AFP
The Somalian capital of Mogadishu in 1977, before it degenerated into chaos.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
An unpublicized and equally logical reason for this action: On Somali land and under the waters now frequented by Somali pirates lies oil wealth that could rival Kuwait’s.
Many oil companies are manoeuvring for a part of this potential oil bonanza — they include firms from China, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, which are already engaged in drilling — but the inside track may be held by British Petroleum and the UK, which has a long history of resource extraction in both Africa and the Middle East. In recent months, British foreign secretary William Hague visited Mogadishu, the Somali capital, for talks on “the beginnings of an opportunity” to rebuild the country and British Prime Minster David Cameron hosted an international summit on Somalia attended by 55 delegations, including a U.S. contingent led by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
But just who are the “we” Prime Minister Ali refers to? He heads the civil-war-wracked country’s transitional government which was installed in Somalia a decade ago by Western powers, which proved so unpopular that it soon needed an invasion by U.S. backed Ethiopian troops to remain in power, which relies for its continuance on U.S. drone strikes on the militants’ stronghold in the south of the country, and whose mandate expires in August of this year.
Somalia is today a hotbed of piracy and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists; a country that over the last two decades has endured near-continual war causing hundreds of thousands to die from violence and starvation, and a million to flee to other lands; a country of the impoverished, almost half of whom live on less than $1 a day. In the absence of good governance, any attempt to divide Somalia’s wealth among BP, Shell, and the other large and small players that are jockeying for position is likely to spell doom, particularly now that the stakes have been raised.
Rather than maintaining the pretence that Somalia rates status as a sovereign country — it is in fact comprised of several autonomous regions — the Somali people would be best served by reverting to the only system in the region’s recent history that saw relative peace and prosperity — when order was imposed by colonial powers acting under the authority of the United Nations. The post-Second World War protectorate of British Somaliland and the trust territory of Italian Somaliland fared relatively well until in 1960 these areas merged to become a greater Somali Republic. Had these Western powers continued to rule and to develop the Somali territories, untold suffering would have been averted and Somalis would have been better prepared for ultimate self-rule, as occurred especially with former British colonies that enjoyed longer colonial rule, such as India, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
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