Dec 07 2006
Why? It is not my country!
Just read this article on WP: Peacekeeping Force For Somalia Approved
In a rare move, “The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution authorizing an East African peacekeeping force to prevent an alliance of Islamic militias from overthrowing Somalia’s fragile interim government.”
But did anyone ask why the interim government is fragile? Who chose this government to begin with? Where does it get legitimacy from? If the answer is that the government was popularly elected, supported by a large middle class but threatened by a small band of military men, then this is a great development–because the government represents a widely-participated polity, has enough economic power and the right incentives to operate and the current situation is an anomaly.
Yet that is not the case in Somalia. What we are seeing is a state being born through internal struggle–as the Wars of Religion did for France, the English Reformation for GB and the unification for Germany. But instead of allowing this process to take its course, what the rest of the nations did was to still-born a state in a nation that desperately needs one.
Although the Council did the obvious by not allowing the Ethiopians to get involved, I still wonder what motivates the Ugandans: if they are too involved, e.g. they worried the Islamist movement will spill over to their country, their involvement will only enlarge the conflict. If they are not, why would they care? Hasn’t the American involvement in Iraq taught anyone anything?
The world is certainly spinning dizzingly fast …