Somalis leaving Minn. for jihad

Medeshi Dec 19, 2008
Somalis leaving Minn. for jihad
By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY
MINNEAPOLIS — Mohamud Ali Hassan once told the Somali grandmother who raised him that he'd become a doctor and care for her.
The Somali immigrant, who moved to the "Land of 10,000 Lakes" when he was 8, had good grades at the University of Minnesota and called Muslims to prayer at his mosque, where he also slept during the holy month of Ramadan.
But on Nov. 1, Hassan disappeared, as have a dozen other boys and young men here — two days after another young Muslim from Minnesota blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Somalia.
Hassan, 18, called his grandmother to say he was back in Somalia, where an Islamist militia is trying to take over the Horn of Africa nation. What he was doing there, he did not say.
Now the FBI is asking questions, as are members of the Somali community. The Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center denies any wrongdoing, but many here suspect that the mosque and its imam are radicalizing their youth to become jihadists in an Islamic holy war overseas or perhaps even in the United States
"They are very powerful, whoever got into his mind and got him to do this," says Hassan's grandmother Fadumo Elmi, 83. "We were forced out of our country one time. We don't want to be forced out of here."
Details of the disappearances are few, but what little is known is cause for concern, says Abdizirak Bihi, a community activist who represents six families of young men who disappeared in early November.
Among them was Bihi's nephew, Burhan Hassan, 17, a high school junior.
All were good students, had no problems with the law, Bihi says. All were raised by single mothers and spent a lot of time in the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center.
The center is the largest mosque in the Twin Cities. Bihi worries it is preaching a radical Islamic ideology to vulnerable young men.
Shirwa Ahmed, 19, who left in August with no notice to his family, was among five terrorists who blew themselves up Oct. 29 in an attack that killed 24 people in Somalia, Bihi says.
"We are wanting the government and politicians to investigate who is responsible for sending our kids and we are requesting the American government to help us to get us back our kids." Bihi says.
Other Somali immigrants worry the disappearances may foretell dangers for their adopted nation. "That kid that blew himself up in Somalia could have done it here in Minneapolis," says Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul.
Special Agent E.K. Wilson of the FBI in Minneapolis would not say whether his agency is investigating the mosque. Bihi and Elmi said the FBI has talked to them and others about the missing.
Wilson said the FBI knows that Muslims here have been going overseas to fight.
"We're aware that a number of Somali men have traveled from around the United States including Minneapolis to potentially fight overseas," Wilson said.
A lawyer for the Abubaker As-Saddique Islamic Center denied any involvement in planning or financing the men's travels or any political indoctrination.
"The mosque has taken a position that it would never take a stand on any political issues," says lawyer Mahir Sherif in San Diego. "We do not support terrorism or any kind of suicide bombing or act of violence."
He said federal authorities last month prevented the mosque's religious leader, Sheik Abdirahman Ahmed, from flying to Mecca.
Somalia has been plagued by lawlessness, terrorism and warfare since the collapse of the military government in 1991. In recent years, a radical Islamist militia that seeks to impose Islamic law captured the capital of Mogadishu, where 18 U.S. soldiers died in the infamous "Blackhawk Down" battle of 1993. Troops from Ethiopia invaded in 2006 to counter the Islamists, who have been praised by Osama bin Laden.
Yusuf Shaba, who writes about Islamic ideology and radicalism for the Warsan Times, a Somali-English monthly newspaper published in Minneapolis, says he decided to speak out about what he considers Islamic indoctrination at Minneapolis mosques because he doesn't want his sons to follow the same path he did.
Shaba, 34, joined Al Ittihad Al-Islami (Islamic Union) at age 16 and was wounded at age 19 in Somalia. Al Ittihad was Somalia's largest Islamic terrorist group in the 1990s.
Shaba says jihadists generally recruit young men from among two groups: those shunned by their families because they've turned to drugs, gangs or alcohol; and the sons of families who forbid exposure to Western culture and allow them to socialize only at the mosque.
Shaba says he and his three teenage sons attended a program two months ago at Abubaker As-Saddique Islamic Center, where a former Somali warrior sat in a circle with other young people and delivered a passionate recitation of his experiences during the Somali civil war.
Some mosques also screen videos about the war in Afghanistan and about Muslim victims of perceived injustices in such places as Nigeria and the Palestinian territories. "They give them all the grievances that Osama Bin Laden has," Shaba says. "They talk about nothing but jihad and it's the best thing that can happen to a Muslim."
When the brainwashing is done and the teachers are confident students will do anything asked of them, the teachers give them tazkia, or clearance, to get more specialized training in the United States or abroad, Shaba says.
"The people who trained us encouraged us to not get married, to sever our ties with our families, so that when the mission comes we won't worry about family."
Shaba says similar activities occur at Minnesota Da'wah Institute in St. Paul, another mosque. Sheik Mahamud Hassan, the institute's imam, says nothing like that is happening as his mosque. "It's liars," he says. "I'm not missing any members."
Elmi wrapped herself in her shawl and sobbed as she thought of Hassan in her one bedroom apartment in a Minneapolis public housing high rise. Outside, snow covered the parking lot and temperatures were below zero.
They moved to the United States in 1996, when Hassan was 8 and after his father was killed in the civil war. Hassan was obedient, but after going to the mosque, "He was completely changed."
"I thought the mosque would be a much safer place than the night clubs and bars," she said, crying. "I don't want God to curse me because I say something bad about the mosque."

Somalia and the war on terror: The third front revisited

Medeshi Dec 19, 2008

Somalia and the war on terror: The third front revisited
Matthew Blood

Exploring Somalia’s fate under the Bush administration’s war on terror, Matthew Blood argues that the US has simply taken an already brutalised people and brutalised them even more. With warlordism, criminality, and piracy ever increasing, the author ponders whether the marked anti-Western sentiment and greater radicalisation of Islamic authority in the country will lead to violent future backlash within locations in the West from disaffected Somalis.

Somalia today is approaching a cataclysm not seen since the early 1990s, and the US role has added in no small part to the misery that once again engulfs the war-weary Horn of Africa nation.
The brutal Ethiopian military occupation of Somalia that began on Christmas Eve 2006 has sustained heavy losses over the past 20 months. The conflict has strained Ethiopian resources and Addis Ababa is currently reviewing its overall strategy. What remains of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), barring a massive new foreign military intervention, teeters on the edge of collapse. In its place an already powerful Islamist insurgency is strengthening rapidly. Warlordism, criminality, and piracy are reaching new heights. All the while, the Somali population remains under siege, caught between abuses on all sides as its society literally disintegrates.
Underwriting a significant portion of the bloodshed has been a US administration engaged in expansive warfare with a preference for covert military operations. Somalia has long been of strategic interest to US policy makers. The country sits next to the strait of Bab al-Mandeb, a key oil transit waterway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean – the second closest point between Africa and the Middle East. During the Cold War the dictatorship of General Siad Barre was the long-time recipient of generous amounts of US military and economic largesse. In 1991, after years of unrest, rebellion, and protracted drought, Barre's regime collapsed into famine, war, and chaos. George H. W. Bush ordered US forces into the country a year later in support of the United Nations relief program, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu and the now-famous Black Hawk Down incident.
At the time of the US withdrawal and international disengagement, no single actor was strong enough to establish and maintain control. Somalia fractured along semi-permanent tribal lines and warlord fiefdoms that would come to define the country's social and political landscape. For more than a decade and a half, the territory was left to fester in ungoverned criminality and violence, only rarely making international headlines.
September 2001 and the wars in the Middle East brought renewed US focus to the Horn of Africa. For some time, a diverse group of Islamists, clan leaders, businesspeople, militia heads, and civic actors had been coalescing into what would in 2005 become the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a heterogeneous movement seeking to establish a semblance of law and order after years of chaos.
The courts proved to be well organised, disciplined, and effective civil administrators. They were popular with average Somalis, even the less devout, all of whom were desperate for relief from the criminal gangs and brutality that had long ruled their country. The Islamists also began to challenge the weak, faction-ridden TFG – the successor to 13 previous failed attempts at creating a central government – which had been confined to the provincial town of Baidoa, headed by President Abdullahi Yusuf, closely linked to Mogadishu's warlords.
Alarmed at the Islamic Courts' growing strength and popularity, in early 2006 the CIA began supplying significant quantities of arms and money to a coalition of secular Mogadishu warlords under the name Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). The CIA programme had been a poorly conceived attempt to hunt down the small number of al-Qaeda affiliated individuals involved in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, then thought to be hiding in Somalia. But the operation failed disastrously and, according to reports, ‘the payoffs added to an anarchic situation that led many Somalis to turn to the Islamic Courts for protection’ (Washington Post, 13 May 2007).
The Islamists struck preemptively and decisively, routing the warlords and seizing control of Mogadishu within a matter of weeks. For six months in 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts proceeded to establish security and the provision of basic social services in much of Somalia for the first time in 15 years. The peace provided by the Islamists also came with more conservative social policies and a type of sharia law. For average Somalis, however, the security of the courts brought a brief respite from their usual suffering.
The Bush administration, seeing Somalia and the Islamic Courts through the lens of its war on terror and, having botched the earlier warlord programme, began stepping up aid to long-time ally and neighboring Ethiopian autocrat Meles Zenawi. Zenawi has held power in Ethiopia since the early 1990s. During a crackdown against popular protests after fraudulent elections in 2005, Zenawi's security forces massacred nearly 200 people, injured 760 more, and arrested an additional 20,000, among them opposition leaders, foreign aid workers, and journalists. Nonetheless, since 2002, Ethiopia has received nearly US$25 million in overt US military assistance while at least 100 US military personnel currently work inside Ethiopia in advisory positions as part of what the Pentagon characterises as a ‘close working relationship’ with the Ethiopian military.
Less than two weeks before the invasion, in mid-December 2006, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer publicly declared, ‘The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, east Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals.’ The claim was dubious and he provided no evidence. Horn of Africa specialist Ken Menkhaus noted in February 2007 that the Islamic Courts ‘movement as a whole was far from an al-Qaeda front. Only three foreign al-Qaeda operatives were said by the US to be in hiding in Mogadishu, a number far lower than those suspected of residing in neighboring Kenya.’
Assistant Secretary Frazer warned of ‘a risk [that] Al Qaeda may take up bases in Somalia,’ but denied that the United States would take military action against the courts. Similarly, then-UN Ambassador John Bolton told reporters in early December 2006, ‘[t]he United States strongly believes that a sustainable solution in Somalia should be based on credible dialogue between the [TFG] and the UIC and we continue to work with our African and other partners toward that end.’
Behind the scenes, General John Abizaid, at the time US Central Command (USCENTCOM) commander, had already visited Addis Ababa to express some last minute reservations to Prime Minister Zenawi. The decision had been made, though, and ultimately Washington lent its support to the invasion.
The Ethiopian military crossed the Somali border on 24 December 2006 and later reports indicated that ‘CIA agents traveled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations’ (the London Independent, 9 February 2008). The United States provided important satellite intelligence and other battleground information from unmanned Predator drones. ‘A lot of what we taught them was used to fight that global War on Terror,’ observed a US military advisor who had trained Ethiopian soldiers now fighting in Somalia. In terms of weaponry, he noted, ‘They got what they needed.’
US Special Forces also conducted periodic operations inside Somali territory, possibly moving out of a rumored CIA base in eastern Ethiopia. The full extent and exact type of activity is not known, but reports of their movements have been confirmed by Somali officials. As TFG Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein explained to reporters in February 2008, ‘The presence of the CIA, the presence of [US] troops, is not a big issue. We like that they are here. But right now they don't have a permanent military presence. They come in and out.’
US warships moved into position off the coast of Somalia in anticipation of the invasion. Acting on intelligence from the ground, Washington ordered bombing raids targeting what it believed to be Islamic militants. US-piloted AC-130 gunships and cruise missiles have blasted Somali territory at least a half dozen times since January 2007. The first of these air raids killed what turned out to be 70 Somali goat herders whom the Pentagon had initially claimed were Islamic fighters. After several other attempts, in May 2008, the bombings finally succeeded in killing the leader of the al-Shabaab militia, Aden Hashi Ayro. The strike also demolished the surrounding homes, killing ten others and leading to anti-US protests.
The Ethiopian military captured Mogadishu before New Year's Day 2007. The most powerful army in the region devastated organized UIC forces. But the remaining militants fled and quickly melted back into the larger civilian population. As predicted, the collapse of the Islamic Courts and the subsequent Ethiopian occupation led to a relentless Iraq-style insurgency – one that has been rapidly gaining strength.
The insurgents have successfully used roadside bombs, hit-and-run attacks, and assassinations targeted at government officials to assault the TFG and its Ethiopian backers. Increasingly, they have routed Ethiopian and TFG military forces in direct confrontations, moving to capture and hold swathes of territory for extended periods of time.
Ethiopian and TFG forces, for their part, responded with a ferocious campaign to root out militants in Mogadishu and surrounding areas. The vicious counterinsurgency has seen the regular shelling of densely populated urban neighbourhoods. Distinctions between civilians and insurgents are often irrelevant to security forces that frequently prey on the Somali population. Looting, rape, torture, mutilation, and cutting the throats of victims are regular tactics of Ethiopian and TFG forces. These are the same methods the Ethiopian military has used to suppress another ongoing insurgency in the Ogaden desert. The most recent report from Amnesty International recounts episodes too horrific to quote here.
Thus, Somalis are caught in the crossfire between Ethiopian and TFG security forces, insurgents, warlords, criminals, and US gunships. The ‘more common complaint among ordinary Somalis,’ according to reporters however, ‘is that the Ethiopians are “indiscriminate” in their reprisals – and that this is why Mogadishu has been emptied of people.’
The human cost has been staggering. The forces of war and drought are rapidly converging on the Horn of Africa nation in a perfect storm against the Somali population. The civilian death toll since the invasion is fast approaching 10,000. More than a million people have fled their homes, including half of Mogadishu, and are now living in squalid, makeshift refugee camps.
The food and fuel crisis that has affected international markets has combined with the disruption of fighting, looting, inflation, and a failure of the seasonal rains to push Somalia to the absolute brink. The country now stands on the verge of famine on a scale not seen since the early 1990s when an estimated 300,000 Somalis starved to death. Recent UN estimates hold that more than 3.25 million people, nearly half the population, are currently in need of food aid. International officials have long been calling the situation the most horrific humanitarian disaster on the African continent.
As in Iraq, the war on terror in Somalia has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, sowing the increasing radicalisation and anti-Westernisation of an entire population of poor Third World people. In recent months there has been new evidence of foreign fighters inside Somalia – decidedly not the case when Jendayi Frazer declared two weeks prior to the invasion that Somalia was ‘now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals.’
While the leadership of the Islamic Courts was originally a mix of moderate and conservative Islamic actors, the insurgency no longer maintains this character. A peace agreement between the former moderate elements of the courts, now called the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, and the TFG has already concluded to no effect. The old leaders of the Courts no longer control the insurgency. Battle-hardened al-Shabaab militants, perhaps poised to succeed the Transitional Federal Government, espouse a far more radical and anti-Western Islamic ideology.
For the moment, the intervention in Somalia appears to be coming full circle. In September two Somalis in their early 20s were arrested at a German airport on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks somewhere in the West. They were released due to insufficient evidence, but German intelligence officials believe the men were arrested too early.
Somalia has indeed been a third front in the war on terror. A quiet front, but a front nonetheless. Six months after the Ethiopian invasion, Defense Department spokesperson Bryan Whitman told reporters, ‘The very nature of some of our operations, as well as the success of those operations, is often predicated on our ability to work quietly with our partners and allies.’ Now, almost two years into the occupation, few can still maintain delusions of success in the Horn of Africa. Perhaps most troubling is that the current episode must be seen against the background of the recent creation of AFRICOM and the larger militarisation of US foreign policy in Africa.
What becomes of Somalia remains to be seen. What is certain is that the US has taken a group of the world's most destitute, desperate, and brutalised people and brutalised them some more. We might expect to see angry young Somalis bringing violence to the West in the future. Whether we know it or not, we have certainly brought it to them. This is the Bush administration's legacy and it will be with us for a long time to come.

Ethiopia leaves Uganda in Somalia quagmire

Medeshi Dec 19, 2008

Ethiopia leaves Uganda in Somalia quagmire
By Rosebell Kagumire
By January 2009, many fighting Somali factions might have what they have been hoping for – the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from their country. Recently, Ethiopia announced it intends to pull out its troops by the end this month, ending a two-year occupation of the lawless Horn of African nation.

(Photo: Burundian flag is passed on to Former Force Commander as Ugandan troops and Somali security officers welcome the first Burundi battalion early 2008)
The withdraw is in line with the Djibouti Accord, agreed upon in June this year by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG )in Somalia and the opposition the Alliance for Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) better known as “The Alliance”.
The Ethiopians will only retain their troops around the border areas if all goes according to plan.
Although Ethiopia’s presence has been unpopular among Somalis who saw it as foreign occupation, the troops have held areas which would most likely by now be under the Islamist militants.
Analysts have warned that the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops will leave a vacuum which the militants might take advantage of to spread mayhem to more parts of Somalia. The Islamists already control much of the country and TFG under President Abdullahi Yusuf only controls Mogadishu and Baidoa.
Such a vacuum will no doubt have an impact on the 1,700 Burundian and 1,700 Ugandan troops on peacekeeping mission in Somalia.
The spokesperson for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) Maj. Barigye Bahoku told The Independent that they hope the African Union (AU) nations live up to their pledge of sending more troops in Somalia.
“The withdrawal of Ethiopia is based on the fact that there are adequate forces to fill the vacuum they will leave behind. Whether it’s AU or UN this must be worked on very soon,” said Barigye.
In a recent Nairobi IGAD Heads of State Summit, the leaders once again called for generation of troops and there has also been talk of UN deploying in Somalia.
“In the initial mandate we were supposed to be there for six months and the UN takes over but that didn’t happen,” said Maj. Bahoku. “We are still hoping by the time the Ethiopians start withdrawing, more troops will be on the ground.”
However the lack of logistics to fund more troops in Somalia must be overcome as soon as possible for these extra troops to deploy.
Nicolas Bwakira, the AU envoy to Somalia, said it will cost at least $200 million to increase the number of AU troops from the current 3,400 to about 8,000.
Ugandan troops have only been confined in Mogadishu where they guard the Mogadishu Airport and seaport, the K4 junction (the main access route to and from Mogadishu) and the presidential palace. The Burundians are in one station at the former Somalia national university.
Although the mission has been generally less costly in terms of troop loss with ten soldiers – one Burundian and nine Ugandans killed, the peacekeepers remain targeted by extremist groups in Somalia
As recent as last month, the Islamists staged a botched attack on AU peacekeepers base.
Dr Paddy Musana, head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Makerere University says the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops will less likely endanger Ugandans under the AMISOM.
“Uganda’s stand has been diplomacy and so far they have done a great job,” Musana said. “If they continue to tow this line of neutrality they will eventually be in good books of Somalis – even the militants.”
It’s unclear how hardliners like Al Qaeda linked Al Shabab will react to the withdrawal especially with increased TFG facing infighting.
There are worries that the current fights between President Yusuf and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein could pose yet another threat to the presence of the AMISOM. The AU Commission Chairman, Dr. Jean Ping has already warned that the AU force could also leave if government in-fighting continues.
The current troop mandate expires in February 2009. Burundi’s Defence minister Germain Nikyoyankana last week said his country will pull troops from Somalia only after studying the situation and consulting with Uganda. Musana said Uganda’s presence in Somalia is more beneficial now more than ever if it can use its new position as on the UN Security Council to bring more international attention the situation in Somalia.
However Musana warns that Uganda must not be seen to push American or western interests.
“The moment Ugandans in Somalia are seen to be outrightly in bed with US, it will not only spell doom to Ugandan soldiers in Mogadishu but also for Kampala.”
Uganda recently been on high terror alert and groups like Al Shabab have vowed to fight Uganda’s presence in their country Somalia.
Somalia has been in a state of anarchy since 1991 when dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted.
The failure of the international community to respond to the Somali situation where more than 10,000 civilians have been killed since 2007 has been manifested in the increase in piracy in Somali waters especially in the Gulf of Aden.
What the international community especially, US and UN decide to do in the face of spill over effects from the Somalia lawlessness that has made important sea routes bordering Somalia impassable is what might ultimately determine the future of AMISOM, and the peace for the people of Somalia.

Somali fighters warn Western powers

Medeshi Dec 19 , 2008
Somali fighters warn Western powers
An armed group battling Ethiopian forces in Somalia has told Al Jazeera it will take its fight beyond the country once it defeats its rivals.
"We are fighting to lift the burden of oppression and colonialism from our country ... We are defending ourselves against enemies who attacked us," Abu Mansoor, the leader of the al-Shabaab's movement, said.

(Abu Mansoor said al-Shabaab will fight "oppression" elsewhere once Ethiopian forces are defeated [AFP])
"Once we are successful with that we will fight on and finish oppression elsewhere on earth," he said.
Al-Shabaab, meaning youth, split last year from the Islamic Courts Union which controlled much of Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu, until it was pushed out by government and Ethiopian troops in 2006.
It has since retaken large areas of central and southern Somalia and is putting increased pressure of the transitional government, which exercises little control from its base in the town of Baidoa.
'Islamic rule'
In Marka, just 90km from the capital Mogadishu, Ibrahim Almaqdis, one of the fighters told Al Jazeera: "We wish to tell Bush and our opponents our real intentions.
"We will establish Islamic rule from Alaska and Chile to South Africa, Japan, Russia, the Solomon Islands and all the way to Iceland, be warned, we are coming."
Abu Mansoor said that al-Shabaab's ranks had been bolstered by foreign fighters and urged others to join, saying that a core principle of the group was that all Muslims are citizens of Somalia.
"Many have already died fighting our cause and many others are here with us," he said.
"We shall welcome any Muslim from any part of the world who wants to join us. We will allow him to wed our daughters and share our farms."
The group was created in 2001 by four Somali men who had trained in Afghanistan and is listed as a "terrorist organisation" by the United States.
Relative peace
The Islamic Courts Union brought relative peace to the Horn of Africa nation during its six months in control, enforcing strict laws and renewing hopes that the Somalia would become stable enough to allow aid agencies the freedom to operate.
However, their defeat by the Ethiopian and government forces has brought renewed violence as various anti-government forces have mounted near-daily attacks.
In Marka, Al Jazeera found people welcoming al-Shabaab and dressing their children like the fighters who have been the only people to bring some semblance of peace to
Somalia in recent years.More than one million people have been displaced by the fighting in Somalia, one third of the population rely on emergency food aid and the chaos has helped fuel kidnappings and piracy off the coast.
Source: Al Jazeera

Somalia nearing disaster

Medeshi Dec 19, 2008

Somalia nearing disaster

Jeremy Sare

Unthinkable as it may seem Somalia looks set to plunge into a wave of even greater chaos when Ethiopian and African Union troops withdraw later this month

The international community now seems resigned to Somalia’s status as the world’s most failed state yet - almost unimaginably - the country is perilously close to a wider human catastrophe.
6,500 Ethiopian and African Union troops are due to withdraw from Somalia at the end of this month. Their legacy will be a complete power vacuum which risks triggering an even fiercer civil war between the heavily armed factions riven by competing visions of extreme Islamic militancy.
The major world powers have only engaged again in the region because of a spate of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden. The possibility of unrestrained anarchy in Somalia has naturally heightened diplomatic activity on wider security issues in the Horn of Africa.
But the prospects for the Somali people look bleak from any perspective. Edward Mason of Independent Diplomat, said: “It’s a slow burn disaster largely ignored by the world’s media and governments – the result in large part of a catastrophically negligent international policy towards Somalia.”
UN resolution 1851, agreed this week, now permits any country to employ, “any means necessary” to pursue pirates on land and air. The emphasis of the international community’s response to Somalia is clearly still on force. The US could exert huge influence but since 2001 their agenda has not extended beyond what is deemed necessary action in the “war on terror”. They were strong supporters of the Ethiopian incursion into Somalia two years ago.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has tried and failed to persuade 50 countries to lead or contribute to a peacekeeping force. There were hopes Turkey might volunteer but Ankara has now refused. Their reluctance is understandable; the UN has not even sent a reconnaissance mission to fully assess the security risk.
Somalia now looks too difficult a political issue for any power to resolve. The prospects for peace are as derelict as the ‘ghost capital’ of Mogadishu.
The current Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has never exerted anything like controlling power; what little they had is dwindling fast. The dominant military force of insurgents amongst the various splinter groups in southern central Somalia is Al-Shabab (or the ‘lads’). They have overrun several towns in recent weeks, including the strategic ports of Kismayo and Merca – they are now threatening Mogadishu.
Al-Shabab adhere to an extreme interpretation of Sharia; like the former Taliban Government in Afghanistan, they wield severe punishment for anyone indulging in the ‘un-Islamic’ activities of listening to music or watching a film. One local commentator blamed the US for the irresistible ascendancy of Al-Shabab: “America has created precisely the radicalised security threat they so feared."
Somalia already has the worst famine situation in the world. World Food Programme spokesman, Peter Smerdon, based in Nairobi, said: “The figures are very substantial. There are now 3.4 million Somalis entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. This year we have supplied 260,000 tonnes of food.”
Al-Shabab’s control of the main port for aid supply, Merca, makes the supply routes of food look increasingly precarious. Smerdon said, “so far their presence has not been affected the aid programme. We are impartial. We deal with the authorities on the ground whoever they are. Security is our biggest problem. Across Somalia, 33 aid-related workers have been killed since January. It’s been a bad year.”
The Human Rights Watch report, So Much to Fear published last week, sets out in chilling detail the oppression and degradation of the people of Somalia.
The author, Chris Albin-Lackey, provided ample evidence of casual murders carried out regularly by troops from the TFG as well the Ethiopian occupiers effectively acting in a “climate of impunity”.
Sally Healy of the international analysis organisation, Chatham House, said the future was, “unpredictable and negative,” but blamed the Ethiopian intervention itself for, “generating a terrible insurgency” and fuelling the “historical enmity” between the two countries.
The threat to the lives of the main population is clear; already one million people have been displaced, another million live abroad. More than 800,000 have left the capital since last year. The Dadaab refugee camp, just over the border in Kenya, holds over 220,000 people - about the same population as Derby.
The fragile democracy of the former British Protectorate of Somaliland in the north has also been targeted. Al-Shabab set off a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in Hargeisa in October killing about 30.
Michael Walls of Somaliland Focus UK said: “It is high time western nations reconsidered their strategies and looked to support those bits of Somalia that are currently functioning. Otherwise, we risk once again losing those rare flickers of hope that have so long been extinguished as the developed world continues to blunder its way through the world's most protracted and profound 'national' political crisis.”
After the troops withdraw, a few sparks of hope may yet emanate from a new more, enlightened US presidency. Obama has a long list of international crises to unpick following eight years of Bush/Cheney unilateralism.
But not even Barack Obama, blessed with the unique presidential attributes of a constructive and collegiate view of international relations, combined with an East African heritage may be able to resolve the intractable problem of Somalia. After twenty years of bloody chaos there are no levers left to pull.

Ethiopia misses Somali deadline

Medeshi Dec 19, 2008

Ethiopia misses Somali deadline
Ethiopia has missed the deadline set out in a peace deal to withdraw its forces from Somalia, but has promised to go by the end of December.
The recent agreement between the transitional government and Islamist opposition set Friday as the deadline.
A BBC reporter in the capital says the troops are still in their bases.
"Our total withdrawal... will be by the end of this month, the prime minister has made it very clear," Ethiopia's London ambassador told the BBC.
Ethiopia went into Somalia two years ago to help government forces drive Islamist forces from the capital.
But different Islamist forces have been gaining ground in recent months and now control much of southern Somalia once more.
The BBC's Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu says in the past two weeks the Ethiopians have been setting up bases in villages along the tarmac road between the capital and Baidoa - their possible exit road.
A small African Union peacekeeping force has indicated it may leave with the Ethiopians unless it gets reinforcements.
Berhanu Kebede, the Ethiopian ambassador to the UK, said Ethiopia's presence had given Somalis an opportunity to participate in political dialogue.
"The conducive environment we created has not been properly used both by international community and the Somalis themselves," he said on the BBC's Network Africa programme.
About one million people have fled their homes - many after fierce fighting in Mogadishu between Islamists and the Ethiopia-backed government forces.
Some three million people need food aid - about one third of the population.
Somalia has not had a functioning national government since 1991 when warlords overthrew the regime of President Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on each other.
Story from BBC NEWS:

Why History Can't Wait

Medeshi Dec 17, 2008

Why History Can't Wait

Person of the Year 2008

By David Von Drehle
You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There's a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.
To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can't quite put your finger on it ...
"It's like the set of The Office," someone offers.
Bingo.
It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt's — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?
But he doesn't seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. ("They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.") Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room's décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It's a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk.

"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out," he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) "And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered." That worries him. Also Afghanistan: "We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.
"And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation," Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. "And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago."
Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll hear the unabridged version shortly.
But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.
See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.
See pictures of Obama's college years.
But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That's why he's here and why he doesn't care about the furniture. We've heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We've observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity.

The real story of Obama's year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership. "We always did our best up on the high wire," says his campaign manager, David Plouffe.
Obama's competence fills him with a genuine self-confidence. "I've got a pretty healthy ego," he allows. That's clear when he offers a checklist for voters to use in judging his performance two years from now. It's quite an agenda. Listen: "Have we helped this economy recover from what is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of crisis doesn't occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of revitalizing our public-school systems?"
There's more: "Have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world effectively? Have I drawn down U.S. troops out of Iraq, and have we strengthened our approach in Afghanistan — not just militarily but also diplomatically and in terms of development? And have we been able to reinvigorate international institutions to deal with transnational threats, like climate change, that we can't solve on our own?"
And: "Outside of specific policy measures, two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, 'Government's not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government's working for me. I feel like it's accountable. I feel like it's transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information.'"
Can he really achieve all that? Plenty of voters will be happy if he aces only Item 1 on his list. But the essence of both Obama's strength and his promise is that, according to a recent poll, a strong majority of Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do. For having the confidence to sketch that kind of future in this gloomy hour and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful that he will pull it off, Barack Obama is Time's Person of the Year for 2008.
I. Simple CompetenceIn some tellings, Obama's journey to the white house started with his little-noticed but carefully nuanced speech against the Iraq war in 2002. In other versions, it began with his electrifying address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. Those moments blazed with potential, true, but something more was necessary: a certain appetite among the electorate. The country had to be hungry for the menu he offered, and in that sense, his path's true beginning lay in the drowned precincts of New Orleans in the sweltering, desperate late summer of 2005.
Hurricane Katrina blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of executive incompetence in American politics. When the people of New Orleans needed leadership, the Republican Administration in Washington proved useless. The Democratic governor and mayor were pitiful. At long last, our government was united — but under an appalling banner of fecklessness. The moral bankruptcy of the spin doctors was laid bare: no soul remained gullible enough to believe that Brownie was doing a heckuva job.
After Katrina, demand collapsed for the very qualities that Obama lacked as a candidate: empty boasts, finger-pointing, backstabbing and years of experience inside a government that couldn't deliver bottled water to the stranded citizens of a major U.S. city. Spare us the dead-or-alive bravado, the gates-of-hell bluster, the melodrama of the 3 a.m. phone call. A door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and deliver. Simple competence — although there's nothing simple about it, not in today's intricate, interdependent, interwoven, intensely dangerous world.
See pictures of Barack Obama's campaign behind the scenes.
See pictures of Obama on Flickr.
His official theme was change, but a specific kind of change: the nuts-and-bolts kind you can see and measure. Voters were invited to believe because Obama kept delivering the goods. Certainly he made mistakes and gave up on some ideas while doubling back on others — his promise to stick to the existing campaign-finance system, for example. On the whole, though, he was a doer. Obama told people that a black man could win white votes. In Iowa he proved it. He said a broad-gauge campaign could win in GOP strongholds; along came Indiana and Virginia and North Carolina. He declared that a new approach to politics would topple the old Clinton-Bush seesaw, and topple it he did. He sank the three-pointer with the cameras rolling. Made a speech in a football stadium feel intimate. Some might say these are not exactly Churchillian achievements, but in the land of the hapless, the competent man is king. In the end, his campaign e-mail list numbered some 13 million people, of whom more than 3.5 million put actual skin in the game — money, volunteer hours or both. Obama's most formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to convince voters that he was all talk and no action, a vessel empty but for intoxicating fumes. Yet he was the one whose campaign ran like clockwork, while hers was a fratricidal mess. And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party.
II. Filling the Vacuum"A presidential campaign is like an MRI of the soul," says David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "And one of the great revelations of this process, certainly the most thrilling revelation to me, was to learn what a great manager this guy is. We had no way of knowing that when we started. When he decided to run, we had no political infrastructure at all. There was just a handful of us, and we were setting off to challenge the greatest political operation in the Democratic Party."
Keep in mind that Obama, as Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican Convention in September, had "never led anything, nothing, nada" — certainly not a sprawling organization spread from coast to coast. But he did have a philosophy of leadership, which he explains like this: "I don't think there's some magic trick here. I think I've got a good nose for talent, so I hire really good people. And I've got a pretty healthy ego, so I'm not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they're smarter than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you've got really smart people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get some things done."
Stop and look back at those last few words, because they are a telltale sign of Obama's pragmatism. A persistent question during the campaign — it became the heart of John McCain's message in the closing weeks — was whether Obama was some kind of radical, a terrorist-befriending socialist masquerading as Steady Freddy. As he builds his Administration, though, he is emerging as a leader who just wants to "get some things done." (Read "The New Liberal Order.")
Obama is a businesslike boss. He prefers briefing papers tightly written and shows up for meetings fully prepared. He expects people to challenge him when they think he is wrong and to back up their ideas with facts. He's not a shouter — "Hollering at people isn't usually that effective," he explains — but if he thinks you've let him down, you'll know it. "What was always effective with me as a kid — and Michelle and I find it effective with our kids — is just making people feel really guilty," he says. "Like 'Boy, I am disappointed in you. I expected so much more.' And I think people generally want to do the right thing, and if you're clear to them about what that right thing is, and if they see you doing the right thing, then that gives you some leverage."
Again, take a second to reread, this time the bit where he says "people generally want to do the right thing." Trust of this kind has been in short supply for many years in American politics, where the dominant attitude is that every disagreement is a sign of bad faith and every opponent is assumed to be malevolent. Obama's attitude was ridiculed as kumbaya naiveté during the campaign, but trust proved to be essential to his victory. His campaign entrusted millions of volunteers with unprecedented authority to download information about prospective voters, to assign themselves to make phone calls and canvass their own neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and to keep the campaign abreast of their progress. A typical presidential effort is top-down, intensely protective of its data and strategies. Obama's approach seemed to court mischief or even chaos. "There was a lot of snickering among the political pros," says Plouffe. "They couldn't believe that we were giving people we didn't know access to our data and trusting them to handle it honestly. But it was enormously important because it made people feel that much more accountable: 'These are my three blocks, and everyone's counting on me.'"
See pictures of Obama on Flickr.
See the Six Degrees of Barack Obama.
Yes, Obama could talk — like nobody's business — but talk didn't win the election. According to the daily tracking polls, the tumblers clicked into place precisely at the moment the financial hurricane hit, when the wizards of Wall Street proved as incompetent as Oz and neither the President nor the leaders of Congress nor the Treasury boss nor Senator McCain could deliver a rescue package. When this group failure provoked a stock-market crash in early October, Americans asked, "Can't anybody here play this game?" Astounding as it would have seemed scant months before, their gaze fell on the one fixed point in the widening gyre: a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)
III. Fear ItselfAs White House Chief of Staff during the final years of the Clinton Administration, John Podesta became accustomed to short nights and emotional roller coasters. Still, he found it a bit strange to be headed to the airport in the predawn darkness of Nov. 5 — just a few hours after the election of a Democratic President. Was Obama really going to chair a major strategy session the morning after winning the longest and most grueling campaign on record? How about a day off?
Long before Election Day, Obama decided that an ordinary transition wouldn't do. Given the shaky economy and two wars, he knew that the winner of the election — whoever it turned out to be — would face instant and daunting challenges. He wanted to be ready. "What I was absolutely convinced of was that, whether it was me or John McCain, the next President-elect was going to have to move swiftly," Obama recalls. He deployed Podesta in midsummer to lead an unusually elaborate preparation for a possible Obama presidency. McCain accused him of overconfidence and vanity, of measuring the Oval Office drapes. To Obama, it was simply a matter of prudence. (See pictures from the historic Election Day.)
Podesta had long been planning the return of a Democrat to the White House, and his think tank, the Center for American Progress, was already preparing detailed briefings on conditions in the various departments of government. As the financial system went into free fall in September, Podesta's team pressed the FBI to work overtime on security screenings of potential Obama nominees. Now, as he boarded a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago, Podesta carried a list of more than 100 candidates who had passed their background investigations and were ready for confirmation on Day One. Instead of taking a day off, the new President-elect celebrated his victory with a five-hour meeting.
Obama had been pondering whether he should step to center stage or wait in the wings as the turbulent last months of the Bush Administration played out. His aides were all over the map. Some advised him to go quietly about his business in Chicago and insist that America has just one President at a time. For Obama to succeed, they argued, the country needed to see his Inauguration as a clean break, a new sunrise. Others floated the idea of immediately starting the First Hundred Days, perhaps asking George W. Bush to appoint Obama's choices to key offices so that they could get to work by late November.
Obama was leery of appearing to shoulder responsibility for problems before he had any real authority to fix them. Bush's bank of political capital was busted, and Obama wasn't about to take ownership of the toxic assets. On the other hand, he didn't want to repeat the dysfunctional transition of power from Herbert Hoover to Roosevelt in the dark hours of the Great Depression. F.D.R.'s silence between his election and his Inauguration may have deepened the crisis. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, when Podesta walked out of that meeting — not 24 hours after the polls closed — Obama was far ahead of the normal transition process, having homed in on finalists for many of his key staff and Cabinet positions. But he hadn't yet decided how public to be about it.
Within two days, however, events forced his hand. On Friday, Nov. 7, Obama convened a meeting of his economic advisers in Chicago, and the tone of their comments was chilling. The stock market was plunging; credit remained tight; fresh unemployment numbers were shocking. "There was just a very dramatic deterioration" in the days after the election, says Timothy Geithner, Obama's choice for Treasury Secretary. On previous occasions when the group had gathered, someone could always be counted on to find potential upsides in dismal forecasts, while Paul Volcker, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, reliably closed each meeting with a gloomy soliloquy. On this day, though, there was no positive scenario for Volcker to deflate. Everyone in the room was grim.
See pictures of the global financial crisis.
See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.
Obama opened the meeting by reflecting on his dilemma: act now or wait until January? By the end of the session, he had concluded that, like it or not, he must "accelerate all of our timetables," as he put it, "in appointments not just on the Cabinet but also our White House team, in structuring economic plans so that we can start getting them to Congress and hopefully begin work — even before I'm sworn in — on some of our key priorities around the economy, on laying the groundwork for a national-security team that can take the baton in a wartime transition." There was no time for the "traditional postelection holiday." Vacations would have to wait until Christmas.
Transition is such a gentle word. We make the transition from youth to adulthood or from the dinner table to the den. For Obama, though, the concept was freighted with danger. "He was very focused on the basic perils of the gap between the election and the Inauguration, at a time when the economy was clearly deteriorating and the markets were very fragile," Geithner explains. In certain powerful respects, Obama felt compelled to begin his presidency immediately. Markets needed to size up his economic team and hear what he planned to do. Congressional leaders, contemplating a colossal economic-stimulus package, needed to know where he was headed. Military leaders, key allies and opportunistic enemies were all keen to know just how dovish the anti-Iraq-war President intended to be. Obama concluded that hanging back would create a dangerous leadership void in the short-term and compound his troubles come January. And nothing that has happened since that Nov. 7 decision — the crisis at Citigroup, the drama of the automakers or the assault on Mumbai — has made the transfer of power look any less perilous.
He could not have predicted when he set out to become President that he would face such circumstances. The distance from the birth of his campaign to these first days of his fledgling presidency could be counted in months but measured in light-years. When he announced his candidacy on a frigid morning in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, Iraq was a disaster, and the Dow was still headed upward past 14,000. So this moment was a test not only of his speed but also of his flexibility. Obama proved lithe, indeed, persuading Robert Gates, Bush's Secretary of Defense, to remain in his post and asking Clinton, a constant critic of Obama's foreign policy views during their primary battle, to be his Secretary of State. Priority 1 was the economic team, however. There his task was to find a mix of people familiar enough to signal stability but fresh enough to promise change, and to design a stimulus strategy dramatic enough to inspire markets to swallow their panic. (See pictures of Obama's White House team.)
In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Obama delivered. Having promised to govern from the middle, he rolled out a bright purple team of economic advisers, neither red nor blue. Geithner had served in various posts under both Bush and Bill Clinton. As president of the New York Fed, he was well known to Wall Street but relatively unknown on Main Street — just the blend of experience and newness that Obama was seeking. His budget director, Peter Orszag, had fans across the political spectrum, and his in-house oracle, Volcker, was a Democrat who fought inflation alongside Ronald Reagan. Larry Summers, named to run the economics team from the White House, was a Clinton stalwart.
Unveiling these and other picks at a series of daily press conferences, Obama assured the public that he wanted to move fast, so fast that trainloads of money might be ready for him to dispatch across the country with a stroke of his pen on Inauguration Day. The idea of another wave of spending horrifies America's surviving conservatives, but most economists support it — some with enthusiasm, some with resignation. Obama realized that the stimulus package could be a vehicle for launching his broad domestic agenda. His ambitious campaign promises — to reform health care, cut taxes for low- and moderate-income earners and steer the U.S. toward a new energy economy — had seemed doomed by the yawning budget deficit (some $200 billion a month, according to the latest projections). But call these projects "stimulus," and suddenly a ship headed for the reef of economic disaster might sail through Congress flying the flag of economic recovery. With even Republican economists talking about hundreds of billions in new spending, the sky's the limit. A dream of health-care reformers — electronic medical records — is now economic stimulus because Obama will pour money into hospitals for computers and clerical workers. His tax cut is stimulus because it puts spending money in the pockets of working Americans. His pledge to repair the nation's infrastructure is a stimulus plan for construction workers, while his energy strategy is stimulus for the people who will modernize government buildings, update public schools and improve the electrical grid.
See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.
See pictures of Obama's college years.
Of course, the bullet points are easy to list; far harder is the task of spending vast sums — perhaps $1 trillion over two years — efficiently, effectively and quickly enough to spur the economy. Washington's three goblins — waste, fraud and abuse — are watching with hungry eyes. Obama has cast Orszag as a flinty keeper of the purse strings, but he has no intention of letting his opportunity go by. "I don't think that Americans want hubris from their next President," Obama says, noting that McCain received nearly 47% of the vote last month. However, "I do think that we received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have said, 'Well, what does this change word mean? You know that it's sort of ill defined.' Actually, we defined it pretty precisely during the campaign, and I'm trying to define it further for people during this transition," he says. "It means a government that is not ideologically driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people."
IV. Into the BreachMore than 75 years ago, a new president took the oath of office amid economic catastrophe and admonished the nation that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Today generations of Americans are experiencing a harsh tutorial in the true meaning of that resonant diagnosis. Fear is kryptonite to the economy, which cannot operate efficiently without broad and well-founded confidence — that wise investments will gain value, that balance sheets mean what they say, that contracts will be honored and bills paid.
The events of the past autumn produced the sharpest drop in consumer confidence ever recorded, and a similar wave of fear cratered credit markets. Obama notes the very real structural flaws in the economy, but he is also aware of the role that fear plays. "Nobody trusts other people's books anymore. And people decide, 'Well, I'm just going to hold on to my cash for a while,'" he explains. "And that compounds the crisis. And all that results in a contraction in lending, in consumer spending, which then has a real impact on Main Street. And so what starts off as psychological is now very real."
Just like our banks and our carmakers, America's shattered confidence is in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it nourishes fresh confidence. "Yes, we can" is both an affirmation of optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is rooted in a record of accomplishment — when tomorrow's yes-we-can is backed up by yesterday's yes-we-did — confidence and competence begin to feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn't the whole of leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most needed in today's sea of troubles. (See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.)
After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart convened one last focus group to ask Virginia voters why a state that gave Bush an 8-point victory four years ago chose Obama by 6 points this time. Their responses clustered around the crucial connection between competence and confidence. They told Hart they were drawn to Obama's self-assured and calming personality. They felt he was "honest," a "straight shooter" — in other words, a person who does what he says he will do. Their confidence in Obama wasn't starry-eyed; they hadn't been swept away by his stadium speeches. They saw a man who can get some things done, at a time when so many of their leaders, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, cannot. He made moderates feel hopeful, and even among many core Republicans who did not ultimately vote for him, Obama inspired admiration. Viewing these comments through the results of his national surveys, Hart discerned a surge of good feeling that he had not seen in a generation: "a sense of real hope," he says, "and the kind of broad bipartisan support that has not been in evidence since the 1980 Reagan election."
Obama has begun to turn his thoughts to his Inaugural Address. According to strategist Axelrod, he is looking for the right mixture of bracing and boost in a speech that will be "both sober and hopeful." He may signal a new day by announcing a plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which aides say is in the works. As the gray Chicago sky frowns outside his conference-room window, Obama rehearses his message. Americans "should anticipate that 2009 is going to be a tough year," he says. Then he adds, "If we make some good choices, I'm confident that we can limit some of the damage in 2009. And that in 2010 we can start seeing an upward trajectory on the economy."
A few days after this interview, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What's in store for Obama's America? "I don't have a crystal ball," he says. But the measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their dread.
—David Von Drehle with reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy / Washington
See pictures of Obama's college years.
See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.

Liars and War Criminals

Medeshi Dec 17, 2008

Donkeys, Liars and War Criminals

By Alemayehu G. Mariam

(Photo: weeping old women- The combatants in Somalia have inflicted more harm on civilians than on each other.)
What a difference two years make! In December 2006, Zenawi invaded Somalia to save it from the "terrorist axis of evil" -- Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and the Islamic Courts Union. In January 2007, he reassured the world, "We will be out of Somalia in a few weeks." A year ago he likened opposition members of his Parliament who opposed his Somali invasion to that faithful beast of burden, the donkey. He said "both have big eyes, but suffer from myopia; and have big ears, but don't hear." This past September, he declared triumphantly that he had fully achieved his primary objective of destroying and neutralizing the Somali "jihadist" threat to Ethiopia. A few days ago he told his parliament African Union troops have asked for help as they prepare to cut and run out of Somalia: "The African Union, Uganda and Burundi have all asked us to stay behind and provide protection for the safe passage of their troops." Uganda's deputy foreign minister, Okello Oryem, said that is a complete fabrication: "This is absolutely not true and this is contrary to everything we have said. Our position has always been that if Ethiopia pulls out of Somalia, we will increase our presence there. Uganda is prepared to increase its battalion if there is a need." In the 104-page report So Much to Fear: War Crimes and the Devastation of Somalia, Human Rights Watch indicted the Zenawi regime and its military forces in Somalia, the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and Somali insurgent forces for war crimes involving "widespread and serious violations of the laws of war. Frequent violations include indiscriminate attacks, killings, rape, use of civilians as human shields, and looting."
The Evidence of War Crimes

HRW's cumulative evidence on war crimes in Somalia is staggering:

Since January 2007 (the onset of Zenawi's invasion) at least 870,000 civilians have fled the chaos in Mogadishu alone -- two-thirds of the city's population. Across south-central Somalia, 1.1 million Somalis are displaced from their homes.

[Following the invasion] Insurgent fighters quickly adopted hit-and-run tactics…Ethiopian and TFG forces developed patterns of responding to those attacks that have since become part of the day-to-day reality of life in Mogadishu -- reacting to indiscriminate mortar attacks in kind, with devastating barrages of rocket, mortar, and artillery fire across populated neighborhoods.

ENDF [Ethiopian National Defense Forces] forces in Mogadishu have routinely and indiscriminately bombarded populated residential areas of Mogadishu since March 2007. They have made regular use of "Katyusha" rockets in Mogadishu, often fired from BM-21 "Grad" multiple-rocket launchers.

Ethiopian forces carried out similar indiscriminate bombardments in fighting in the strategically important town of Beletweyne. ENDF forces responded by indiscriminately bombarding large swathes of the western districts of the town for three days beginning in July 2008. Humanitarian organizations estimated that at the end of July, 74,000 people—more than 75 percent of the town's population—had been displaced as a direct result of the bombardment and related fighting.

There have been increased reports in 2008 of Ethiopian forces responding to insurgent ambushes and other attacks by firing indiscriminately into populated areas… particularly in Mogadishu, Baidoa, and along the Mogadishu-Afgooye road.

In 2008 the human rights and humanitarian situation in Somalia deteriorated into unmitigated catastrophe… Two long years of escalating bloodshed and destruction have devastated the country's people and laid waste to its capital Mogadishu.

During the past two years life in Mogadishu has settled into a horrifying daily rhythm with Ethiopian, TFG, and insurgent forces conducting urban firefights and pounding one another with artillery fire with no regard for the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the city. The bombardments are largely indiscriminate… Insurgents lob mortar shells from populated neighborhoods… and Ethiopian and TFG forces respond with sustained salvos of mortar, artillery, and rocket fire that destroy homes and their inhabitants… TFG forces, often commanded or accompanied by Ethiopian troops, commit assaults, rapes, killings, and pillage of civilians during house-to-house search operations…. The discipline of Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia has broken down to the point where they increasingly are responsible for violent criminality.

TFG and ENDF forces frequently respond to insurgent attacks by firing mortar shells, artillery, and "Katyusha" rockets—the last being weapons that are inherently indiscriminate when used in populated areas—towards the neighborhoods from which they took fire.

ENDF soldiers have been implicated in serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law against Somali civilians with increasing frequency since the end of 2007.
The Art of Hocus Pocus

On the same day the HRW report was released, the regime's Ministry of Foreign Affairs swiftly responded with a befuddled and incoherent critique of the report's "methodology" and "specific findings".[1] The official statement, in the usual categorically dismissive manner, rejected the HRW report because it was based on "flawed methodology, unsubstantiated allegations, hearsay and second-hand information conversations with anonymous informants." In typical self-serving and sanctimonious hand-wringing style, the statement also declared that it was Ethiopia's manifest destiny to bring peace to the warring factions in Somalia, and is now leaving because peace had become elusive there: "Ethiopia has persistently tried to facilitate peaceful resolution of the problems among the people of Somalia, not least by sponsoring a whole series of peace conferences since 1992… It was natural for Ethiopia to lend whatever assistance it could when called upon by the Government of Somalia… [Unable] to create a credible ongoing peace process… Ethiopia felt it appropriate to withdraw its forces by the end of the year."

Remarkably, the official statement glosses over the serious accusations of war crimes and denies responsibility for any unlawful killing of Somali civilians. It even makes the comical argument that most of the Somali casualties since 2006 were not real "civilians". Rather, "many of the claimed casualties have in fact been of fighters not civilians." The statement denies the occurrence of any specific collateral damage (unintended civilian casualties) from combat operations by "Ethiopian" forces. It categorically and emphatically rejects the occurrence of any barbaric practices of war such as throat-slitting and body mutilation, and attributes such monstrous practices exclusively to Al Shabaab fighters. "Ethiopian" forces would never commit such atrocities because the "the Ethiopian military would not deploy under-trained troops in a combat zone like Mogadishu and… training in human rights and humanitarian law is part of the core curricula of all the country's military training institutions at all levels…"

The regime's criticism of HRW's methodology, -- that is the claim that the HRW report consist of "unsubstantiated allegations, hearsay and second-hand information conversations with anonymous informants" -- shows willful ignorance of facts and constitutes a feeble attempt at diversion from the serious war crimes allegations. The fact of the matter is that by any objective measure, there is nothing unusual or improper about HRW's "methodology". In "So Much to Fear," HRW employed the same standard investigative techniques and methods it has used in all other cases of suspected war crimes/crimes against humanity. It has not used any questionable techniques in its Somalia investigation. As a matter of fact, HRW's basic investigative techniques are not much different than those used in ordinary criminal investigations which involve gathering evidence from victims, eyewitnesses, confidential informants, officials, experts and any others sources that are capable of producing material and relevant evidence. In its Somalia report, HRW "interviewed more than 80 victims and eyewitnesses to the patterns of abuse documented in this report." They interviewed "dozens of analysts, Somali civil society activists, humanitarian workers, diplomats, medical staff, and journalists, some of whom were also eyewitnesses to the events described in this report." HRW also "met with TFG officials including Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, with ARS officials, including Sheikh Sharif Ahmed and Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, and with UN officials, including UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG), Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah… European Commission officials in Nairobi." Beyond these evidence gathering techniques, HRW is also experienced in the acquisition of aerial and ground imagery, and analysis of combat operations information regarding collateral damage, cluster munitions and time sensitive targeting as evidenced in another recent report, Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden Area of Ethiopia's Somali Regional State (June, 2008).2

The fact of the matter is that HRW used well-established criminal investigative techniques and procedures. But implicit in the "methodological" criticism is the subtle attempt to cast aspersions on the credibility of HRW as an impartial international human rights organization and create doubt on its investigative methods. The self-serving criticism must be challenged with facts. First, it is an irrefutable fact that there are few organization in the world that have the breadth and depth of war crimes/crimes against humanity investigative experience than Human Rights Watch (and Amnesty International). In the past decade alone, HRW has extensively and repeatedly documented war crimes and gross human rights violations in every corner of the world including Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda, the Sudan, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Chechnya, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sri Lanka and many other countries. Second, HRW has a stellar reputation for impartiality, neutrality, and integrity. Its reports are used in policy making by the highest legislative, executive and judicial bodies in most democratic countries in the world. Third, the countries that lash out against HRW most vociferously are countries with significant and lengthy records of human rights abuses. For instance, China has criticized HRW for preparing its country report "out of thin" air. Sudan savagely criticized HRW after it called for punitive sanctions against the top leaders in the Sudan who supervised the killing fields in Darfur. Last March Robert Mugabe dismissed a report by HRW on Zimbabwe as "rubbish". A few months ago, Hugo Chavez threw out HRW from Venezuela, claiming that "[HRW] dressed up as human rights defenders, are financed by the United States. They are aligned with a policy of attacking countries that are building new economic models."

Despite these transparent investigative procedures, one of the central criticisms of HRW by the Zenawi regime revolves around HRW's unwillingness to turn over the names and addresses of the victims who gave evidence: "HRW gives no names of its informants and no addresses, though it does claim to have interviewed some people over the telephone in Mogadishu." One can only shudder thinking about what they could do with the names and addresses of victims and informants!

What is also equally puzzling in the official statement is the regime's emphatic assertion that, "It should be made clear that Human Rights Watch's first time effort to expose abuses committed by Al-Shabab and other extremist forces in Mogadishu does not make its unsubstantiated allegations against Ethiopia any more credible." Simply stated, the fact that HRW is telling the truth about Al Shabaab and the other insurgents for the first time does not mean it is telling the truth about "Ethiopian forces" this time around. Curiously, the regime's logic compels a much different conclusion: If HRW's evidence and allegations concerning war crimes/crimes against humanity against "Ethiopian" forces are untrue,mutatis mutandis (allowing other things to change accordingly), HRW's evidence and allegations on Al-Shabaab and the other insurgent groups must be equally untrue. In other words, HRW's allegations that Al Shabaab used civilians as "human shields", it indiscriminately used mortars and remote-detonated explosive devices in populated areas, engaged in targeted killings, coerced recruitment and engaged in the use of child soldiers, etc., must also be untrue. It does not make logical sense for HRW to tell the unvarnished truth about Al Shabaab atrocities and fabricate unmitigated lies about atrocities committed by "Ethiopian" forces. As the old saying goes, what is good for the goose is good for the gander!
War Crimes

"War crimes" include a broad class of crimes under international law. There are at least four distinct categories of such crimes: 1) grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, 2) violations of the "Laws and Customs of War", 3) genocide and 4) crimes against humanity (large-scale atrocity directed at civilian population including murder, torture, rape, etc.) Prosecution of war crimes raise many technical, legal and procedural issues as evidenced in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Some of these issues are jurisdictional, e.g. where to bring the legal action, whether to use an ad hoc tribunal or the International Criminal court. Others are logistical, e.g. how to identify, capture, arrest and transport suspects to the venue of the tribunal. Still other issues involve prosecutorial strategy, e.g. how widely to cast the prosecutorial dragnet, whether to prosecute anyone implicated in atrocities or only those most culpable and responsible, how to distinguish between leaders who gave the orders to commit war crimes from those who actually carried out the worst offenses and those whose offenses were minimal. For instance, many of these issues arose in the Rwandan case. Prosecution of more than 100,000 Rwandan war crimes suspects proved to be an impossibility. For that reason, the Rwandan prosecution focused on the planners and leaders of the genocide, those in positions of authority who authorized, aided and abetted the commission of the genocidal crimes, notorious killers and torturers and others.

The Prima Facie Case for War Crimes: Collateral Damage and Concealment Warfare

At the core of the prima facie (on its first appearance) case in the HRW allegations are two central issues: 1) criminal liability for collateral damage, and 2) lawful responses to "concealment warfare". Collateral damage generally involves excessive injury or damage to civilians from unintentional or incidental military actions. Intentional targeting of civilians as a military objective is a war crime. Protocols I and II of the 1949 Geneva Conventions codify the principles of distinction, proportionality, necessity and humanity in assessing collateral damage for war crimes purposes. These Protocols require that military objects be distinguished from civilian ones prior to attack in a combat theater. For instance, the principle of proportionality requires that attacks on a specific military objective are impermissible if they "may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life or injury that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." A responsible military commander is expected to first determine if the target is a military objective, and then decide whether the collateral damage from destruction of the target is proportionate to the military advantage of destroying it. Combat planners are required to "take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life…" Similarly, the doctrine of military necessity under the Protocols requires that there be some military advantage gained from the destruction of a target. "Concealment warfare" is often used by insurgents who commingle among the civilian population and launch attacks. For instance, some insurgent groups operating in urban combat environments employ the tactic of placing the civilian population at the center of conflict in an effort to create a more favorable battle space, and maximize their survivability against forces they are unable to engage under conventional terms. Concealment warfare poses special problems for conventional forces by combining military and civilian targets in the combat theatre increasing substantially the likelihood of significant civilian casualties.

One of the key legal issues in a future Somalia war crimes prosecution is likely to be whether the commanders of the "Ethiopian" forces in launching an attack or counterattack on insurgents concealed in civilian areas knew or should have known their actions would cause excessive incidental death or injury to civilians in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated, but failed to take appropriate mitigating actions. Another issue of criminal liability is likely to involve command responsibility under the Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 which provides: "The fact that a breach of the Conventions or of this Protocol was committed by a subordinate does not absolve his superiors from …responsibility … if they knew, or had information which should have enabled them to conclude in the circumstances at the time, that he was committing or about to commit such a breach and if they did not take all feasible measures within their power to prevent or repress the breach." Under this provision, command responsibility liability may go well beyond the actions or omissions of "Ethiopian" military commanders on the battlefields. Indeed there are many other legal issues that could be raised in a future war crimes prosecution.

HRW's Big Message: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Will Be Punished

Over the past two decades, war crimes have been committed on a mind-boggling scale throughout the world. Most of them have gone unpunished. A year before the Rwandan genocide, the New York Times put out an editorial that began: "Commit atrocities on a large enough scale and you can get away with it." That prophetic statement proved to be true in Rwanda in 1994 and later in other African countries. The message in the HRW report is not that the Somali war crimes suspects will be identified and prosecuted anytime soon, but rather those criminals should be on notice that the evidence is piling up against them for that day when justice will catch up with them. War criminals generally do not believe they will ever be caught by the long arm of the law. Radovan Karadzic believed as much. He became a mythical figure among some Serbs for evading arrest for war crimes for so many years. In the end, he was caught and is now facing justice in The Hague. No doubt, those who committed war crimes in Somalia will also be caught and brought to justice. But HRW's report is important both for calling international attention to the "daily horrors of life in Somalia" and for resetting a universal tone of moral outrage so eloquently expressed over one-half century ago by Robert H. Jackson, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice and Chief Prosecutor Nuremberg Tribunals: "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated." War crimes must never be tolerated!

1 http://www.ena.gov.et/EnglishNews/2008/Dec/08Dec08/75097.htm
2 http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ethiopia0608_1.pdf

Chinese ship rescued from pirates

Medeshi Dec 17, 2008
Chinese ship rescued from pirates
An international naval force has rescued a Chinese ship from Somali pirates, a day after the UN authorised troops to pursue the bandits on land in a bid to tackle the increasing problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
Troops rescued the Chinese-owned Zhenhua 4 on Wednesday, a sign that foreign navies patrolling the shipping lane linking Europe to Asia are adopting tougher tactics.

(Photo: The Indian navy captured 23 Somali and Yemeni pirates earlier this week)
A Kenyan maritime group said the crew on the Chinese vessel had locked themselves in their cabins and radioed for help.
A warship and two helicopters came and fired on the pirates, but did not kill them, it said.
Chinese state media said a "multilateral" force with helicopters hovered over the ship and successfully fought off the pirates.
The Chinese boat was one of four vessels captured by pirates on Tuesday.
A yacht, an Indonesian tugboat and a Turkish cargo ship were also seized, Andrew Mwangura from the East African Seafarers Assistance programme said.
Piracy off the coast of Somalia this year has earned gunmen millions of dollars in ransom and hiked shipping insurance costs.
The seizures have prompted some of the world's biggest shipping firms to switch routes from the Suez Canal and send cargo vessels around southern Africa instead - which could push up the cost of commodities and manufactured goods.
Land operations
Warships patrolling the seas off Somalia and escorting ships have not been enough to tackle the pirates.
But a new UN Security Council resolution, adopted unanimously, allows states to take "all necessary measures in Somalia, including in its airspace" to stop the pirates.
The Somali government, which controls only the capital Mogadishu and the city of Baidoa, has said it does not have the resources to tackle the problem.
The pirates are mostly based in the northern Puntland region.
Officials there welcomed the UN initiative.
"We ... have agreed to support this resolution," Abdulqadir Muse Yusuf, Puntland's assistant minister for fisheries, said.
"We want our security forces to work with the UN forces because we are the main victims of piracy."
Divided government
Mohammed Adow, Al Jazeera's correspondent who recently returned from Somalia, said it will be very difficult for any countries volunteering to fight pirates on Somali soil to do so.
"They would need a partner in Somalia and this is lacking - most of central and southern Somalia is controlled by Islamists and mujahidin militias.
"If they see any foreign forces coming in, they will direct their war on them.
"Also, there are huge logistic problems. There are no proper roads, nothing you can talk about in terms of infrastructure."
Adding to these problems is the political crisis which has escalated during the last week.
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Somalia's president, has sacked the government and appointed a new prime minister despite the parliament's support for the current premier, Nur Hassan Hussein.
Al Jazeera's correspondent said that the divided parliament and tensions between Hussein's faction of government and Yusuf's faction is raising fears of armed conflict between the two blocks.
Nineteen ships and nearly 400 crew are still being held in pirate hideouts along the Somali coast.

Somali leader faces impeachment

Medeshi Dec 17, 2008

Somali leader faces impeachment
Somali MPs have voted to start impeachment proceedings against President Abdullahi Yusuf, accusing him of being a "stumbling block to peace".
He must now appear before parliament to defend himself. The motion would need a two-thirds majority to succeed.
The move in Baidoa comes a day after the president named a new prime minister in defiance of parliament.
It also prompted neighbouring Kenya to announce sanctions against the Somali president and his associates.
'Miscalculation'
According to the Somali parliament's motion, President Yusuf stands accused of being a stumbling block to peace; of behaving like a dictator and of failing to push the peace process forward after four years as president.
He is also charged with side-lining some of the communities.
The BBC's Peter Greste in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, says this is coded language referring to the increasingly bitter clan rivalries that have deepened under his leadership.
President Yusuf's biggest miscalculation appears to have been a decision to sack Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein and his cabinet on Sunday, for "failing to deliver peace", he says.
President Yusuf and Mr Nur had clashed in recent months over attempts to deal with the Islamist-led armed opposition.
Our reporter says the government badly needs a unified front if it is to find peace with Islamist insurgents who now control almost all of southern Somalia.
The Ethiopian troops, which helped government forces drive Islamist forces from Mogadishu two years ago, are due to pull out in just over two weeks.
A small African Union peacekeeping force has indicated it may leave with the Ethiopians unless it gets reinforcements.
About one million people have fled their homes - many after fierce fighting in Mogadishu between Islamists and the Ethiopia-backed government forces.
Somalia has not had a functioning national government since President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
Story from BBC NEWS: