Whenever Americans recall Somalia, whether considering lofty foreign policy aims or simply reflecting upon the chance encounter with the name, our minds inevitably snap back to October 3, 1993 and the tragedy that was the Battle of Mogadishu. This is a memory of eighteen U.S. soldiers lying senselessly dead and desecrated, one even decapitated, in the streets of a hostile city. Given the striking clarity with which Black Hawk Down has memorializ...
Abukar Arman is the special envoy to the United States from the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. In 1991, the ruling regime in Somalia was overthrown by a number of competing clans and political factions, and since then the country has been torn apart by violent civil war and political instability. In 2004, the TFG was established in an effort to restore peace in Somalia and lay the foundation for national unity. Despite their mandate...
...While time and again we fall into the essentialist trap, we still try to remain skeptical of our pre-conceptions, and rightly so. In our cover story (p. 6), Mark Hay brings to our attention the politico-religious situation in Somalia so that we might not relegate it to hopeless abandonment in our minds. He asks us to bring Somalia back onto our moral radars—not simply through images of Josh Hartnett in Black Hawk Down, but through a more nuanced...
...eadlines, along with speculation about all-out civil war. And the images of young, angry black men carrying guns in front of flaming roadblocks circulatinged in the media evoke memories of other hotspots like Sierra Leone and Somalia. But the Western media is getting it wrong. This is not to say that the horrific stories are untrue, or that the violence in Kenya isn’t really all that bad. But these stories are incomplete. They ignore the past dec...
Last week, the Kenyan government officially declared an “offensive military agenda,” an action that many are calling Kenya’s first war. Interestingly, this war is not with another nation, but with Al-Shabaab – an extremist militia splinter group of Al-Qaeda that has controlled large parts of Somalia for years. Accompanying this novelty of war was a familiar national holiday: Mashujaa Day. Every October 20, Mashujaa Day, or Heroes Day, cele...
...rrently in line to become Obama’s Rwanda; but we’ve been there, and we no longer do that. On Election Day alone, 140 people were killed. The Arab League’s envoy for Syria warned this week that Syria is about to become another Somalia, which would put the country into bloody civil war for decades. By now, almost two years since the uprisings, we know very well who the Free Syrian Army is, and we know very well which factions can be trusted with we...
...t in Jordan undoubtedly predicates its imminent downfall is to ignore circumstances specific to Jordan. In November, Nicholas Seeley presented a spirited argument in response to many alarmist claims. Jordan, he wrote, “is not Somalia, or Yemen: it is a middle-income country with substantial state legitimacy, large bureaucratic institutions, and a strong military apparatus…Nor is it Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, where the state has spent years establishi...
...in Libya is constructive. Some events to consider: Two day’s ago, a man’s hand was cut off for stealing a sheep and, last week, a couple accused of adultery was stoned to death. Okay, this wasn’t in Libya. It didn’t happen in Somalia, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia either. None of the usual suspects were involved. It happened in Mali. For months now, Mali has effectively been two countries (somehow this has escaped every major news outlet’s attenti...
...lf of France’s 12,000 troops devoted to global peacekeeping are employed in Africa. France possesses military bases in Djibouti, Senegal and Gabon. In the 21st century, France intervened, among others, in Cote d’Ivoire, Chad, Somalia, Libya and now Mali. In Europe, only Britain has the expertise and willingness to take on international interventions, which is also a product of its imperial past. Germany, on the other side, though the economic pow...
.... In Pakistan, the specter of the drones provides the Taliban with an effective recruitment tool without having to spend any extra effort. Resentment also runs deep in other nations subject to drone attacks, such as Yemen and Somalia. The Bush Doctrine’s grandiose ‘shock and awe’ style of intervention proved to be deeply unpopular around the world and at home, but as the United States expands its reliance on covert operations, the repercussions o...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments