EU Referendum

Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts

Somaliland[i-Somaliland]The New York Times has an interesting story in today's paper. It is not completely unknown to those who follow such matters but neither is it written about particularly often in the media.

Jeffrey Gettleman contrasts Somalia, which has been a bloody mess (I use those words advisedly) for many a long decade and continues to be that with the possibility of African Union troops moving into Mogadishu to make it even worse help keep the current government in place with Somaliland, an area in the north-west of the country that claimed its independence in 1991 whent the most recent cycle of violence began.

Mr Gettleman describes the place as being stable and peaceful with a number of useful reforms introduced by the government of Somaliland. But he is puzzled. How can this be. After all, this area was traditionally one of the poorest in Somalia.

Furthermore, the country has not been recognized and has received next to no aid from the West, let alone the tranzis, who tend to be rather sniffy about break-away parts of African countries.

There are various problems in Somaliland, as the article points out, but compared to its neighbours it is doing very well.

Mr Gettleman is bemused:

In 1991, as Somalia’s government disintegrated and clan fighting in the south spun out of control, Somaliland, traditionally one of the poorest parts of Somalia, claimed its independence. But no country acknowledges it as a separate state and very few even contribute aid — which makes Somaliland’s success all the more intriguing.

Its leaders, with no Western experts at their elbow, have devised a political system that minimizes clan rivalries while carving out a special role for clan elders, the traditional pillars of Somali society. They have demobilized thousands of the young gunmen who still plague Somalia and melded them into a national army. They have even held three rounds of multiparty elections, no small feat in a region, the Horn of Africa, where multiparty democracy is mostly a rumor. Somalia, for one, has not had free elections since the 1960s.

Hmmm, I wonder if there is a lesson to be learnt here.

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AIR+-+AC-130+044[i-AIR+-+AC-130+044]It is interesting to see how The Daily Telegraph – so jealous to protect its own property – displays no compunction about nicking from the USAF a page-wide photograph of an AC-130 to illustrate its Somali story, and publishing it in its newspaper without even the hint of an acknowledgement.

But the pièce de resistance from today’s newspaper (print edition) is an "analysis" from David Blair, the "diplomatic correspondent", who writes:

An AC-130 Spectre gunship carried out the strike. This large aircraft, modelled on the Hercules cargo plane, is stuffed with cannon and machine-guns. The AC-130 is designed to saturate a large area with gunfire, hitting every square yard in the target zone with multiple rounds.

So this was the very opposite of a surgical strike. Anyone in the path of the gunship, which departed from the US military base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, would have been killed.

To give it its due, the newspaper does allow comments on the online edition of its story, and the first two up (yesterday, just after midday) read thus:

Mr Blair is factually incorrect; Spectres are quite capable of 'surgical' strikes technically - check out the AC-130's capabilities via google or wikipedia if you doubt that - but we have no way of knowing yet the precise nature of these missions. Mr Blair is welcome to accuse America of an 'indiscriminate' approach but should understand that this makes him an 'indiscrimnate' journalist whose assertions are unsupported by fact.

Posted by michael schrage mit security studies program on January 9, 2007 1:50 PM

and…

This sentence makes no sense. "So this was the very opposite of a surgical strike. Anyone in the path of the gunship, which departed from the US military base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, would have been killed."

The gunship was not shooting from the moment of takeoff. Instead it flew to the target area, located its target and then dealt with it. The AC 130 is a very precise weapon. Its 40 mm cannons can place a shell within two feet of its target. How is that not surgical? This was not a recreation of Bomber Harris.

Posted by Matt on January 9, 2007 1:48 PM

Following through on one of the main defence websites, one also reads:

The AC-130H Spectre gunship's primary missions are close air support, air interdiction and armed reconnaissance. Other missions include perimeter and point defense, escort, landing, drop and extraction zone support, forward air control, limited command and control, and combat search and rescue.

These heavily armed aircraft incorporate side-firing weapons integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation and fire control systems to provide surgical firepower or area saturation during extended periods, at night and in adverse weather.

That latter phrasing - "surgical firepower or area saturation" comes straight from the official USAF website.

And you don't have to take this account as gospel. You can read any number of accounts of how an AC130 has intervened in a combat situation, and how close it can work to friendly forces. You can talk, as I have done, to the pilots, and you can look at the multi-million dollar targeting systems. This, after all, is one of the most expensive aircraft on the US inventory, the bulk of the cost made up from the hugely sophisticated targeting systems.

The adverse comments on its own website came in more than sufficient time for the paper to have pulled a highly innaccurate - to say nothing of libellous - piece from its print copy, but it was not to be. Once again, The Telegraph scored an own goal. It needs to raise its game. The low grade crap it is producing these days would not even pass muster in a comic.

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Ban+and+Kofi[i-Ban+and+Kofi]On the day the government forces in Somalia, backed by Ethiopia, ousted the Islamists from Mogadishu, the Daily Telegraph published a pontificating leader, entitled "The world must not ignore the Horn of Africa".

As the continuing catastrophe of the Horn of Africa means large numbers of migrants moving across the world, not ignoring the place and its problems could be described as rational self-interest. That is not how it was described by the leader writer of that esteemed newspaper. Instead, we had a good deal of waffle about how terrible things are in Somalia and how the government was unlikely to establish order, backed as it was by another country.

There was a reference to the American debacle with its Operation Restore Hope 14 years ago and a good deal of hand-wringing. The international community, according to the argument had not come up with a viable solution. Somebody, I suspect, had not looked at the map of the area or read even superficially about its history.

Curiously enough, several of the commentators insisted that the Islamic Courts were actually rather a good idea as they had imposed law and order, albeit Sharia law and order. One suspects, none of those people would like to live under the usually corrupt and unspeakably cruel Sharia law and order, but, hey, it’s good enough for those Africans.

What was the Telegraph's solution? Well, I expect, you have guessed it even if you did not read it at the time:

However, as argued above, their intervention may just as well leave a gaping power vacuum as create a platform for power-sharing talks. If the Somalis are to be rescued from the horrors of continuing anarchy, a neutral peacekeeping force will have to be deployed. For that, a UN mandate is required. The incoming Korean Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, should make Somalia the priority of his first months in office.

Nobody would pretend that restoring order in such a poverty-stricken, clan-based society will be anything but fiendishly difficult. But the identification of Somalia by Osama bin Laden as a potential launching-pad for terrorism precludes leaving it to its own factional devices. American intervention, both in the 1990s and more recently in support of business-backed militias challenging the Islamic courts in Mogadishu, soon proved counterproductive.

The same fate will befall the Ethiopian coup de main unless a UN-mandated force can rapidly be deployed. Even then, the chances of a political solution, perhaps between a reconstituted TFG and moderate elements in the courts, will remain slim. But it is well worth the try, and not merely in the interests of the region.

Fast forward several days and a new year, and what do we find? As my colleague has already pointed out, even more hand-wringing and calls for Ban Ki-moon to face up to the first great challenge: accusations of child rape and abuse by UN troops in southern Sudan. This is not Darfur we are talking about but the previous civil war with a great deal of atrocity on the part of government troops and militias directed against Christians and animists.

What surprised me this morning, if surprise is quite the right word in the circumstances of the new, improved Telegraph newspapers, was that they actually thought this was news.

It's not as if a number of blogs (and newspapers in the United States) have not written about UN abuses across the globe; it’s not as if Claudia Rossett had not conducted a dogged investigation into these many abuses. Do our journalists really believe that with the departure of that great and good man (according to most of them) Kofi Annan (father of Kojo and brother of Kobina) would miraculously change everything immediately?

To start with, as Claudia Rossett points out, Ban Ki-moon’s first job is to clear up the mess left behind by the sainted Kofi, unfortunately with the staff that was there under the latter and are, therefore, unlikely to want to do too much digging or too much clearing up. You never know what might crawl out of the woodwork. As for that Rossett woman … Just make sure she never gets a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism.

Secondly, there is a basic misunderstanding at the heart of the Telegraph’s analysis:

The reason that the UN so often behaves badly is, paradoxically, because so many people wish it well. Because the organisation embodies the loftiest of ideals – peace among nations – it tends to receive the automatic benefit of the doubt. We are so fond of the theoretical UN that we rarely drag our gaze down to the actual one. The UN has therefore fallen out of the habit of having to explain itself and, in consequence, become flabby, immobilist and often sleazy.

The reason, dear journalists, the UN behaves almost always badly is because its structure is in clear contradiction to its supposed principles and always has been.

Let me reiterate, just in case somebody from the MSM is reading this: the fact that the Soviet Union was made a permanent member of the Security Council from the very beginning, the fact that Ukraine and Byelorussia, republics within the USSR in the first of which an appalling though undiscussed civil war was being fought, were allowed to have seats in the General Assembly as if they were independent states, made the UN a sick joke from the very beginning.

Since then, it has gone from bad to worse, its one achievement being the Korean War, when the Soviet Union was temporarily exercising an empty chair policy. At present it consists of 191 members, most of whom would not begin to understand what democracy, freedom and human rights are.

Finally, there is the structure of the UN, which just happens to be the structure of every tranzi. I am not talking here about secretariats or assemblies but basic accountability.

The problem is not just that the UN is run by career politicians or lawyers, but that they are career politicians and lawyers who want to usurp power from national governments, particularly those elected through a democratic mandate. Neither they nor those troops who keep behaving like old-fashioned conquerors are accountable to anyone for anything.

There can be any number of inquiries but nobody is going to be put on trial (where?) or punished for misbehaviour. Most of those troops have gone home and their countries will refuse all co-operation if there is the slightest chance of blame being brought home.

The unfortunate people of those countries, meanwhile, shrug their shoulders at yet more atrocities being perpetrated on them and their children. The international community must do something. Oh wait, this is the international community in action.

COMMENT THREAD

Somalia[i-Somalia]It now looks as if Somalia is at war with Ethiopia, or not as the case may be. According to the latest from Reuters (its African reports seemingly still fairly reliable) it is Somalia's Islamists that are at war, not the government.

That in itself would be an interesting development as wars, historically, have usually been considered as affairs between (or within) nations. But, as with the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and Nato against the Taliban, the old definitions and certainties seem to be breaking down.

Whatever else, although – we are told – there may be fewer wars than in the recent past, the number breaking out and the complexity of the issues is such that keeping abreast of them is beyond the capabilities of the ordinary, intelligent lay person.

Accordingly, this Blog has a suggestion. Through general lack of interest, or whatever, we understand that the BBC programme "Top of the Pops" was recently abandoned. If the slot is still vacant, we think there is room for a new weekly programme on the same lines, this one called "Top of the Wars".

Each week we could have a run-down of the wars in progress, with scores awarded to each partly on the basis of the viewers' views and partly according to how many people had been killed the preceding week. No doubt a weighting system would have to be devised, in which – presumably – civilian deaths could score higher than those of soldiers, with an added bonus for shock value and originality. European deaths would, of course, score higher than those of locals, and British even higher, with US deaths topping the league.

TOTP[i-TOTP]Anyhow, whatever the scoring system, from it would emerge the war of the week, to become that week's "Top of the Wars". It would be the topic of conversation in the offices, factories and bars of the nation and, with the BBC's genius for marketing (using other peoples' money for its risk capital), it could line up what would become award-winning DVDs of the shows.

What better way could you imagine of bringing the entertainment value of these wars to the homes of ordinary people, generating massive royalties which can be used to fund UN peacekeeping forces - and the SecGen's pension - a certain way of prolonging the misery and maximising the kill.

Add a Nobel War Prize for the best war of the year (the Peace prize is soooo last-century, don't you think?) and we could have an annual TV bonanza along the lines of the Oscars or Eurovision song contest. And, if the War Prize was as successful as its predecessor, we could look forward to the complete cessation of hostilities throughout the world within a decade.

In the meantime, the media would be able give up its pretence that it was reporting news and integrate its war reporting with its entertainment portfolio, where much of it already belongs.

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