Word: somali
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Somali President Sheik Sharif Ahmed has described his job as the most difficult in the world, and he may be right. Now in its 19th year of civil war and without a government worthy of the name, Somalia is the world's most failed state, shattered by war and serving as a safe haven for both al-Qaeda and pirates. Sharif, a strict Islamist who nevertheless believes in dialogue with the West and who came to power in January, rules little more than a few blocks in Mogadishu, and recently even that has been threatened by a ferocious attack...
...violent and anarchic vacuum, a place that has gone 18 years without a government, which is an al-Qaeda sanctuary and destination of choice for hundreds of foreign jihadists, and where millions need food but where 40 aid workers have been killed since the start of 2008. Somali expert Ken Menkhaus, political science professor at Davidson College, calls it the "longest-running instance of complete state collapse in the post-colonial...
...Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Portugal, Russia, the Seychelles, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the U.S. and Yemen have all contributed to the effort to safeguard international sea trade. Currently that involves 25 warships, scores of surveillance planes and tens of thousands of sailors. (See pictures of Somali piracy...
...stating the obvious to say the Somali crisis that involves millions of people receives almost no attention while the Somali crisis that involves millions of dollars receives unprecedented military action. (Menkhaus says the pirates raised $20-$40 million in ransoms last year. They also cost the shipping industry millions more in hiked insurance premiums.) It's also true that land intervention in Somalia would be immeasurably bloodier than the sea operations underway, and the ineffectiveness of peacekeepers in Darfur, and the DRC raises big questions over whether such operations can ever be successful. It is widely acknowledged that finding...
...none of that makes any more palatable - or defensible in international law - the idea that the world's worst humanitarian disaster continues to unfold within sight of its most international military force. "Somehow the rights of ordinary Somalis seem not to count in the international system," says Alex de Waal, program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. "The Somali issue is framed entirely in terms of other political agendas...