Any roundup of the day's news in Somalia looks, for all the wrong reasons, like any other from the past 20 years: fighting and killing here, a town taken or retaken by some faction or other over there, a terrorist arrested or killed in this other place, piracy off the coast, and children starving all the while.
Most of the people who try and improve matters end up completely ineffective at best and targets at worst. The last link provided involves 20 teenagers arrested by one of the factions, Al-Shabab, for refusing to fight, or more specifically, refusing to fight for Al-Shabab. They've been taken to an unknown location.
Just to let you know, every single one of those links has been from an article written this weekend, and the last one is the only article not from the last 24 hours. Not a single story concerning anything that could clearly be considered as good came out of that same period. Believe me, I looked. I thought I'd found one from Friday, concerning a singer by the name of Sado Ali Warsame, but the piece turned out to be largely a screed against Somaliland, which has been noted here a year ago as the only place in the country that could even begin to be described as stable or functioning. Even a piece about shoe-shining children from April 15, which I originally thought might be a cute little flicker-of-hope story about an odd job to make money, turned horrific when it went into detail about how the shoe-shiners get caught in crossfires when the soldiers whose shoes are being shined get shot at, are frequently unpaid, and then shot deliberately if they press the issue.
These are children, mind you, of ages ranging in the article from 9-14.
There's nothing new under the sun in Somalia. And that's the worst news of all.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
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