.....*Somalia moving closer to total collapse*..........
By Jeffrey Gettleman, International Herald Tribune, Published: February 20, 2007, NAIROBI
Fierce mortar attacks killed more than 10 civilians in Somalia on Tuesday, and that is virtually the new status quo.
Nearly every day, government forces and insurgents shell each other across dilapidated neighborhoods in the capital, Mogadishu, scattering limbs and any remaining traces of hope. Gun prices are soaring, more clans are joining the underground, and an outbreak of cholera sweeps the countryside.
"To tell you the truth, I'm pretty worried," said Ali Mahdi Mohammed, an influential clan elder and once a contender for the presidency. "When the government came to Mogadishu last month, I felt we were going the right way. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore, and soon it's going to be too late."
Somalia is becoming a more violent and chaotic place, though this is not how it was supposed to be. Nearly two months ago, an internationally supported transitional government expelled the Islamist movement that ruled much of the country and steamed into the capital with great expectations. But confidence in the government — never very high — is rapidly bleeding away.
Somalia seems to be just shy of total collapse — again — because the Ethiopian troops who provided the muscle to throw out the Islamists have already begun to withdraw, while none of the peacekeepers promised from other African countries have arrived.
Hundreds of families are streaming out of Mogadishu, following pitted roads to villages where there is no electricity or medicine, nor the faintest hint of government, but no warfare — at least, not yet.
"We can't stand the shelling anymore," said Hassan Mohammed, a father of four headed to a village in the south.
There was a brief burst of optimism beginning Dec. 28, when government troops, with serious Ethiopian firepower behind them, marched into Mogadishu and planted the hope that this was the end of nearly 16 years of anarchy and bloodletting.
Cheering crowds poured into the ruined streets. Aid experts in Nairobi began circulating ambitious reconstruction plans. Ethiopian and American officials, who worked together to overthrow the Islamists, whom they accused of threatening the entire Horn of Africa, breathed a mutual sigh of relief.
But the violence of the past few weeks has killed that mood. A deadly insurgency has started, beginning with a few clans connected to the Islamists and expanding to several more. Many government troops refuse to get involved.
"We're not going out there," said Dahir Hassan, a police captain, from the confines of his police station. "If we get hurt, who's going to take care of us?"
Analysts agree that the violence will continue and probably intensify unless the government genuinely reconciles with clan leaders, who control what happens in Somalia.
But so far, there has been little of that. Instead of reaching out to truly influential figures, analysts say that the government has picked ministers not because they have any substantial support among their clans but because they will do the government's bidding.
The result is an increasingly isolated, authoritarian and unpopular government in which the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, is accused of behaving more like a clan warlord — which he was — than a national leader.
"Where this government is heading is so far from where the international community wants it to go," said Ali Iman Sharmarke, co-owner of the HornAfrik radio station in Mogadishu.
A common complaint is that the transitional government is not working itself out of a job as promised. Donor nations agreed to pay the salaries of Somali officials with the understanding that they would shepherd the country to democratic elections in 2009.
But there has been almost no progress toward setting up an election commission, let alone taking a census. Many Somalis say they would be more inclined to support, or at least tolerate, the transitional government if they thought that it was, indeed, transitional.
To be fair, governing Somalia, which has not had a functioning central government since 1991, is not easy. Thirteen previous governments have been formed — and 13 have failed.
Abdirahman Dinari, the chief government spokesman, said that the criticism about the selection of ministers was just an excuse. "These people wouldn't be happy with anyone in power," he said.
He conceded that the government did not have the skills to pull the country together. "We need help," he said.
But Dinari said that help had been slow to arrive partly because international organizations were spending millions of dollars on Somalia staff based in Kenya, which is deemed a much safer place to work, instead of investing those resources directly in Somalia.
"This is not just our failure," he said, "but the failure of the international community."
But many say that argument rings hollow. Security in Somalia has never before depended on foreign troops or aid.
In the mid-1990s, the United States and the United Nations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stabilizing Somalia and they failed notoriously, leaving the country as capriciously violent and hopeless as it had ever been.
Then along came the Islamists, who during their 6-month reign last year pacified the hornet's nest of Mogadishu without foreign peacekeepers or significant foreign aid. They succeeded by getting clans to voluntarily disarm their militias and getting Somalis to buy into their Islam-is-the-answer solution. Somalia is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.
One Western diplomat laughed when asked if a modest force of peacekeepers — the African Union is proposing about 8,000 — could deliver the same level of stability that the Islamists had delivered on their own. "No way," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "And the government's urgency for peacekeepers shows you just how badly they've done with reconciliation."
