Hi Mike First of all, now that I look:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1775000/1775865.stm BBC News | AFRICA | Tuesday, 22 January, 2002, 19:14 GMT Internet returns to Somalia There's some useful information there in a sidebar, "Somalia, land in turmoil". >OK...Somalia. Interesting place. I'm really keen to know whether we'll go there or not, but there's no way of knowing that until the time comes. Quite a few other such places too. >...a place where no industrialized country has recognized a coherent >government in 13 years and where these countries usually have no >hesitation in calling it "anarchy". I don't totally disagree. > >What makes Somalia so interesting (IMO) is that they've managed to >form a fiefdom whereby protection comes from the tribal elders >and so called "warlords" and skirmishes between tribes happen >regularly as a way of re-establishing territorial borders. It's always been that way, not much has really changed, conquest and colonialism and government were never much more than a different coat of paint. The Somalis are an extraordinary people. They're a nation of poets. They could be the only nation of poets. Poets and warriors, like the feudal Japanese were (the Japanese are still poets). Feudal is the right word. Though of course there are Somalis in all walks of life now, they seem to be talented and capable people. I'll post this article and come back to the rest in my next post. This was published in 1993, during the first crisis (which hasn't ever ended). You might recall that the Bad Guy at the time was a warlord named General Mohamed Farah Aidid. (By the way, I wrote this article three months before the mainstream press picked it up, though they all had men on the spot. I'd edited and produced this book on Somalia for Zed the year before: Divine Madness, Zed Books, 1992.) Best Keith Hong Kong Standard July 13, 1993 A tale of two monsters Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid has a role model - a warrior-priest who held off the British for 21 years, writes Keith Addison General Mohamed Farah Aidid, once the commanding officer of a national army and Somaliland's ambassador to India, now has blood on his hands and a price on his head. On Saturday the United Nations offered a Somalis-only reward of US$25,000 for information leading to Aidid's capture. It would take the average Somali 147 years to earn that much. It might work - they might catch him (or kill him) tomorrow. But yesterday, the wily warlord was still at large in Mogadishu, in spite of a month of high-powered attempts by the UN peacekeeping forces to obliterate him. He says he's protected by God. The two sides are locked in a deadly game of retaliation which each thinks the other started. Bombed but unscathed, Aidid retaliated with a double ambush of UN Pakistani soldiers, killing 24 and wounding 59. They were in Somalia to guard aid workers taking food to the starving millions against the likes of Aidid (who, when the two sides were still talking, had refused to allow the Pakistanis into the country). Outraged, the UN Security Council authorised its 18,000 troops to "take all necessary steps", which translated into intensive air and ground attacks and house-to-house searches, which failed either to catch Aidid or to stop him. The rising toll of innocent bystanders, especially women and children, killed by the UN (which says the gunmen use them as shields) sparked strong anti-foreigner feeling among the Somalis. Angry crowds demonstrated, and the Pakistanis opened fire on them, killing 20 and wounding 51. "They give us food and they shoot us," a Somali said. "Imperialist bootlickers," added Aidid's radio station. "The Somalis will fight to the last man. We do not want to become a new colony." Aidid's urban guerilla attacks on UN "Blue Helmets" and civilian workers continued at the rate of two a day (they even attacked a US ship), the "clean, surgical" UN raids grew ever fiercer, and the people of Mogadishu angrier, until on Monday, two days after the UN posted its reward, following a UN attack, a Somali mob killed two Western journalists. Italy's foreign minister called for a suspension of the UN combat operation, and the UN's role in Somalia came under intense international scrutiny. Meanwhile, Aidid, unhurt and uncaptured, was said to be holding meetings with the elders of his clan. This is all a modern remake of a hundred-year-old Somali movie. General Aidid's role model is an irksome warrior-poet-priest named Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, whose dervish horsemen held off the British colonisers for 21 years, up to 1920. He too was protected by God. The British called him the Mad Mullah, and he was a pain in the neck. There is a long Somali tradition of being a pain in an infidel's neck. British explorer Richard Burton, encountering a caravan of herdsmen in East Africa 150 years ago, was warned by his guide: "Somalis - no good, each man his own Sultan." Undeterred, Burton and John Speke set off to explore Somaliland in 1855, but they were attacked by nomad warriors and Speke was badly wounded. In 1898, only a year before the Mullah arose, Britain's Lord Kitchener finally crushed the 14-year Mahdist rebellion in neighbouring Sudan, which required a 25,000-man army equipped with the new Maxim machineguns. The new guns mowed down the Mahdi's dervishes, killing 10,000 of them, but they nearly won the battle anyway. In Somaliland, with Kitchener now far away in South Africa fighting Boers, the nervous British picked a fight with the Mullah by accusing him of theft - but they wouldn't move against him until Maxim guns had been brought in from India. However, the Mullah was not fazed by Maxim guns. His strategy was mobility, and the British simply couldn't catch him. He chose the ground, stretching the British supply lines to the limit. If he lost the battle he'd flee, and they would pursue - until their water ran out and they were forced to retreat. Then the dervishes would pick them off in a series of guerilla raids. Their vast technological superiority did the British little good. The Mullah made them look like a bulldog chasing a fox. He even captured three Maxim guns. A British intelligence officer wrote in 1903: "Up to the present, the British forces in Somaliland have always done what the Mullah wished, and have carried out what he has prophesied. He always told his followers that they have only to kill a white man in any fight and that the English would immediately run away. At the actions of Ferdaddin, Erigo, Gumburo and Daratole, we have had officers killed and have had to retire, and have been unable to return to battlefields with reinforcements to face the Mullah again . . . " Though Queen Victoria reigned over the British base at Berbera, the Mullah ruled the hinterland. Mohamed Abdulle Hassan was a master strategist, a famous holy man, leader of a new and fiercely anti-foreign Sufi sect, a leading Islamic scholar and a great poet, in a nation of poets - the Somali nomad's grapevine is *made* of poetry (Aidid uses the radio). He was also a bloodthirsty monster who ruled by terror, via 200 fanatical followers - men like "Yusuf the Nose-Chopper" - who killed, maimed and tortured at his bidding. He also terrorised rival clans, or those who offended him. In a way, he had little choice - the concept of a ruler was not one with which the individualistic, clannish and xenophopic Somalis were familiar, for each was his own Sultan. The Mullah's anti-foreign stance, his religious appeal and sheer charisma attracted followers, and he kept them obedient and united - and indeed loyal - by keeping them terrified. He was an improbable mixture of Shakespeare and Attila the Hun. It might not be a coincidence that General Aidid, who holds together a fragile alignment of four clans, is accused by Amnesty International of atrocities and other grave human-rights abuses. Many of his countrymen blame him for most of the killings of tens of thousands of Somalis in the past 18 months. Amnesty says thousands of unarmed civilians, including women and children, have been murdered simply for belonging to a rival clan - and it holds the warlords as much to blame as the famine for the 300,000 Somalis, mostly children, who died of starvation last year. Aidid, too, is a monster. The British finally conquered the Mullah in 1920, when they brought in World War 1 biplanes and bombed the old man in his desert fastness. The Mullah and his men had never seen aircraft before, and they fled in terror. "The sky could not be told from the earth!" the Mullah wrote in a subsequent lament. "What could a man do but run for his life?" This was a mistake. The bombs did little damage, and if the dervishes had instead run back inside their fortified town they could have held the British forces off for months. But the Mullah panicked and took horse. And, old and fat though he now was, the British once again couldn't catch him. He died in his bed a year later, of the flu, surrounded by his devoted dervishes. Today he is a legend, known by every Somali as a great resistance leader and the country's greatest poet. Post-independence Somalia erected a statue of him mounted on his horse, on a hill above Mogadishu. In 1991, as the nation plunged into chaos, the statue was toppled and sold for scrap, which Somali scholar Abdi Sheik-Abdi, who wrote the definitive book on the Mullah (Divine Madness, Zed Books, 1992), called "an unmitigated death-blow to Somali nationalism and even nationhood". General Aidid is no Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, but, unlike the Mad Mullah, he knows how to handle bombers. He does it the same way the Mullah handled Maxim guns: when they arrive, he is not there. If he succeeds in updating the Mullah's tactics, he could survive in Somalia longer than the UN. >Within each of those borders, there seems to be relative calm (if >not destitution). Barring the technologies that give us civil >services and health care, I wonder if the number of homicides are >comparable to an inner city community in the US (i.e. Watts/LA, CA) >-- Different culture, different societal infrastructure but, similar >results (not including environmental impacts and lack of medical >care). <snip> _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
