Articles filed under Somalia | Middle East Research and Information Project

From the Editors

published in MER180

“Propaganda to Journalism” was the New York Times headline on a year-end story about mass media in former Socialist countries, without the slightest self-consciousness about how US coverage of events like the Somalia intervention exemplifies “journalism to propaganda.” Perhaps there have been equally bizarre landings in the history of the US Marines -- Beirut, for instance, in July 1958, when they splashed onto a beach full of sunbathers and Coca-Cola vendors. In this latest patriotic spectacle, troops landed in camouflage uniforms and greased faces, only to find their high-tech night vision goggles rendered useless, even hazardous, by the glare of the television camera lights.

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The Intervention in Somalia: What Should Have Happened

An Interview with John Paul Lederach

by Joe Stork

published in MER181

John Paul Lederach directs the International Conciliation Service of the Mennonite Central Committee, and has been working closely in the past five years with Somalis in North America, Europe and Somalia, in particular with a Somali forum, Ergada. He also teaches at Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Joe Stork spoke with him in early February 1993.

People working in the Horn have expressed the view that the situation had deteriorated to the point where an internally generated reconciliation had become impossible. Some sort of external intervention was necessary.

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From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement

The Somalia Precedent

by Patrick Gilkes

published in MER185

The US decision to intervene in Somalia in December 1992 came well after the two-year-old crisis had finally hit the headlines. The power vacuum that followed the flight of Siad Barre from Mogadishu in January 1991, and the subsequent civil war in the capital, particularly the fighting between November 1991 and March 1992, attracted little attention despite the country’s collapse into anarchy. [1]

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An Interview with Muhammad Sahnoun

by Joe Stork

published in MER187

Muhammad Sahnoun is a former Algerian diplomat who served as the special representative of UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in Somalia prior to the US military intervention there. He is presently a fellow at the International Development and Research Center in Ottawa. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington, DC in August 1993.

You are from a country that went through a national liberation struggle and which has historically taken a strong position against intervention. Yet you’re a practitioner of intervention. Do you see this as a new period requiring actions of this sort, or is this something that’s long overdue?

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On Piracy and the Afterlives of Failed States

by George R. Trumbull IV

published in MER256

Until the resurgence of naval predation in the late 2000s, pirates were confined to the realm of the fantastic -- novels, films and stage productions. Since Western states last worried about pirates in the eighteenth century, the intrinsic, man-bites-dog interest of contemporary pirates for the popular press is easy to understand. The reemergence of piracy as a political problem, however, has in no way banished the fantastic from current understandings of the phenomenon, nor of Somalia, whence the most famous of today’s maritime bandits come. The fantasy is evident in media coverage, but in policy discourse as well. Once upon a time, begins the tale, there was a state called Somalia and now there is not. Pirates flourish where the writ of government has entirely lost its sway.

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Somalia Airstrikes Are Not the Answer

by Khalid Mustafa Medani | published February 8, 2007

On January 24, the US launched a second round of airstrikes in Somalia against alleged al-Qaeda terrorists believed to be responsible for the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Intended to eradicate these extremist elements from the Horn of Africa, the airstrikes instead exacerbated the chaos brought on by the fall of the Union of Islamic Courts to US-backed Ethiopian forces late last year. Continued instability renders Somalia ripe for the reemergence of the same kind of militancy the US strikes aimed to eliminate. Limited military actions cannot prevent Somalia from reverting to militant haven status, but a comprehensive, three-pronged US approach could.