Taliban and suggestions elsewhere on the web as regards what may disappear with another part of Arab expansion and influence.
Sometimes there's no point but to sanctify art for art's sake, and embed a comedian or graphic arts work with fractals.
International Culture pulls its own Napolean in reference to the Islamist Fronts: it doesn't confront them; it doesn't argue with them; it just goes around the unhappy nodes and beyond to put its little bit of heaven on the World Wide Web.
This one above by artist Ibrahim Tatlises, a Turkish artist of Arab and Kurdish descent--has some features in the the look-alike penguins with their big dance-alike chorus numbers that may echo Islamic design tenets, but the work departs through love, humor, and technology.
Wise men know every departure embarks.
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Spy Factory - Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4BItquziNI
Spy Factory - Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Fw1L_n-ZQ&NR=1
Spy Factory - Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJR4tdXKil8&feature=related
Spy Factory - Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9nGHqbEbI0&NR=1
Spy Factory - Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOSnmLY3O3w&feature=related
Spy Factory - Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yiRt5iqtk&feature=related
Posted on YouTube by "doobsta", February 4, 2009.
NOVA "The Spy Factory" Web Site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/
Produced by NOVA, the above videos repeat what we have long known about "The Long War": it has been always a war for detectives and poets who have to approach their work from two vectors: untangle skeins of personal and private relationships; become adept at listening to Islam in the way that Islam listens to itself, and more specifically in the ways that Islamists have fashioned for themselves an alternative existence to modernity by way of mind and reversion to a foundation text.
The videos emphasize the operational nuts and bolts that dropped between an ill-coordinated relationship involving the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and they tackle the mammoth job of both gathering communications, shades of Orwell, and ferreting out what to listen to closely, but now and then, as you watch (and are introduced to western bureaucratic and technology driven operations), you'll pick up on the basics involved in driving--truly, wheels, brakes, and accelerators--on the other side of the street.
What you won't have: an internal cultural x cross-cultural decoder.
Only humans have that--and, generally speaking, it's their own culture they decode.
As the narrator notes in Part 6 of the "Spy Factor", "When it comes to human conversations, technology is of little help"--at least as regards comprehending their import.
Engineers elaborate where poets distill, compress, and amplify.
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Somalia is one of the world's biggest refugee producing countries. UNHCR provides protection and assistance to some half a million Somali refugees in nearby countries, including Kenya (292,194), Yemen (142,394), Ethiopia (40,439), Uganda (8,889) Djibouti (8,741), Eritrea (4,636) and Tanzania (1,527). We are also coordinating protection and shelter activities for the 1.3 million displaced in Somalia [1]
“I have never lived by myself before. I am worried, what will I feed my daughters.” With tearful eyes, she added, “but I am more worried about my family. I don’t know if they are alive or dead. I just want to know what has happened to my family.” [2]
While Somalia's rebel uber-Islamists continue to fight the government's now incumbent Islamists, Somalis continue to find the middle path between bullets and decamp Mogadishu for the camps on its fringe and elsewhere.
The residents of Swat Valley and surrounds in Pakistan would seem to be dodging another sort of monster: an army providing a fine demonstration of its "heavy metal" and conventional war fighting skills, which efforts may well sanitize the region primarily by driving out or killing most of its inhabitants.
Will Pakistan's War on the Taliban turn out a Big Show?
It may if the military and the residents of Swat Valley (and surrounds) put less effort into resettlement and reconstruction than they have migration and war.
In terms of Pakistan's Islamic Small War, military operations will have done little to alter the baseline insurgent tactics revolving around assassination, campaigns of intimidation, and roadside and suicide bombing; however, in relation to who may have been killed or captured in the latest effort, Al Qaeda and the Taliban may be at least temporarily de-energized as regards their expression through violence.
Life--development, modernity, progress--goes on around the Islamic Small Wars.
This is one chink in the cancer metaphor often hauled out to describe the Islamist Front: whether the displacement through warfare of 1.25 million Somalis or an approximately 1 million Pakistanis, millions of others in Somalia and Pakistan and billions of others around the world simply go on about the business of living in remarkably different circumstances and under a most colorful umbrella of varying beliefs about the divine and philosophies about living as brave good men and women.
Presidents Zardari and Sheikh Ahmed should be working furiously on security force recruitment and deployment for current battle and near-future policing, and they should be devising reconstruction and repopulation plans with appropriate defense elements and systems as they go.
"War without end" may have an oscillating existence in Islamic philosophy, and to the effect that where westerners would say "enough", Islamists would seem to want to say "now or later", but even so, the want of peace for all may become unexpectedly primary.
The woman says, "I just want to know what has happened to my family."
Oh, Islamist, tell her what you have done with her family.
1. UNHCR. "Escalating violence displaces Somalis." Via Alertnet, May 26, 2009: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/UNHCR/7446ac6f76968e21b8606567c67e88f1.htm
2. Oxfam GB - UK. "Pakistan's displaced people: one woman's story." Via AlertNet, May 26, 2009: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/220803/8d7e92d49aebf2f930e34e3504adda3b.htm
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"When we're not advancing, we are retreating. And right now we are not spreading, we are not achieving our goals," the Brotherhood's second-in-command, Mohamed Habib, said in an interview. [1]
No one likes being really unpopular, not even Islamists, and this month has been a hard one.
Despite the continued fighting in Somalia, the government led by President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed seems to want to govern in other than theocratic fashion and for purposes other than war.
In Pakistan, also fighting, the Taliban have become the trigger that brought down the roof by will of the state's army and put one million people out of their homes. Spin it every which way, the Islamists succeeded in doing what no army of conquest in the world ever has--i.e., evicting the indigenous residents of Swat Valley and surrounds from their homes.
Even in Syria, it seems possible that doves want to fly:
A statement from Hamas said that Lavrov told the group that Russia was still trying to convene a Middle East peace conference and that Moscow hoped the Palestinians, split between Hamas and the Fatah faction of President Mahmoud Abbas, would be represented by one delegation.
Moscow had hoped to convene the meeting last year. Both Israel and Hamas were cool to the idea, in Hamas's case partly because the Palestinians would have been represented by Abbas. [2]
Well, it all may be a lull, a small break from fiery rhetoric and sword waving and plans for the annihilation of Israel, but it sure reads like reality.
For comfort, I think cultural affiliation greater than religious binders and piety; I think religions greater in their comparative visions than the people who comprise them. Few Christians, Jews, and Muslims--none--live according to their foundation texts as laid out in their time: consciousness and the passage of time forbid it; goodness forbids it too, or we should never reach for a modern appliance or medicine or . . . political accommodation.
1. Trofimov, Yaroslav. "Muslim Brotherhood Falters as Egypt Outflanks Islamists." The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2009: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225195098016929.html
2. World News. "Muslim nations link better ties with Israel to peace." May 25, 2009: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre54o2zi-us-muslims-israel/
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Unsworth, Tessa. "Somali displaced flee violence." Reuters, May 25, 2009: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=105154&videoChannel=1
Women may do only so much.
The men want to fight, especially 62-year-old Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who has been leading the al-Shabaab militia in its fight against the newly installed government of Presdient Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
One may see what good effects come from continuing armed struggle in the name of God: 60,000 more Somalis made uncomfortable enough in Mogadishu to flee their homes for camps plainly unprepared for the weather.
At an allegorical level, the main theme is the conflicting impulses towards civilization (live by rules, peacefully and in harmony), and towards the will to power. Other themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of the story. [1]
Wikipedia's description proves apt: there is the countryside of latent rural elegance, complete with folk ways and seaports, and if rough, then so by its own medieval organization and an impoverishment driven in no small part by nature herself, and there arrive "the youth" bound to despoil its people and its treasures, such as they may be, while making themselves less the army of God and more the hosts of death and destruction.
In Golding's book, the navy arrives with its forthright officers to return the children to order.
For Somalia, there is mostly talk: my talk, American talk, UN talk, European talk, NGO talk, academic talk, journalists's talk.
However, there is President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a young officer arrived by cunning to spare Somalia its deepening misery, and as a once perhaps uncompromising Islamist himself, he and his troops seem to be taking an object lesson in the intractability of an old man and his divisions of young ones bound for ignominious glory.
1. Wikipedia. "Lord of the Flies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
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"We were surprised to see men in government uniforms fighting in Bakara. They have recaptured four police stations between here and the palace, and they are advancing further." [1]
Government uniforms.
Those are Islamist government uniforms, and they're on men fighting an Islamist insurgency spun into motion as Somalia's latest president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, sought in the shadows of defeat by the previous government the coalition and partnerships suited to a return to power.
Somalia's story to this day tells the difficulty of reestablishing government -- any form of government -- out of the tangles of political anarchy.
Somalia has weathered more than 18 years of protracted warfare and lawlessness between immense egos and desparate ones. Depending through whose eyes one might see it, it has become a dismal playground for the worst of the worst of the world: criminals who both raid its waters and dump toxics on its lands and seas; pirates, whose work needs no further introduction; the varied personalities of the Islamist Front, including those whose relevance or personal importance and self-concept lays most with the soul of a Kalashnikov decorated, conveniently, by a few verses of the Qur'an for cover; and a small (not so small) industry of NGO's, interlopers with bandaids and food who would seem often to run risks for those who would just as soon kidnap or shoot them or both.
Mogadishu has been turned into an urban shell.
About one million Somalis remain "internally displaced" and another quarter-million may be camping out in Kenya.
The count of the dead caught between fighters and of those who have died fleeing the country by land and sea . . . I don't know.
However, as bad as the effects of 18 years of fighting have been, one might suggest that if Somalia were the World Capital of Peace, it would face equally serious challenges from nature herself. A modern mind cognizant of "carrying capacity" and ecology and so many related concepts could design a well functioning society out of the rubble, but such would seem left to Islamist philosophy, one way or the other, and Islamist militia to do it.
One hopes Sheikh Ahmed's government will prevail and come to administer in light of the full suite of demands of the country -- literary, its lands and seas -- and its people.
President Ahmed's Administration should know what armed militants have been most avoiding for terror of another kind.
1. Sheikh, Abdi and Abdi Guled. "Fighting kills at least 15 in Somali capital." AlertNet, May 22, 2009: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LM061305.htm
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Source: Woolridge, Mike. "Funds to Boost Somalia Security." BBC News, April 23, 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8013712.stm
For a look back and comparison of condition and themes, this from the International Crisis Group (ICG) might be helpful: "Counter-Terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds?" Africa Report No. 95, July 11, 2005: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3555.
The ICG report came out prior to the installation of former Somali President Yusuf's administration and the sweeping of the Islamic Courts Union from power by the Ethiopian Army. One sentence may signal how Somalis experienced American meddling at that point: " Few Somalis believe there are terrorists in their country, and many regard the American-led war on terrorism as an assault on Islam."
Fast-forward about two years:
The formation of the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) on September 12 brought together Islamist chiefs, former senior TFG leaders and diaspora representatives. The ARS is Islamist-dominated, with ICU leader Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed its chairman, and with ICU members or diaspora sympathizers in all strategic posts. The ARS aims to unify the armed opposition, claiming its first direct responsibility for an attack on a Mogadishu police station last month (Soomaalinews.com, September 30). Yet, the long-running violence preceding that attack clearly indicates that they are only one of many factions. There are notable absences in the ARS leadership, especially the failure to include leaders of the radical Shabaab militia.
Source: Irving, Sydney. "Splits Developing in Somali Insurgency." Terrorism Focus 4:32, The Jamestown Foundation, October 10, 2007: http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4445
That "failure to include leaders of the radical Shabaab militia" would seem to have proven no failure at all but rather a part of the vision plan held in President Ahmed's head as he went about building a coalition capable of obtaining a governing position in Mogadishu. In effect, Ahmed's efforts have gotten former President Yusuf to quit his job (around December 2008), the Ethiopian Army to pull its forces back to its borders (although reports or rumors of presence abound), and al-Shabaab to stand as a distinct renegade force.
That's pretty good chess, and on top of it, President Ahmed's would seem to be producing international backing and funding for the military defeat of al-Shabaab.
We will soon see if the new government can find the insurgents and IED's better than the old one; in that it has come out of that same struggle, it well may do that.
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