SA+cannot+join+proxy+war+in+Somalia,+Editorial,+City+Press

City Press, Johannesburg, 13/01/2007 15:51 - (SA)
=Tempting, but SA cannot join proxy war in Somalia=


 * Editorial**

SOMALIA is Africa’s forgotten crisis. It slips into focus now and again, but in the main, it languishes in its various wars below the radar, out of sight, and unfortunately, to many of us, out of mind.

Until something as drastic as a real war with jet fighters streams through our TV screens. Then we wake up and wonder what will happen.

It remains the responsibility of the leadership of our continent to ensure that just as it seems to have been done in Congo, Somalia is also drawn, kicking and screaming, into the new democratic fold of the Africa we are building.

In doing so, resources that Africa does not have are needed, and the hope must be that right-thinking nations within the international community will play their part.

But that help cannot be what the Americans are offering. The Union of Islamic Courts, which had arrogated to itself the right to marginalise the fledgling civilian effort at government, was hell-bent on creating a theocratic state based on sharia law.

They brooked no opposition and in the process were able to rout many of the warlords who had become a permanent feature of Somalia and Mogadishu in particular.

But even they were not a homogenous force. There were elements among them that were amenable to nationalistic interests and it is they who should have been persuaded to link up with the Transitional National Government. Instead, using the supposed presence of al-Qaeda as a pretext, the US pushed Ethiopia into Somali to do its dirty work.

The US has since followed with indiscriminate bombings of villages that have left many innocent people dead, with no proof of even the alleged targets having been found.

Ethiopia’s leader Meles Zenawi is presiding over a brutal regime in Ethiopia, which has seen opposition virtually outlawed and journalists jailed. He cannot be a torchbearer for a democratic revolution in Somalia when he presides over a dictatorship back home.

The situation in Somalia now runs the risk of becoming another Iraq, with the Union of Islamic Courts regrouping and waging a protracted guerilla war. It is into this scenario that SA is being asked to send troops, ostensibly to defend the transitional government but in reality, to do the dirty work for the US in its war on terror.

Let us be clear: the arrest of those responsible for the Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam bombings that killed innocent Africans is a responsibility that we all carry. But it cannot be allowed that the US unilaterally determines how that search is done and then expects all of us to fall in line.

Until the context is redefined and a proper role for our forces is outlined, where the AU, and not the US, sets the agenda of peace-making and peace-building exercise, we cannot go.


 * From: http://www.news24.com/City_Press/Leaders/0,7515,186-189_2054641,00.html**

489 words