Kenya Invades Somalia

That tenskion caused by Euroborders, the class corrborated by serve economic devatsaion, and the extreme poverty made by the construction of the states TO BE economically abused (not to mention the 1st world leaching the 3rd). So yeah "Blame Whitey" actually is a sound strategy here.

edited 17th Oct '11 9:32:28 AM by JusticeMan

Africans were murdering each other en masse long before we got there, with or without nations based on colonial borders.

Anyway, good luck to Kenya. I don't think they'll change anything (southern Somalia is fucked, Puntland isn't much better, even Somaliland has a lot of problems) but it's good to see more nations helping take an active role in world policing.

Everyone was murdering en masse everywhere it's called, "war." The Empires severely damaged the integrity of the Continent, it was supporting nations long before Europeans could make it past the Sahara without dying.

Sure, but most other countries got over their "screwed by Europe" phases. Africa's problems are a lot deeper rooted than that. Remember, the Scramble for Africa was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and were decolonized following World War II.

Tribal loyalties were pervasive before colonization and they remain pervasive. The fact that they now have AK-47s instead of spears just means that tribes can kill one another more efficiently.

Meanwhile, developed nations are stuck in a bind. If they ignore the problems they're accused of indifference. If they get involved, they're accused of imperialism. Send humanitarian aid, and it gets confiscated by warlords. Send in peacekeepers, and they get shot at. It's a clusterf**k.

Africa is no easy thing to fix. However, pointing fingers about which country did what to whom way back in ancient times (defined as any time period before I was born) IS NOT a solution.

Somalia, as mentioned, has been without any sort of government for what, two decades now? I can only hope that Kenya can help actually restore the place, but I have dim hopes on that.

Well the reason previous colonies, now dominated by white people, are doing fine is because they had a lot of backing from their mother country and trade to keep the political structures alive. Imagine, if you will, that the British/French came to North America. Then the place is ravaged by disease. Then we go into genocidal wars. And then we leave. How do you think Canada, Australia, New Zealand and USA would look like today? Complete hell holes.

But that's not what happened, we stayed, replaced all the locals with our government and culture and then oppressed them into oblivion. So what's here now are off-shoots of British, French and Spanish places. And you can see that the amount the mother country invested is correlated with how well they are doing now. The French gave up on Nouveau France but the British took over and were constantly meddling in its affairs, pouring resources into the region and so on to ensure success. The Spanish gave up pretty early on and ran their colonies into the ground, now they aren't doing as well as North America.

Africa is basically, we went in there, screwed up a lot, killed lots of people and then went "Okay, this is pretty unsalvageable, let's leave" and then we expect for Africans to magically cobble themselves back together like humpty dumpty. Not gonna happen.

Political structures don't get magic-ed out of thinair and constructed by good intentions. You have to spend the time to build up social values, cultural mores and the expectation within certain political frameworks. Why does a prime minister in Canada not take pictures of his dick and send them to the Globe and Mail? Why do people in Toronto not riot about black neighbourhoods? Why do people in Strasbourg not shoot each other over a game of Starcraft? How are jobs decided? How do leaders come from communities? What are our education systems? How do you interact with people of different cities? What kinds of religions do you have and how do they interact? How do you deal with labour disputes? How do you typically greet each other? How do you try to show off skills to potential employers? What kind of news/media/tv shows do different people watch?

It's not just a matter of, "Send in some marines, prop up a government and we're good to go." Society isn't anywhere close to that easy.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:26:31 PM by breadloaf

Some things I'd try to do if I had the power to do them, in no particular order:

• Open up markets to the crops made by local African farmers.

• Invest heavily in making the African Union stronger and more resilent. Give them the tools and resources needed to police each other - cull the loose cannon governments, prop up the ones that are genuinely trying to do the right thing for their people and neighbors.

• AIDS education, to fix the misconceptions about it that are running rampant.

• Infrastructure improvements all over the place. Roads, electricity, communications, clean running water, healthcare, education, stuff like that.

• and some stuff I'm probably forgetting.

Any more ideas?

Dictator pvtnum?

If you're going the strongman route, generally what you want is to cultivate a political class before you die of old age. That way things continue on as you move on.

I also think that you want to practice some form of cultural education because it's important for people to care about each other enough to want to be together. Things like media-mixing and so on.

I was aiming for that with the AIDS education thing, specifically, but yes, a cultural exchange thing may help a bit. And no, I'm not cut out for being a dictator, even a benevolent and reasonable one. This is more continent-wide stuff, anyway. I'd have to be an Emperor or something to make all that work...!

There are nations there that aren't all bad. South Africa comes to mind.

...aaaaanyway, getting a bit off-topic. My bad.

al-Shabab threaten to flatten buildings in Nairobi

They can't even take control of their country, and now they're trying to threaten someone else's? How pathetic.

edited 17th Oct '11 2:08:04 PM by tropetown

You know what, they might actually find it easier to smuggle a bomb into a foreign city than try it out, like respectable warlords, on a battlefield.

Generally I agree with the Europe screwed up Africa argument, but not with regards to Somalia. It was one of the last areas of Africa to get conquered (WWI and immediately after). Europe didn't have TIME to screw up Somalia. Especially when Somalia then went on to become a powerful and modernized state after independance (granted, it was a military dictatorship, but that was Cold War politics for you).

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/10/20111017171543493140.html

Al Jazeera video on the same subject as the BBC link above.

Africa screwed the Africans over.

You could say OMG ITS WAS THE YUROPEANS

But that is ignoring everything before the Portuguese voyages. Africa was able to be exploited because of geography, not the Africans.

Read Guns, Germs, and Steel to get the full argument.

edited 17th Oct '11 2:42:56 PM by Erock

^ Yeah I can agree with that. When Somalia fell into civil war, all its neighbours were greedy about it. Then when the Islamists had Somalia back under control, Ethiopia took out that regime. Now it's Kenya's turn to ensure there is no government.

I don't like Islamists any more than the next guy, but bringing a country back into horrible civil war just to get rid of them on principle? That's killing so many people in the name of what? Preventing the Islamists from killing them first?

Before we try to put Somalia as The Woobie, bear in mind when Somalia was still stable, it was constantly a threat to Ethiopia (there is a reason why General Barre fielded the third largest military in Africa, and that was because of the Ogaden). Thus Ethiopia has a vested interest in keeping Somalia weak since otherwise Somalia would do the same thing to them. It sucks, but there you go. In the case of Kenya, Al Shabaab has already made attacks and kidnappings in the EAC region (Kenya and Uganda). They see this operation as a security measure.

And yes, the Islamists may have unified the (southern sector of) the country, but thats pretty much the only good thing they ever had going for it.

edited 17th Oct '11 3:30:58 PM by FFShinra

I'd figure the added bonus of working court systems (of a scary Islamist kind unfortunately) and lack of pirates, and low crime and chaos was pretty good too. Sadly, they've created a situation that is somehow worse than Islamists in power.

and If you are more reactionary and oppressive than warlordism (and Islamists are), I fail to see how unifying the country under their rule was any sort of achievement. Ethiopia did the right thing when they kicked them out of power.

Reactionary courts aren't an improvement over no courts: Chaos is better than oppression.

edited 17th Oct '11 3:37:47 PM by SavageHeathen

Eh, thats debatable, but I agree with you about Ethiopia.

Point of order, the ICU never unified all of Somalia. Even when they were at full power, there was no way they'd take on Puntland or the far more stable Somaliland. So I dunno what's so sad about them being kicked out of power. The territory under Islamist control remains so just without Mogidishu (and now the border region with Kenya). Everything else still belongs to them, so its not like that much changed.

Well except for all the dying in the capital. But oh well, there isn't much we can do unless we want to pour a zillion soldiers and money into the region.

I think some people vastly under-estimate how expensive it is to nation build. A simple water treatment plant costs billions of dollars and millions per year to run. I remember people making comments on how Haiti got a billion dollars and couldn't build one, thus "wasting our aid money", with clearly no engineering background to realise how damn expensive something like that is (plus the engineers required to keep it going).

If that was directed at me, I never made the assertion that nationbuilding was either easy or cheap. I agree with you, in fact.

Nope, not directed at you, just a general statement. Getting Somalia back on its feet is going to take forever and I'm not sure how much military action would help if at all.

Indeed. It's probably the reason why Somaliland is getting steam for its bid to secede, especially now that Sudan has been partitioned thus finally shattering the "borders can never change" mentality thats existed since the 60s.

And honestly, with this insane famine in the south, there might not be a population to rebuild the state FOR, at the rate they're dying...

@Lawyer, the other co tries got out of there "Screwed by Europe" phases because they ceased to exist. The Native American and Australians went through a genocide, and South America is still a shit hole; just a slightly less shitty shithole than Africa's. Europe is the single greatest cause for the suffering of the world, anything else is delusion bordering on racist denialism.

Pipe down Yankee boy, because what you did in the Cold War wasn't any better than what Europe did.