(img by Barnaby Furnas)
Time to take advantage of my privileged position as armchair critic to be smug and self-congratulatory in pointing out that I basically called this back in January, but now even the Times agrees with me: Somalia's in real-bad shape, thanks in good part to the invasion of the largely foreign sponsored (mainly US and Ethopia) "transitional government".
United Nations officials now concede that the country was in better shape during the brief reign of Somalia’s Islamist movement last year. “It was more peaceful, and much easier for us to work,” Mr. Laroche said. “The Islamists didn’t cause us any problems.”
Mr. Ould-Abdallah called those six months, which were essentially the only epoch of peace most Somalis have tasted for years, Somalia’s “golden era.”
Yay, the Whitehouse's blatant Islamophobia and singleminded desire to force their needs and fears onto other countries has fucked over yet another poor, desperate nation filled with easily forgettable others! Hooray for democracy and freedom!
2 comments:
Just to stir the pot...
Could it not be argued that just because a there is no obvious violence, it does not mean that a population is not abused, oppressed, maligned, marginalized, exploited, starved, etc.?
For example, is the general populace in North Korea so much better off because they are not actively at war with anyone?
Was the Taliban really such a great government for all of their people that they should have stayed in power?
Certainly there are many ways in which a government can be oppressive, not all of them involving overt violene towards its people. But Somalia hasn't even HAD a government for at least a decade. It's been pretty much just shifting territories of various warlords and ethnic groups. So priority number one for these people are just the basics of safety, law & order, that kind of things. But the US is so blinkered by ideology that they impose THEIR priorities on these poor somalis. The US priorities==do not allow any strengthening of organized muslim anything. So now more somalis are dying because the US wants to protect itself (though arguably its actually making things worse for itself). After there's some semblance of order in Somalia, THEN we can start worrying about the issues you've brought up. Not before.
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