Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Operation Somalia: The U.S., Ethiopia and now Kenya
By Aaron Maasho
Ethiopia did it five years ago, the Americans a while back. Now Kenya has rolled tanks and troops across its arid frontier into lawless Somalia, in another campaign to stamp out a rag-tag militia of Islamist rebels that has stoked terror throughout the region with threats of strikes.
The catalyst for Nairobi’s incursion was a series of kidnappings by Somali gunmen on its soil. A Frenchwoman was bundled off to Somalia from northern Kenya, while a British woman and two female aid workers from Spain, abducted from a refugee camp inside Kenya, are also being held across the border.
The incidents caused concern over their impact on the country’s vital tourism industry, with Kenya’s forecast 100 billion shillings or revenue this year expected to falter. The likes of Britain and the United States have already issued warnings against travel to some parts of the country.
Kenyans have so far responded with bravado towards their government’s operation against the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group. Local channels regularly show high approval ratings for the campaign, some as high as 98 percent.
“The issue of our security is non-negotiable,” one commentator told a TV station in the wake of the announcement. Another chipped in with: ”We’ve been casual to the extent of endangering our national sovereignty. Kenya has what it takes to get rid of this dangerous threat once and for all.”
from Photographers Blog:
The children of Dadaab: Life through the lens
Through my video “The children of Dadaab: Life through the Lens” I wanted to tell the story of the Somali children living in Kenya’s Dadaab. Living in the world’s largest refugee camp, they are the ones bearing the brunt of Africa’s worst famine in sixty years.
I wanted to see if I could tell their story through a different lens, showing their daily lives instead of just glaring down at their ribbed bodies and swollen eyes.
It was a challenging project. As one senior photographer asked, how else can we tell the story without showing images that clearly illustrate the plight of the starving millions? Few photographs cover all aspects of life in the camps.
Many of Dadaab’s children are dying. And then there are others who, despite living in the world’s oldest refugee camp, embrace their childhood; they play, go to school, care for their siblings and collect water for their families. I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of life for Dadaab’s children into this project.
To tell the story, I combined Reuters photography captured during the height of the famine with footage I had collected when I was in Dadaab six months ago, before the severity of the crisis hit international headlines.
The point is, when news of the famine made it to the front pages, the children I had filmed in Dadaab were now only perceived as children on the frontline of famine. Not just as children who were excited with the furor we brought to the camp.
from Photographers Blog:
Me and the man with the iPad
By Barry Malone
I never know how to behave when I go to write about hungry people.
I usually bring just a notebook and a pen because it seems somehow more subtle than a recorder. I drain bottled water or hide it before I get out of the car or the plane. In Ethiopia a few years ago I was telling a funny story to some other journalists as our car pulled up near a church where we had been told people were arriving looking for food.
We got out and began walking towards the place, me still telling the tale, shouting my mouth off, struggling to get to the punch line through my laughter and everybody else’s.
Then there was this sound, a low rumbling thing that came to meet us.
I could feel it roll across the ground and up through my boots. I stopped talking, my laughter died, I grabbed the arm of the person beside me: “What is that?” And I realized. It was the sound of children crying. There were enough children crying that -- I’ll say it again -- I could feel it in my boots. I was shamed by my laughter.
Hi blairhickman,
Thank you for your feedback. Barry’s name is visible on the right-hand side of the blog post under Author profile, along with a biography and a portrait.
Cheers,
Corinne
Online Visual Editor
from Photographers Blog:
AUDIO SLIDESHOW: Two Decades, One Somalia
In the 20 years since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled, Somalia has faced hunger, flooding, fighting, suicide attacks, piracy and insurgency.
Prevailing violent conflict inside Somalia makes it difficult if not impossible for aid agencies to reach people.
AlertNet brings you special coverage of the country which has struggled without a strong central government ever since.
Here is a selection of Reuters pictures from 1993 to 2011 on this war-torn country and failed state.
Update on the refugee camp that now lives in the sky
Screen grab of the introduction to the online game "The City That Shouldn't Exist"
A few months ago I wrote a story about a controversial online game posted on Facebook called the “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” that was consequently pulled off the Web days after its launch amid claims it objectified refugees and lacked sensitivity.
The game developed by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) with funding from ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian agency, and designed to raise awareness of Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, is now back online but with some noticeable changes.
Some features have been removed such as Mr. ECHO’s lover calling him “my hero” as he leaps out of bed on hearing an emergency siren go off. That was deemed too cheesy. You can still rescue or “drag and drop” your refugees as you do your supplies but instead of them walking towards a pile of bones, now they just walk towards a hole.
“My refugees were dying like flies because I couldn’t work out how to drag’n'drop supplies. Haven’t felt so stressed since I worked for ECHO!” posted Marianne Farrar-Hockley on the Facebook page hosting the game.
As If!!! Insensitive Aid worker stuff as usual from the “developed”. Clearly one has missed the point on the whole “humanitarian(ism)” rhyme and reason. Hope they find their peace … there in also will there be peace in many parts of the world experiencing conflict. We pray for Somalia.
Is Eritrean policy shift just “tactical”?
Eritrea’s arms seem to have been folded in a sulk for a long time now. The Red Sea state has, for some, taken on the black sheep role in the Horn of Africa family. But President Isaias Afewerki is looking eager to get off the naughty step.
His opponents say he was put there for good reason. Eritrea became increasingly isolated in the region after a 1998 – 2000 border war with neighbouring – and much bigger – Ethiopia.
Things have been tense between the two ever since – partly fueled by the fact that Eritrea only fully ceded from Ethiopia in 1993 after rebels led by Isaias and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi ousted a communist regime.
Eritrea has also fallen out with another neighbour, Djibouti. The two countries have been kicking each other in small but regular border clashes since 2008.
But the biggest blot on Eritrea’s copybook is its alleged backing of Somalia’s Islamist al Shabaab rebels – fast becoming an ulcer, not just for Somalia, but for the whole region. Analysts say Eritrea funds and trains Shabaab as a way of getting at Ethiopia, the West’s closest regional ally and a country that sent troops into Somalia in 2006 to run another Islamist group out of the capital.
The United Nations Security Council finally took action against Eritrea last December, imposing sanctions for its destabilising meddling in Somalia.
Well Meles would say that wouldn’t he? but what is interesting is why is Meles spending so much energy in blackmailing and defaming Eritrean when he has so much to do in country
Let US BRIEFLY see the situation in Ethiopia
1. HIV/AIDS is in a rampant stage
2.There is chronic food shortage
3. the gab between the haves and the have nots increasing at sky rocketing rate
4.The prostitution industry is on the increase
5. People are dying from curable diseases
6. Ethiopians are know for poverty through out the world
7. the country is divided by ethnicity problems -very fragile politics that can shatter down any time
….etc
the list are endless
so what does it matter if Meles says anything about Eritrean-it would matter if such comment comes from a successful leader but From Meles–he is making himself subject of mockery
Meles is a failure
even his hometown Tigray is suffering from shortage of water
I urge Meles to deal with his domestic problems first before he can be consulted about regional issues
The leadership quality of a leader is not measured by the quality of his interviews or the equableness of his speech but by the change that he can bring on the quality of life of his people
Hence using Meles is a poor reference for any sort of political analysis of that region
Why is the world ignoring Somalia?
I’m blogging from the African Union’s annual summit in Addis Ababa and can see the Somali delegation from where I’m sitting. They’re mingling right now, cups of coffee and croissants in hand, pressing the flesh and smiling and joking with leaders and ministers from all over the continent and beyond. Delegates are responding warmly to the men who represent a government hemmed into only a few streets of the capital Mogadishu as they fight an increasingly vicious Islamist rebellion.
But you get the sense the other delegates are responding so warmly to compensate for something: The fact that the Somalis are here looking for help and nobody is really willing to stick their neck out and give it to them.
Somalia’s strife — as well as the conflicts in Sudan and DR Congo — have dominated the agenda at these summits for years now. But there’s something different about this year. The African delegates seem confused – really genuinely confused – about why the international community is dragging its heels.
When Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero — a guest at the summit – stood up on the opening day he made some of the most dramatic remarks any world leader has made on the Horn of Africa country.
“If we do not support the transitional government more, Somalia could become a place that could destroy humanity,” he said. “The proper response is a strong response from the international community, led by the U.N. Somalia is suffering.”
Strong stuff, but Zapatero didn’t offer any real help. African leaders will have taken heart, though, from the fact that he seemed to be pushing the UN to send in peacekeepers — something the African Union, with its beleaguered force of 5,000 under constant attack in Mogadishu, has been crying out for.
After Zapatero, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon took the podium.
For more in-depth news about Africa, you may want to visit Newstime Africa http://www.newstimeafrica.com – We cover the whole of Africa
You’re kidding, right?
The attack on the AMISOM compound AND DynCorp office — good luck finding much coverage of the latter or any discussion of its ramifications — were a preemptive strike against foreign fighters in Mogadishu, reportedly timed during a meeting b/w several international representatives, at a stage where reports of AMISOM’s enhanced mandate to wage counterinsurgency operations abound.
Same situation that took place in Beledweyn a few months back when a hotel bombing took out the TFG’s security minister and others who had just returned from Ethiopia leading fresh forces planning on conducting operations in Central Somalia as they were holding meetings.
It was only the western media that “billed” the attacks last week as revenge, leaving out, among other important contexts, that of its strategy. That’s essentially propaganda – you leave out the context to shape the reader’s perception of what took place, which in this case strips one of the parties of any logical catalyst, substituting, instead, that of irrational & reactionary behavior.
This then sets up the opportunity to cherry pick quotes from select individuals — assuming they exist at all & were not constructed out of whole cloth — that reinforce the framing of a narrative that biasedly supports one of the parties in the conflict at the expense of the population at large, relying on several unquestioned premises to do so: the TFG is a legitimate, constituted govt of the people of Somalia; the foreign fighters propping it up on behalf of its foreign sponsors are “peacekeepers” and wearing the white hats; the rebels are extremists, unpopular in Somalia, and should be destroyed.
This blog entry is no different. It purports to tell us that we can learn (“may be instructive”) from the quoted reaction of a businesswoman, trying to make sense of the reason provided her for the bombing, that there is likely popular support for “a real international force” to invade Somalia and “[take] the fight to them in Mogadishu and elsewhere,” w/ “them” being conflated into “al Qaeda” in the third-from-last paragraph.
The real instructive lesson to be learned from all the attacks against foreign forces in Somalia is that the people of Somalia are just like most everybody else on the planet – they do not like uninvited foreign militaries in their neighborhoods, especially when they have been sent their to protect rulers imposed on them by outsiders. Advocation of sending “a real international force” – one supposes that this implies U.S. leadership – into “Mogadishu and elsewhere” only indicates a failure of comprehension at the most fundamental levels.
from Our Take on Your Take:
Too busy with pirates
My initial contact with Abdinasir Mohamed Guled was when he submitted a photo to our user-generated content service, called You Witness at the time, now Your View. The caption read "hi reuters" and the location was listed as Mogadishu suqa holaha district. This was enough to peak my attention.
I spoke with Abdinasir, who at the time was busy covering the story of pirates off the Somali coast. Below is his account of his journey from contributor to You Witness to regular stringer for Reuters.
A Somali family arrive at the Elasha Biyaha camp for the internally displaced after they fled from renewed clashes in Mogadishu, May 13, 2009. REUTERS/Abdi Guled
"Before working for Reuters I was working for a local radio station in Mogadishu and for various websites. I was working as a producer and would contribute to CNN.
I do like taking photographs, however it is not always easy in Somalia. One day I took a picture of Ethiopian soldiers walking on the street. They were really annoyed. One of the soldiers asked me what I was doing and I told him I was fixing my camera. He asked me to show him the picture and told me to leave the area. Be careful, always.
I saw movie called “Loard of Wars” it is on same lines. Where Nicholas cage is trader of arms ammunation selling to both parties.
So the USA bombs Somali, and the Somali bomb Kenyans. That’s why USA wants Somali to think Kenya is bombing them. Well played Kenya Cabinet!
“Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, is surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that JSOC has repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps that have attracted some Somali Americans.
But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/n ational-security/under-obama-an-emerging -global-apparatus-for-drone-killing/2011 /12/13/gIQANPdILP_story.html?hpid=z1