A proud moment for all Americans

Shortly after arriving in Boston this morning I saw the news that Captain Richard Phillips was freed by US Navy SEALS in the Gulf of Aden...3 of his captors were shot dead and the fourth was captured. Hearing this gave me a great rush of patriotism, and I hope that all Americans felt the same way.

Perhaps this event will show the Somali pirates and their brethren in Mogadishu, the Al-Qaeda-allied Al-Shabaab militia, that America is not going to deal with their antics. These pirates picked the wrong crew to mess with, that's for sure, and eventually, it looked like these pirates would have been satisfied if they could have escaped with their lives, never mind the $2 million ransom they were demanded. However, their potential future in pirating met a violent end.

A collage of Somali pirates...time for transport ships like Maersk Alabama to be armed so they can protect themselves.

Navy SEALS in Afghanistan...let's hope that the Taliban scum who flog young girls and blow up mosques got news of what happened off the coast of Somalia.

Anyway, the Maersk Alabama arrived safely in Mombassa, Kenya, with all of its cargo. The ship was delivering aid to suffering Africans, and luckily all of that aid will be able to reach them.

Aid workers under attack

People sometimes forget how anyone can be fair game in a violent conflict...and aid workers, the people who try to help and put a smile on the face of the innocent people they are protecting, are no exception. In the last week, there have been several attacks and assassinations carried out by various thugs and terrorist groups operating in countries ranging from Africa to south Asia.

The latest example is an attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against two ships carrying aid supplies to war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka. LTTE "suicide squads" rammed two motor boats packed with explosives into the vessels, damaging one and nearly sinking the other. The ruthless Tamil fighters are growing more violent as the fighting intensifies with the Sri Lankan government.

A UNHCR convoy rumbles through the countryside in Uganda

Earlier this week, aid worker Gayle Williams, a native of London, was gunned down by Taliban militants in Kabul. She was heading off to work when two men on a motorbike opened fire...the Taliban later claimed responsibility and boasted about her killing, saying the aid worker was "spreading Christianity", whatever that is supposed to mean. Williams' charity organization is now considering withdrawing from the country amidst the deteriorating security situation. I hope the Taliban feel proud of what they have done to the Afghan people and those who are trying to help them.

Also earlier this week, suspected rebels from the Al-Shabab insurgency in Somalia shot dead Muktar Mohamed Mohamoud, an engineer working for the children's organization, UNICEF, in front of a tea shop. The attack came after another worker from the world food program was killed as he stepped out of a Mosque in Mogadishu.

It is a tough, dangerous, and even life-threatening line of work, but someone needs to be there to make the world a better place...even when the rest of the civilized world is too afraid to do anything about it, or too ignorant to look past their own borders.

The children of Africa

What happened after "Black Hawk Down"?

I have been busy working on several articles for some local newspapers, so I'm sorry that I haven't been able to update my blog. One of my articles focuses on the west's policy toward Africa and as I was doing some research, I found this story on BBC about Somalia. In a just world, this story would be at the top of the headlines, above economics and the financial crisis. No amount of foreclosures or bad lending can ever stack up to this.

Somalia is "most ignored" tragedy

The world should be shocked at the systematic destruction of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, and its residents, says lobby group Human Rights Watch.

The organisation told the BBC the city had become a zone of free-fire between government and insurgent forces.

It said if such a situation was happening anywhere else in the world, like Georgia or Lebanon for example, it would be considered a travesty.

Instead Somalia was the most ignored tragedy in the world today, HRW said.

Meanwhile, a group of 52 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has issued a statement saying the international community had "completely failed Somali civilians".

The aid groups estimate that almost 40,000 people had been displaced from Mogadishu in the last few weeks, with 1.1 million uprooted in the last nine months.

Eerie

BBC World Affairs correspondent Mark Doyle recently visited Mogadishu and says the city on the Indian Ocean, which was previously one of Africa's trading hubs with the Middle East, is dying.

Now whole swathes of it are rubble or skeletons of buildings without doors or windows or roofs, he says.

He adds that the most shocking, eerie aspect of it is that in many parts of the capital all the people have fled.

The fighting is between the US-backed government and Islamist and nationalist insurgents, who Washington accuses of having links with al-Qaeda.

There are no international aid workers left as they are threatened with kidnap for ransom or are murdered.

The fighting has been much worse for the ordinary residents of Mogadishu than even the infamous period in the early 1990s that spawned the film Black Hawk Down, a portrayal of US troops killed in Somalia at that time, our World Affairs correspondent says.

In the early 1990s not a night passed without explosions lighting up the sky, he says.

But even that did not empty the capital of Somalia like the daily fratricidal confrontations now taking place between the government and its armed opponents.

I suppose there is no interest in this conflict since American soldiers are no longer involved. I hope we do not make this same mistake with Iraq, especially with all the recent success...or just the same, Afghanistan.

Alarming news from East Africa...

Violence in Somalia has forced thousands of people to leave their homes, and many of them have turned to fleeing across the ocean to Yemen. Unfortunately, the journey is dangerous, but its probably safer than waiting around in battle-scarred Mogadishu.

This is from the BBC:

"The United Nations refugee agency says there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people crossing the Gulf of Aden in smugglers' boats. The UNHCR said almost 9,000 people, most of them Somalis, arrived in Yemen's coastal waters in the first two months of this year.

That is three times as many as during the same period last year, the organisation said in a statement.

At least 113 people died and a further 200 are missing, presumed drowned.

Those making the crossing were crammed into 182 boats, the Geneva-based UNHCR said."

Kenya fighting rages on

Violence in Kenya has taken a turn for the worse with Tuesday's assassination of an opposition lawmaker who had been working to end the crises. Ethnic militias armed with machetes continue to terrorize the slums of the capital Nairobi and towns across the country's west while the death toll in the fighting has topped more than 850.

Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who visited Kenya from the UK, issued a serious warning about the crises:

"We are greatly concerned at what we see as a step change in the violence from something bloody and ugly but perhaps spontaneous to something much more organised and sinister,"

He continued on to say:

"What is so alarming about the last few days is that there are evidently hidden hands organising this now. Militias are appearing, street gangs are being organised."

I hope I'm wrong when I say this, but this kind of violence seems all to familiar. In 1994, sporadic violence between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsis ethnicities quickly spiraled out of control and became the infamous Rwandan Genocide, where over one million people were slaughtered across the country. Since then (and even before) this type of violence has reciprocated again and again in Africa, whether it be Rwanda, Darfur, Eastern Congo, South Sudan, or Somalia. Kenya's current situation may very well find its place up there if the conflict is not peacefully resolved and the machete-wielding militias are not disarmed.

Tensions grow next door:

While not really related, violence is also being reported in neighboring Somalia with the continuing street battles between Ethiopian/Somali coalition forces and Islamic insurgents armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Yesterday, two foreign aid workers and a Somali journalist were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb outside of Mogadishu. Kenya, which was once one of East Africa's most prosperous democracies, had the potential to serve as a role model to the struggling UN-backed government in Somalia. Kenyan forces have also wielded positive influence in the capture of Islamic militants along the border.

What can we do?

One of two things needs to happen in order to stop this from becoming the latest "Never Again" pledge. Either the people of Kenya must agree to put aside their differences and solve their problems through dialogue as opposed to the blade of a machete, or the UN and the international community must step in and do something before the militias become too powerful and the bodies of innocent men, women, and children begin piling up in the countryside. Leaders here in the U.S. need to play a constructive role as well. Senator Barack Obama, who is of Kenyan descent, has been actively involved in pushing for dialogue and an end to the killing. If everyone in Congress did so, it would certainly send a strong message. Today's violence in Kenya is a perfect example of how we can all put aside our political differences to work together and impact the world in a positive way.

...or we can continue doing what we're doing and have another "never again" pledge that we failed to live up to and add it to the pages of history.

(Photo courtesy of AP)