Word: somalia
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Hussein Mohammed Aidid is still getting used to his transformation from warlord to Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister. But his assessment of the precarious hold the new government has on Somalia, after ousting an Islamist regime, is both candid and grim. "The institutions of the T.F.G. [Transitional Federal Government] are very weak," Aidid says in an interview with Time at his villa in Mogadishu. "It is a symbolic government. Permanence we do not have. We do not have institutions, we do not have a credible force. Unless [we receive outside assistance] quickly, we have no chance of building a nation...
...earlier incarnation, Aidid was - and some say still is - commander of a clan militia that ruled a district of Mogadishu from the barrel of a gun. A naturalized U.S. citizen who became a U.S. Marine in 1987 and served in Somalia in 1992, Aidid succeeded his father, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, as leader of a Saad clan militia after he was killed in 1996. In 1993, it was the elder Aidid's faction that killed 18 U.S. troops in a bloody Mogadishu street battle made famous by the book and movie Black Hawk Down. Today, by virtue of the clan power...
...Somalia's future hangs on whether the new government can achieve that reconciliation. Since the collapse of the last functioning government in 1991, Somalia has been a prisoner of bloody anarchy, a void filled by vicious and impressively armed chaos as rival warlords, clans and subclans, and Islamists prosecuted a series of civil wars - over power, over historic animosity and over competing visions of Islam. Last summer, the Islamic Courts Union (i.c.u.) - an alliance of clerics and clan leaders - took Mogadishu and forced the warlords out. In the last two weeks, the T.F.G., backed by thousands of troops from neighboring...
...President Bush is trying something similar. For much of 2006, Administration officials fretted about Somalia, where some of the ruling Islamists had terrorist ties. Next door in Djibouti, America stations around 1,000 troops. But instead of sending them in, we turned to Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbor and longtime rival. When the Ethiopian military rolled into Mogadishu and sent the Islamists fleeing last week, the Bush Administration kept a low profile, applauding the invasion and thanking its lucky stars that it was Ethiopia that launched...
...indicated the government realized it had been over-ambitious, saying it had called an emergency meeting Wednesday to hammer out a new disarmament plan and adding that the government would now be happy with a three-month process. Asked why this new try to establish a national government in Somalia would succeed when so many previous attempts had failed, Aidid replied: "This is a great chance. It is not an easy process. Reconciliation must be very aggressive." It's that last sentence that worries Somalia...