Tafelberg Short: Somalia - Fixing Africa's Most Failed State. Greg Mills

Tafelberg Short: Somalia - Fixing Africa's Most Failed State - Greg Mills


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      Somalia – Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State

      Greg Mills, J. Peter Pham and David Kilcullen

      Tafelberg

      Somalia: the archetypal failed state

      Parts of Mogadishu today look like those pictures one sees in sepia of Ypres or Amiens or Stalingrad or Berlin. In the old part of town, in the area around the once-prestigious Lido Beach, the shells of buildings, pockmarked carcasses of war, form monuments to more than two decades of fighting, most recently between the African Union’s peacekeepers (known widely as Amisom – the AU Mission in Somalia) and the militant jihadist Al-Shabaab movement. The roads are unpaved, less a path than bucking bronco, testament to decades of no investment; there is rubbish everywhere, smouldering underneath the human and goat scavengers, with plastic bags flying and lying around. The grandstand at Tarabunka, where the former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre took the salute of his armed forces, is a tangled mess of concrete and reinforced steel, discarded car chassis and panels, and pathetic refugee shelters and shops.

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      Somalia has more than 1.2 million refugees, including 300,000 in Mogadishu alone, among them these in Camp 77.

      And the locals say things have really improved recently.

      On the western outskirts of the city there are thousands of refugees crammed into Sonak and Camp 77, enveloping the once-proud Gaheyr University facilities. When one turns off towards the old stadium (now a camp for some of the 300,000 internally displaced people in Mogadishu, from more than 1.2 million countrywide) just after Village Restaurant where two suicide bombers killed themselves and a dozen civilians in an attack shortly after the election by parliament of a new president in September 2012, the Bakara market complex beckons, a site for regular Al-Shabaab suicide bombings and assassinations. Regardless, it remains a hive of commercial activity. People go about their business on foot and donkey carts, peddling petrol, fussing outside brightly decorated premises advertising building material and auto spares, with women constantly moving in brightly coloured scarves and veils like flares in the dusty gloom.

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      Years of war have placed Somalia at the bottom of the ‘Failed States Index’ for five straight years, and the effects are visible everywhere.

      And it is remarkable how, for all the outward destruction, much of the economy has survived. In fact, the failed state of Somalia has actually served some segments of the population rather well. This is one reason why Somalia cannot be rebuilt unless Somalis change their attitude toward each other, whatever the African Union or the wider international community offers and does.


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