It seems that the country is trying to kill itself, and such madness is totally incomprehensible to outsider.    The former president of Human Right Group, the Africa Watch, expressed that super power rivalry should have much responsibility on what is happening in Somalia right now.

In an CBS interview, she explains how General Barre, a ruthless and brutal dictator, come into power with Soviet backing.  He declared Somalia a socialist state and reinforced the clan system which he believed was good for his rulings.  He seeded mistrust among clans and divided the nations to have all clans loyal only to him.  Under his “dynasty”, thousands of opponents were brutally killed.  But still,  he gained U.S support for strategic reason, since, a former US general explained that, it was valuable for U.S to have back up asset in Africa against Soviet if they needed at that time. 

Once the cold war ended, both the Soviet Union and U.S saw no interest in Somalia and left the land without plan.  Many places declared separation and civil wars started all over the place again under the weakened transitional government.   The Africa Watch explained that, although Somalis bear the responsibility on support dictators such as Barre settled the country to the road of chaotic,  they would have get rid of him much easier and quicker if he had not received economic and military support from both Soviet Union and US government.  In the end, Somalia became the ultimate victims under the superpower rivalry. 

One of the biggest headache in handling Somalia has been the endless civil wars between clans to rival for power. Very often, as many as 12 different clans have their warlords come to power and represent their own clan to fight for the limited resources in their country.   Clans have been the largest political units among Somalia.  The number and size of clans within a clan-family varied; the average clan in the twentieth century numbered about 100,000 people. Clans controlled a given territory, essentially defined by the circuit of nomadic migration but having unspecified boundaries, so that the territories of neighboring clans tended to overlap.

There is nothing wrong with the way it was running, until the clans and warlords are equipping themselves with much destructive weapons such as AK47, artilleries, RPG, and anti-tank flyers to replace knives and archives in old days.  With killing weapons as such, even children can easily and horribly turned into killing machines in the name of protecting their own clans.   Clans rivals nowadays, unlike the good old times, have become unimaginably bloody and deadly.

Such kind of bloody and inhumanity power struggles,  are , of course, being perceived as the biggest obstacle in imposing democratic system in Somalis politics.   But it is unable to reach any progress in trying to downplay the importance of clanmanship when the general public feels hostile and uneasy to outside support.  The transitional government the west is backing received little recognition. A large among of Somalis still seems to be clinging onto different warlords of their own clans.

It is hard to be optimistic when the clan system still deeply attached to the mind of Somalis.  But after all, the people separated by clans do have hope of being a one ethnic community.  For one, their sense of security can be build by sharing the same piece of land if the people feel that they are backed and protected by a representative government who care about their benefit.  It is perhaps, the most appealing solution for a fragmented Somalia to build up a deep seed of sensing on a Somalis nationhood.  

Mohamed Farrah Aidid, mentioned in the above article which focused on the history of “Black Hawk Down”, was later killed on Mogadishu in 1996.

In 2006, conflict broke out again between an alliance of Mogadishu warlords known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) and a militia loyal to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), seeking to institute straight Sharia law in Somalia.

Social law changes, such as the forbidding of chewing khat, and even the prohibition against watching movies and football in public, were part of moves by the ICU to change behaviours and impose strict social morals. Several hundred people, mostly civilians caught in the crossfire, died during this conflict. Mogadishu residents described it as the worst fighting in more than a decade. Suspect was that the CIA in American funded the ARPCT with arms in an effort to prevent the Islamic Courts Union from gaining power, but the US never officially admits that.

By early June 2006 the Islamic Militia had control of Mogadishu. The remaining A.R.P.C.T. forces fled into Ethiopia border. The Ethiopian border has now become a place of refuge for many Somalis. The Transitional Government backed by Ethiopia later claimed back Mogadishu on 28 December 2006. Yet up to now, the Transitional Federal Government and its Ethiopian allies still face frequent attacks from an Islamic insurgency.
In order words, Somalia has had no effective national government since 1991. The internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government, controls only parts of Southern Somalia and is not recognized by most Somalis. Many other small political organisations exist, some clan-based, others seeking a Somalia free from clan-based politics. Many of them have come into existence since the civil war.

Endless civil war between clans and warlord has made it hard, almost impossible, for the international communities to impose order with the country. The political situation therefore still remains highly unstable, and unlikely to be resolved any soon.

The only famous film in history which has a background on Somalia is Black Hawk Down. It was based on true event happened in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993.

Mohamed Farrah Aidid, one of the warlord in Mogadishu started to attack peacekeeping force within the country and seized all food aid which was intended to distribute to Somalia who were suffering from famine. He openly declared that “hunger is the biggest weapon”, “white people should gets out of Africa problems” and “guns is our way of negotiation”.

The Battle of Black Sea (The Day of the Rangers) was about 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market in the heart of the city of Mogadishu. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of Aidid and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, the miscalculation and misinformation among the US had caused their entire team being pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city. Thousands of heavily armed Somalis surrounded American rangers who fought for their lives. Eighteen soldiers were dead and more than seventy badly injured.

The images of Somali mob abusing American corpses shown on CNN and Somalis media, which bodies of dead US soldier being dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu, are among the most disturbing and horrible in US history. As Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, puts it, “such images made all the worse by the good intentions that prompted our intervention”.

There were no American reporters in Mogadishu on the day of the battle, and after a week or so of frenzied attention, the world events soon summoned journalists elsewhere. It is a history that the American would preferred to forget together with Somalia. The Battle of the Black Sea was perceived by the government as a failure. President Clinton accomplished what he had intended to slammed the door on the Somalis episode. “In Washington a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia”, said Bowden.

Along with American, the larger world seemed to have forgotten Somalia since then. “The great ship of international goodwill has sailed” as Bowden puts it. The war has, not only discouraged the invincible American army to jump off Africa’s affair, it also aborted a hopeful and unprecedented UN effort to salvage a nation so lost in anarchy and civil war that millions of its people were starving.

Without natural resources, strategic advantage, or even potentially lucrative markets for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and rebuilding. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the international muscle. They have been effectively written off the map of globalization and modernization.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884, the scramble for Africa started the long and bloody process of the imperial partition of Somali lands.  Somalia was divided into two and became the British and Italian colony.

The independence of the British Somaliland proclaimed on 26 June 1960 and unification with the former Italian Somaliland took place 5 days later.  Now most of the Somali clans were independent and the country of Somalia was formed, albeit within boundaries drawn up by Italy and Britain. 

However inter-tribal rivalry persisted with many clans claiming to have been forced into the state of Somalia.  It has engaged a lot of wars with its neighbor including Ethiopia and Kenya to liberate and unite the Somali lands that had been divided and subjugated under colonialism.  

The most famous attack on Ethiopia was later called The Ogaden War, which was seem unlawful by the international communities and backed the communist Ethiopia.   The Somali Civil War finally broke out when its government became increasingly totalitarian and there were constant tribal wars and government resistance movements encouraged by Ethiopia sprang up across the country.  

The civil war disrupted agriculture and food distribution in southern Somalia.  The basis of most of the conflicts was clan allegiances and competition for resources between the warring clans. This is how the bloody story of Somalia begins, but it is not where it ends.  

For my last post I had intended to write about something else, but I read this story and immediately wanted to share it.

Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of the Darfur conflict. On this occasion, a remarkable petition, consisting of over 30,000 handwritten signatures and testimonies from Darfuri refugees, will be submitted to Gordon Brown in Downing street.

“‘Your excellency, prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown,’ one entry from a 13-year-old begins. ‘With best greetings. Life in the refugee camps is difficult because the area is desert and there are a lot of desert storms.’ He tells Brown that ‘the parents in the camp are always in a panic’, and ‘if the women venture out to gather firewood they are raped by the locals’. A young woman describes what happened when the Janjaweed attacked her village: ‘When they ran out of ammunition, they burned people and killed them with knives.’

“Eyewitness accounts of terrible violence are delivered with bald simplicity between appeals, which sound more bewildered than enraged. ‘Why does the government still ask for more time which gives them a chance to kill more people while the UN has not made a move yet? Why is the international community still keeping quiet, although the Darfur disaster is the worst human disaster? Does the international community support what is going on? Do they agree with Omar Bashir that blacks are worthless? Why have they not done anything yet?’”

The idea for the petition came from aid worker Anna Schmitt, when she was asked by camp refugees how she would get her political leaders to listen to her. While petitions are normal behavior in the west, Schmitt says in Africa, it is unusual, even absurd.

“It needs to be stressed, this is just not something that happens in this culture. For us it’s no big deal. We do petitions all the time. But for them, it was extraordinary. When I went back, I’d say to them, are you sure? Do you realise the risk? But they said, if we need to die, we might as well die. We’re in an open-air prison as it is. They’re in their fifth year of this now. I think they just realised that unless they spoke out, the perpetrators were going to keep going.”

And so camp elders had distributed notebooks to educated persons within the camps, “and one by one illiterate refugees had dictated their personal experiences, and stated their political appeals, signing their testimonies with a thumb print.” Children’s entries are illustrated with drawings.

The refugees are clear about what they want.

“We, the mothers, want the UN peacekeepers to enter Darfur immediately.” In another signatory’s words, “We want the UN forces to disarm the Janjaweed and end ethnic cleansing, rape, random killing.” One entry reads simply, “We are in such a sorry state. We want them to secure our country, and end the fighting.”

Discretion has been critical in facilitating this remarkable petition, which is why Schmitt has been cagey in divulging logistical details.

“If this came to the ears of the Sudanese government,” she said, “And they knew which camps had signed, it would be easy for them to retaliate with bombs. And if the government in Chad or Sudan thought the humanitarians were helping with an action like this, they could close their programmes down.”

The ongoing 12th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Ghana has placed hunger and food as its top priority. Rising food prices over the past months and the subsequent riots breaking out from Africa to Asia, led UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to state that UNCTAD “could not have come at a more crucial time.”

“Ghanaian President John Kufuor, whose country is among the worst affected West African countries by rising food prices, expressed the hope that the conference would allow developing countries to strengthen economic cooperation and trade, and increase pressure on rich countries to end agricultural subsidies which worsened poverty in Africa.”

In fact, most of the 3000 delegates from 193 countries attending the conference believe that cooperation among countries in efforts to increase aid for agriculture and abolish rich-nation subsidies is of vital importance to finding a long term solution to the food price crisis.

According to UNCTAD’s secretary general Supachai Panitchpakdi, “A disproportionate amount of aid had been spent on governance initiatives in the developing world in recent decades while agriculture had been neglected.”

Although there have been many calls for increasing food production and developing agriculture, there are many obstacles to this, particularly in Africa. These include a lack of government investment and a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation and access to markets.

Said Lawrence Haddad, an economist and director of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies, “Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren’t connected to markets. They find there are no chilling plants for milk and no grinding mills for coffee.”

Speaking Tuesday at a London summit on the global food crisis, the UN World Food Program’s executive director Josette Sheeran said, “a ’silent tsunami’ of hunger is sweeping the world’s most desperate nations”. According to Sheeran, African governments would need to allocate at least 10 per cent of their future budgets to agriculture.

Ghana, Kenya and Uganda have been singled out as countries doing well to meet the millennium development goals. There are worries however, that the global food crisis will derail this development, and make it even more difficult for African countries to meet the necessary targets.

Their countries sit side by side in Southern Africa. Their Presidents enjoy a close political relationship and ideology, yet in their own lands and within the African continent and around the world Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa are increasingly being seen as relics of Africa’s liberation struggle.

It’s ironic that two close political friends should have such opposite views on how to end their legacies as presidents.  Mbeki will step down in 2009 in line with a constitution that only allows him two terms of office, while Mugabe, who led his country to independence 28 years ago, desperately clings to office, despite an election result that seems to favour the opposition party.

However today’s Daily Telegraph reports that Mugabe is planning to step down from power within 18 months if he wins the bitterly contested election. Long-time ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa is thought to be his eventual successor.

Mugabe’s foibles are well documented. While ranting against Britain wearing expensive suits tailored in London and his wife known for extravagant European shopping trips, Mugabe has turned a once prosperous agricultural nation to one of the poorest in Africa and the world.

Once viewed as southern Africa’s bread basket, Zimbabwe’s economy is now in ruins with a staggering inflation rate of 165,000 per cent and 80 per cent unemployment and millions living below the poverty line. That’s in addition to his genocide of 20,000 Ndebele people and decreasing the life expectancy for a man from 63 years old in 1990 to 37.

In the eyes of many, both men have fallen short of their mandates. In Mbeki’s case, Nelson Mandela, his predecessor was always going to be a hard act to follow as pointed out in recent editorials in the British press.

Writing about Mbeki, in England’s The Observer newspaper, journalist Chris McCreal said: “He views politics and much else besides through a racial prism in a way that Nelson Mandela does not. Rainbow nation man had given way to Zebra man.” He goes on to say: “To Mbeki, the pipe-smoking, urbane intellectual, the dignity of an African leader is more important than the indignity of Africans scrabbling on rubbish dumps for food, dying in hospitals for want of drugs, or forced to crawl through barbed wire into a foreign country to find work.”

England’s Daily Telegraph added: “South Africa, the country best placed to put pressure on Mugabe, is unfortunately reluctant to do so. Thabo Mbeki is no Nelson Mandela, willing to stand up for democracy: the South African president appears content to let Mugabe remain in power.”

Strong criticism of Mbeki also appeared in the The Washington Post, under the headline of “Rogue Democrat.” The editorial commented: “The government of President Thabo Mbeki has consistently allied itself with the world’s rogue states and against the Western democracies. It has defended Iran’s nuclear program and resisted sanctions against it; shielded Sudan and Burma from the sort of pressure the United Nations once directed at the apartheid regime … Now Mr Mbeki’s perverse and immoral policy is reaching its nadir – in South Africa’s neighbour, Zimbabwe.”

Unfortunately for Mbeki’s his conduct is also being slammed by the South African media. Last week South African columnist Lucky Mazibuko delivered a stinging attack in The Sowetan saying: “Our outgoing president, Thabo Mbeki, has set the lowest standards for our country and our people, and yet he is dismally failing to meet them. I think the less of a public role he plays in the few months left in office, the better for all of us. President Mbeki has become a menace to our society, he is like a fly in the pudding.”

South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper added this criticism: “But Mbeki has again done himself no favours. African peace-keeping is a very important matter, which needs to be addressed. By concentrating on it at a moment of supreme crisis in Zimbabwe -and arguing against all logic that Zimbabwe poses no threat to Southern Africa’s peace and stability – he has completed his isolation from almost every other world player on the issue.”

In terms of news versus editorial opinion pieces, The Times newspaper in South Africa reported that the African National Congress (ANC) has decided to sidestep President Mbeki and deal directly with President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The ANC strongly questioned Mbeki’s impartiality as an “honest” mediator following MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s request to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) for Mbeki to be replaced as the regional body’s mediator. The ANC press statement on the issue appeared to question Mbeki’s impartiality, saying he “needs to observe a neutral position in this matter”.

Significantly last week, members of the South African cabinet broke ranks and issued a statement condemning Harare’s withholding of presidential election results. In an unusual step, government spokesman Themba Maseko, described the situation as “dire”.

Adding to the comments about Mbeki’s ineffectiveness, ANC spokesperson Jesse Duarte said: “It (the ANC) is concerned with the state of crisis that Zimbabwe is in and perceives this as negative for the entire SADC region.”

Since declaring that there was “no crisis” in Zimbabwe, Mbeki’s “honest” mediation was in the spotlight again last week following news that as chairman of the UN Security Council meeting, he had resisted pressure from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Western powers to discuss Zimbabwe. This action earned a rebuke from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon who expressed “deep concern” over the delay in publishing Zimbabwe’s election results and noted that “the credibility of the democratic process in Africa could be at stake here.” Mbeki was later forced to include Zimbabwe in discussions by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

While Mbeki can perhaps shrug off overseas criticism, at home in South Africa the situation has enabled his rival Jacob Zuma to improve his international image. Zuma is due to go on trial for corruption and as the frontrunner in next year’s South African presidential elections, local and international communities are concerned about the future direction of the country. Zuma has already ousted Mbeki as the leader of the ruling African National Congress.

Last week it took the actions of a South African trade union and a human rights group, not the African Unity or United Nations, to help prevent a potential electoral genocide in Zimbabwe.  Both Zimbabwean and South African presidents Robert Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki have been embarrassed on the world stage by this incident.

Three days after the disputed Zimbabwe election with a victory claimed by the Movement for Democratic Change, Mugabe ordered weapons from China.  Several Western countries and the European Union have banned arms shipments to Zimbabwe.

On Friday, Mugabe’s arms ship was left all at sea after South Africa’s Durban dockyard workers refused to allow the vessel into port to unload its cargo.

The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) General Secretary Randall Howard said it would have been “grossly irresponsible” to allow the cargo through. “The South African government cannot be seen as propping up a military regime,” he added.

The South African newspaper Mail and Guardian reported the An Yue Jiang vessel is carrying three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition along with 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and several thousand mortar rounds.

In addition, a court order banning transportation of the ship’s cargo across South Africa was obtained by the International Action Network on Small Arms which argued that it had been destined to “suppress the Zimbabwean people.”

The group’s African co-coordinator, Joseph Dube said: “We welcome the court’s decision and the solidarity shown by the South African transportation unions. South Africa has a chance to show the world that arms atrocities can be stopped by responsible governments.”

After being refused entry, the An Yue Jiang vessel was forced to anchor at sea, 11 miles from port.  It was then thought it would dock and unload at Maputo in Mozambique. 

However, Mozambique’s Transport and communications minister Paulo Zucula said: “We know that it registered its next destination as Luanda (the Angolan capital) because we wouldn’t allow it into Mozambican waters without prior arrangements.”

Speaking from New York in a complete contrast to the mood of his country’s trade unions, South African President Thabo Mbeki supported earlier statements made by his Defence Secretary January Masilela who said the country’s National Conventional Arms Control Committee had given approval for the transit of the weapons because there was no United Nations or African Union embargo on weapons sales to Zimbabwe.

“If the buyer is the Zimbabwean sovereign government and the seller is the Chinese sovereign government, South Africa has nothing to do with that,” Masilela said.

News agency Reuters reports that Zimbabwe’s Deputy Information Minister, Bright Matonga, has hit out at the ban saying that how the weapons were to be used “is none of anybody’s business.”

In a short faxed statement to Reuters, the Chinese foreign ministry said: “China and Zimbabwe maintain normal trade relations. What we want to stress is China has always had a prudent and responsible attitude towards arms sales, and one of the most important principles is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”

The issue of supplying arms to Zimbabwe is likely to further fuel world opinion against China’s human rights records as the government has already been criticized for its role in the Darfor crisis.

Meanwhile United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is in Ghana for talks for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development where he will discuss the unfolding Zimbabwe crisis.

Many Darfur activists take the Beijing Olympics as a great chance to exert pressure on the Chinese government, but for the twelve Sudan athletes that are busy training for the Games in a shabby stadium in Khartoum, the talk of boycotting the Olympics is rather absurd. For them, it is an event to show the world that good things can happen in Sudan too.

This is a photo from African based freelancer Rob Crilly’s blog, which shows Sudan’s Olympic medal hopeful for the 800m – Abubaker Kaki Khamis – using “bits of rubble for weights”. An article from the Times described the basic training condition of these Sudan athletes and said training for the runners has to stop after the sun goes down because they don’t have floodlights. And as athletes from neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia get big sponsorship, a lot of the training gear for the Sudan athletes come from a British Charity group, according to Reuters.

Almost half of the Olympic athletes come from the Darfur region. Abubaker Kaki comes from the Misseriya tribe, where many Arab militia gathered. His roommate Ismail Ahmed Ismail is a 23-year-old coming from the Fur tribe in west Darfur which supported the rebel movement. But for them, tribes and ethnicity really doesn’t mean anything. They are running for their country, their families, and also for themselves.

“I think it is ridiculous what these people are doing (Olympic protests),” said Jamo Aden, coach of the Sudan Olympic running team, “They say they are doing it for the people of Darfur. They think it is only about war and genocide. But they don’t realize that if they damage these Games, they are going to be hurting Darfuris, running to support themselves and their families.”