A land of despair

It's been a bad week for Somalia. It would also be accurate to say it's been a bad few decades, but last week was particularly bad when it comes to international efforts to bring peace to the country.
The week started out with 11 Burundian soldiers killed in an explosion triggered by a Somali suicide bomber. The Burundians are in the capital Mogadishu with soldiers from Uganda who make up the African Union's peacekeeping mission to Somalia (Amisom). It's sad for the peacekeepers and it's sad for peacekeeping. In the world of peacekeeping missions Amisom is the poor cousin. It's in a part of the world most people don't care about and more importantly it's in a part of the world most people don't want to go to.The fact that Burundian and Ugandan troops are in Somalia at all is a small miracle. Both the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN) have made appeals to member states to contribute to Amisom, with the call falling, for the most part, on deaf ears. A Ugandan soldier based in the small part of Mogadishu that is controlled by the AU told me that the absence of oil or any other strategic commodity on or under Somali soil is, as far as he can see, the reason Amisom doesn't get the troops. The only real interest in the region is offshore, and that's not because of oil trapped beneath the ocean floor; rather it's because of the oil and other goods passing by Somalia in tankers and ships -- the world tends to know much more about Somali pirates and the efforts to stop them than it does about the chaos on the mainland. The pirates have only one motive and that's to make as much money as possible from either the ransoms they collect in return for freeing the vessels they board or the money they make by selling whatever they happen to loot from the cargo holds...more..http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-03-02-a-land-of-despair