Somalia is Not A State, Not A Failed State
The
United States has killed Aden Hashi Ayro in a missile strike. The US claims
Aden Hashi Ayro is an al-Queda trained terrorist in Somalia. This is a publicity stunt to create the
impression progress is being made against Al-Queda and to compensate for the
deteriorating security situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Somalia
was created in 1960, when British Somaliland won independence from the British
and Italian Somaliland was given independence by the UN mandatory
authority. It has never been a state.
In
the late 1950’s, Paolo Contini, a lawyer for the United Nations, was tasked
with writing a new constitution for Somalia prior to independence. It was a difficult task because the Somalis
have no written language. Therefore,
many of the concepts of western states have no meaning for Somalis. People with no written language can not
understand the idea of codifying laws.
In
the Black Hawk Down incident, American rangers killed hundreds of Somalis in
the course of losing a handful of their own.
For the past century, western involvement in the horn of Africa has
failed to bring either progress or peace to the people of the region. The population is still pre-literate living
in clan based cultures. To talk about
their leaders as part of Al-Queda is just eyewash. There are not that many people who reached
the 20th century without inventing some kind of writing. The Somalis are one of them.
The following is the article on the
airstrike from the Voice of America. Trying to depict Ayro as an Al-Queda ally
is quite a stretch.
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Missile
Strike Kills Somali Terrorist Leader |
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By Alisha Ryu |
A missile strike has reportedly killed the
al-Qaida-trained founder and leader of Somalia's militant al-Shabab insurgent
group in central Somalia. Aden Hashi Ayro was on the U.S. list of suspected
terrorists giving sanctuary to al-Qaida operatives believed to be responsible
for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. VOA
Correspondent Alisha Ryu has details from our East Africa Bureau in Nairobi.
Residents in the Somali town of Dusamareb,
about 480 kilometers north of the capital Mogadishu, say a thunderous explosion
woke them out of bed before dawn.
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This
undated handout image provided on May 1, 2008 by IntelCenter shows a video
still image of Aden Hashi Ayro |
An eyewitness, Elmi Hassan, tells VOA that
the house where Aden Hashi Ayro had been staying was engulfed in flames after
being hit by what Hassan believes were missiles.
Hassan says he is not sure whether the
missiles were fired from a plane or launched from a ship, but he says they
destroyed the house and killed people and animals. Hassan says he had
seen American planes flying over the area in recent days.
In a telephone interview with Somali
journalists, the spokesman for the radical Shabab movement Sheik Muktar Robow
confirmed that Ayro, another senior Shabab leader, and seven other people were
killed in an air strike, which he blamed on the United States.
Robow, who is also known as Abu Mansour,
calls Ayro a martyr and says the attack will not deter Ayro's followers from
their fighting.
According to numerous Somali and western
intelligence sources, Ayro received terrorist training from al-Qaida in
Afghanistan in the 1990s and gave protection to al-Qaida operatives wanted by
the United States for their role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in East
Africa 10 years ago.
Ayro is also believed to have played a key
role in establishing ties between al-Qaida and the ultra-fundamentalist Shabab movement,
which had functioned as the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union during
its six-month rule over much of southern and central Somalia in 2006. The
Shabab is a State Department designated terrorist group.
The courts' links to al-Qaida through the
Shabab prompted Ethiopia, with U.S. support, to invade Somalia, oust the
Islamic Courts Union, and install a secular, but unpopular, interim government
in Mogadishu in December, 2006.
Ayro fled Mogadishu ahead of the Ethiopian
invasion and barely survived a U.S. missile attack last January in Ras Kamboni,
near Somalia's border with Kenya. In November, the hiding Islamist leader
released an audio recording, urging attacks on African Union peacekeepers.
The town where Ayro was killed, Dusamareb,
lies in the Galgadud region of central Somalia and is among a handful of towns
in the region dominated by members of Ayro's clan, the Ayr.
The Ayr is a sub-clan of the Hawiye tribe
that forms the majority in Mogadishu. Somali sources tell VOA that Ayro
had sought refuge among the Ayr in the Galgadud region, while leading the
Shabab in an Iraq-style insurgency against Ethiopian and Somali troops in the
country.