Somalia a Country in Peril, a Policy Nightmare
www.enoughproject.org AP PHOTO/MOH AM ED SHEIKH NOR SOMALIA A Country in Peril, a Policy Nightmare By Ken Menkhaus ENOUGH Strategy Paper September 2008 This is the first of two ENOUGH strategy papers on Somalia by Ken Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College and a specialist on the Horn of Africa. Based on recent field research, the first half of this report provides an analysis of the current crisis in Somalia. The second half critically examines why international policies toward Somalia have produced disastrously unintended results, and makes an urgent case for a review of those policies. A follow-up report will explore options and make recommendations for a new, more effective, international approach to Somalia. he world has grown numb to Somalia’s seem- of an Ethiopian military occupation. How did it get ingly endless crises—18 years of state collapse, to be this bad? Tfailed peace talks, violent lawlessness and warlordism, internal displacement and refugee flows, chronic underdevelopment, intermittent PART I: THE CURRENT CRISIS famine, piracy, regional proxy wars, and Islamic ex- tremism. It would be easy to conclude that today’s disaster is merely a continuation of a long pattern 1. Hurtling toward disaster of intractable problems there, and move on to the The current crisis in Somalia is the culmination of a next story in the newspaper. So Somalia’s in flames series of developments since 2004, when national again—what’s new? reconciliation talks produced an agreement on a Transitional Federal Government, or TFG.1 The TFG, The answer is that much is new this time, and it led by President Abdullahi Yusuf, was intended to would be a dangerous error of judgment to brush be a government of national unity, tasked with off Somalia’s current crisis as more of the same.
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