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Open Thread 08-04
The "paper of record" wants you to know that an Inquiry Finds Power Failure in London Jumbo Jet Crash.
A ‘Jumbo Jet’ is a four-engine Boeing 747 while the plane that crashed in London was a twin-engine ‘Triple Seven’. A trivial mistake one may think but for the fact that the crash landing was likely a result of engine problems.
If the NYT gets even such banalities wrong, how about other stuff? Yes, a rhetorical question …
News accounts are often misleading – intentionally or by mistake – and one has to read from multiple sources to know what really happens.
In the last open thread Bea documents the Israeli attempts to derail the current ‘peace process’. b real keeps watch on AFRICOM and on the aftermath of the Coup in Kenya.
Please help their efforts and contribute your news & views here.
This is an open thread.
garowe online: Somalia’s govt says insurgents briefly captured airbase, looted weapons
BAIDOA, Somalia Jan 25 (Garowe Online) – Somali insurgents raided and briefly seized a major military airbase in southern Somalia on Friday after out-gunning base soldiers, a military official has said.
“The insurgents who attacked Baledogle [airbase] captured the base and looted weapons, medicines and other equipment,” local police commissioner Isse Moallim Yasir told Garowe Online.
Three government soldiers were killed and six others wounded in the short skirmish with the heavily-armed rebels, who briefly captured the base and held other soldiers hostage.
Baledogle, 100KM northwest of the capital Mogadishu, is located in Lower Shabelle region.
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A spokesman for the al-Shabaab guerrillas claimed responsibility for the raid, saying that there was “no resistance” at the base and denied reports of any deaths on the al-Shabaab side.
Al-Shabaab spokesman Mukhtar Robow “Abu Mansur” told a Mogadishu-based radio station later today that they captured several Somali soldiers alive, while others “hid in the mosque.”
He said al-Shabaab later released all the captured soldiers.
that station was shabelle radio/media network, whose website is again down. aweys yusuf, who was one of the primary reporters until he was forced to flee for his safety when the TFG was threatening the station (among others), is now a correspondant for reuters (and subject to their editors and handlers), which put up the following article
Islamist rebels conduct raid on Somali airfield
Islamist insurgents briefly seized control of Somalia’s biggest military airfield on Friday and looted weapons, witnesses and an Islamist commander said.
Muktar Ali Robow, leader of the al-Shabab rebel militia, told a local radio station his forces also captured government troops during the raid on Baledogle, about 100km west of the capital, Mogadishu.
“We seized Baledogle Airport, took supplies of arms and also captured some Somali soldiers, but we released them,” Robow told Shabelle Radio by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Residents said Islamist fighters armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades took control of the airfield before breaking into two armouries and leaving.
“They seized the airport and killed three soldiers. We saw them taking government weapons with them and burning two battlewagons,” resident Ali Aded Diriye told Reuters by phone.
michael weinstein of PINR, which doesn’t appear to be publishing yet this year, has a good commentary up at garowe online
What Somalia Teaches Us About the World
The Courts’ attempted reforms were firmly rooted in a humane understanding of Islam that accorded with traditional Somali culture – the Quranic proclamation that human beings are “co-directors in the earth” and are responsible for creating a just and merciful community. This humane disposition offered the promise of an Islamic political formula consistent with modernity, yet rooted in revealed religion. One did not have to be a Muslim to be moved by the life-affirming creativity of the side of the Courts movement that was shown as it ascended.
The failure of the Courts movement as a result of internal excess and external repression has effaced the memory of its integrative potential.Indeed, foreign journalists, commentators and analysts systematically discounted the integrative tendencies of the Courts at the moment when they were most obvious – perhaps the possibility of a humane Islamic (not Islamist) politics was too inconvenient to acknowledge.
Recognition of the Courts’ life-affirming side does not imply the judgment that the cynics were perverse, but only that they neglected half the story – the part that revealed that Somalis are not inherently contentious and clan-bound, that they are capable of attempting to forge a political community when they are presented with an attractive political formula that resonates with their received culture and is based in grassroots self-help; that they have the potential to create a more favorable balance of public function and private interest.
The tragedy of contemporary Somalia is that the most promising formula for a political community has been shattered. When Somalia devolved after 1990 and became stateless, people turned to the mosques and created autochthonous institutions that became the springboard for the Courts revolution. Where can they turn now? Where is the focal point for popular impetus? What will bring people out of the self-destructive self-protection that marks the demoralized phase of the human condition – the “fretful and grudging” disposition that the Quran so aptly names and attributes to anxiety.
It is disquieting to read all the plans for reorganizing Somalia that pour out from the pens of Somali intellectuals and Western experts. Many of them are intelligent and insightful, and some of them are well-intentioned, but none of them factor in the Somalis as a people capable of exerting collective will. All the plans see-saw between top-down and bottom-up approaches, and centralist, federalist, confederalist and cantonalist structural formulas. All the plans are elitist, guided by an engineering mentality; none of them is organic, inspired by awakening popular sentiment. This is not to cast blame; putting the cart before the horse is a symptom of demoralization, an indication of a political post-traumatic stress disorder and perhaps it makes the best of a bad situation. The problem is that the wide diversity of plans ends up mirroring the divisions of a devolved political community rather than overcoming them. State structure
is not the fundamental issue; mobilization of popular will is what is wanting and wanted.
An outsider has no business telling people how to organize their lives – it is rude, arrogant and patronizing to do so, and it would behoove Western governments, international organizations and assorted “experts” to own up to that. An outsider can, however, legitimately respond to questions that insiders ask him. Somalis continually query: Why do the great powers seem to aid and abet our suffering? Why do they treat us like stepchildren? Why do they turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by their proxies?
The simple, honest and brutal answer is that they do not find it in their perceived interest to give full-hearted and appropriate help and encouragement. It is not that they are in conspiracy to hold Somalia back, but that Somalia is just a piece in the mosaic of their foreign policies that has no value in and for itself, but is one element of a regional strategy that is based on what regional actors can bring to the table. From the viewpoint of the great powers, Ethiopia is the linch-pin state, Djibouti gets their foot into the door, Eritrea is a North Korea without nuclear weapons and Somalia is too disorganized to take seriously, except as a possible staging base for “terrorists” and, secondarily, as a potential source of raw materials and as another foothold for power in the Middle East. Their utopia, sketched in the strategic plan for the U.S. military’s Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, is a harmonized region following the dictates of Western policy. Short of that impossible dream, they will settle for an uneasy alliance with Ethiopia and a dependent Djibouti. One can question the wisdom of this policy all that one wishes,but it remains the perceived interest of the major international actors.
The annoying – to understate the sentiment – aspect of the international powers’behavior is its hypocrisy: they talk the humanitarian and democratic talk, but they do not walk the walk. It is understandable that Somalis try to hold them to their words, but that has little or no effect.
What Somalia teaches us about the world is that one has to bring something to the table to count. Ethiopia brings its sheer size and military force, Djibouti brings its location and receptivity, and Eritrea brings its track record of determined resistance. At present, Somalia brings little or nothing.
The most important asset that Somalia could bring to the table in the future would be an effective political organization based on an integrated political community supported by popular will. The key is popular impetus crystallized around an attractive political formula. The watchword is self-organization that does not provoke destructive external intervention. No doubt, that will be difficult to achieve, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Posted by: b real | Jan 25 2008 19:30 utc | 98
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