26.4.07

Mogadishu: the new killing zone on the neocon 'liberation' trail

''There are so many wounded people; from babies to 90-year-olds. They are brought to the hospitals near my house in wheelbarrows and donkey carts, bleeding, missing limbs.
The smells and sounds are unbearable. I find myself crying. I need to go to the hospitals to chronicle what is happening. But it is getting too hard emotionally. As a reporter for Reuters I am an observer, but I am also a human being.''

READThe return of Somalia warlords by Amina Mire (Thanks to Reclaiming Space, Forever Under Construction, and Ben Heine who featured Mire's article on his blog)

3 comments:

Wolfie said...

I'm not quite sure that what is happening in Somalia can be blamed on the "Neo-Cons" Sophia. While it is true that the CIA is funding the other side the Islamist rebels are hardly "the good guys", they are indulging in genocide, wholesale rape and murder when they are not imposing Sharia law on a people who simply don't want to live in this way. Meanwhile the Arab League sit on their hands and do nothing.

Perhaps you could make your case in a separate post but I see the Somalian tragedy as a foretaste of a future without American intervention forces as the sun sets slowly on the American century.

Sophia said...

Wolfie,
The Arab league is a bunch of corrupt leaders sold to the Saudi kingdom. They did nothing for Palestine, nothing for Iraq, nothing for Lebanon, nothing for Soudan (I don't say Darfour because the Darfour tragedy is a Sudanese tragedy), and they are ot going to do anything for Somalia. However, by their intervention in Somalia and their unconditional support for Ethiopia, which is a belligerant state, the Bush adminstration and the neocons have opened hell again. War on civilian populations, illegal detention and torture have followed in the trail. As for Islamists, do you think that in all this anybody will be able to prosecute them for anything. There is so much furor, so much mayhem, and so much confusion that their crimes will be drowned and diluted in all this. I think the beginning of the end of American interventionnism is a good thing. With globalisation, people are becoming more and more aware politically, so we should let people liberate themselves, with openess from our part, not wars, not interventions, not radical politics. Military humanitarian intervention is the most hypocrite concept of the new century or the post cold war era. It is causing more damage, more regressions in democracies including ours...

Wolfie said...

Sophia,
The latest solution seems to me to just be the least bad choice of a whole load of bad choices that could have been made. I can see the reasoning behind UN and US desires for a regional solution considering that the UN is next to useless and the US is already overstretched. I would place more blame on the UN for this imperfect solution.

It would be nice if military interventions were no longer a necessity and I do realise they don't have a great record but I suspect that they serve some form of deterrent, with no policeman on the block I am concerned that every criminal would see their way clear for a crime spree. There was a time when Americans were the "good guys", it just seems such a long time ago...

 
Since March 29th 2006