Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"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.
Reference
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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