Islamists gain support as they resist federal forces that prey upon a traumatized and starving public.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Islamist insurgents poured into the streets to defend the merchants. The soldiers got hammered, taking heavy casualties and retreating all the way back to the presidential palace. It too came under fire.
Mohamed Abdirizak, a top government official, crouched on a balcony at the palace, with bullets whizzing over his head.
"I feel this slipping away," he said.
By its own admission, the transitional federal government of Somalia is on life support. When it came here to the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia's cycles of war, chaos and suffering.
But now its leaders say that unless they get more help — international peacekeepers, weapons, training and money to pay their soldiers, among other things — this transitional government will fall, just like the 13 governments that preceded it.
Less than a third of the promised African Union soldiers have shown up, and the United Nations has shied away from sending peacekeepers anytime soon. Even the Ethiopians are taking a back seat, often leaving the government's defense to overwhelmed teenage Somali troops with clackety guns.
The Islamists have been gaining recruits, overrunning towns and getting bolder. The new prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, has been reaching out to them, and some are receptive, but it is unclear whether he has the power within his own divided government to strike a meaningful peace deal before it is too late.
The looming failure is making many people question the strategy of installing the transitional government by force. In December 2006, Ethiopian troops, aided by U.S. intelligence, ousted the Islamist administration that briefly controlled Mogadishu, bringing the transitional government to the city for the first time.
In recent weeks, the Islamists have routed warlords and militiamen who have been absorbed into the government forces but whose predatory tactics, like looting food, are undermining what little progress transitional leaders have made. After 17 years of civil war, Somalia's violence seems to be driven not so much by clan hatred, ideology or religiosity but by something much simpler: survival.
"We haven't been paid in eight months," said one government soldier named Hassan. "We rob people so we can eat."
Prime Minister Nur says he does not have the money to pay them. Each month, more than half of the government's revenue, mostly from port taxes, disappears — stolen by "our people," he said.
That leaves Nur with about $18 million a year in government money to run a failed state of 9 million of some of the world's neediest, most collectively traumatized people.
The U.N. World Food Program said Thursday, in a warning titled "Somalia Sinking Deeper into Abyss of Suffering," that the country was the most dangerous in the world for aid workers.
In the rat-tat-tat of nightly machine-gun fire, people are beginning to hear the government's death knell. Many residents have mixed feelings about this. They say, almost without exception, that life was better under the Islamists, but they fear what lies ahead.
Source: NY Times, Mar 30, 2008