My Life as a Diplomat
By NURUDDIN FARAH
New York Times
Cape Town
WATCHING from afar, people find it difficult to understand the intractability of the conflict in Somalia. The cycle of violence, almost mysteriously, remains uninterrupted. Peace breaks out. Victory is declared, as it was a couple of weeks ago when President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government declared its triumph over the rival Islamic Courts Union and the clan-based militia fighting alongside it. And then the violence quickly erupts again.
In Somalia, it has been clan versus clan, Muslim Somalis versus Christian Ethiopians, for as long as anyone can remember. A recent United Nations report asserted that a dozen or so countries — Egypt, Eritrea and Iran among them — are engaged in trying to destabilize Somalia.
Why can’t Somalia arrest its downward spiral?
Well, let me tell you about my brief time as an emissary between Somalia’s two main warring factions; perhaps it might help explain in concrete — and human — terms why the conflict has become so difficult to solve and why the transitional government, backed by the United States and with the support of Ethiopia, is probably doomed to fail.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
Cape Town
WATCHING from afar, people find it difficult to understand the intractability of the conflict in Somalia. The cycle of violence, almost mysteriously, remains uninterrupted. Peace breaks out. Victory is declared, as it was a couple of weeks ago when President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government declared its triumph over the rival Islamic Courts Union and the clan-based militia fighting alongside it. And then the violence quickly erupts again.
In Somalia, it has been clan versus clan, Muslim Somalis versus Christian Ethiopians, for as long as anyone can remember. A recent United Nations report asserted that a dozen or so countries — Egypt, Eritrea and Iran among them — are engaged in trying to destabilize Somalia.
Why can’t Somalia arrest its downward spiral?
Well, let me tell you about my brief time as an emissary between Somalia’s two main warring factions; perhaps it might help explain in concrete — and human — terms why the conflict has become so difficult to solve and why the transitional government, backed by the United States and with the support of Ethiopia, is probably doomed to fail.
(Continued here.)
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