Violence, fear and confusion: welcome to the Horn of Africa

[IndianaGreen]

Violence, fear and confusion: welcome to the Horn of Africa

In Yemen, Somalia and beyond, the lawless, strife-torn region has provided disturbing evidence that its myriad problems cannot be ignored – and that the west must see the connections between them all.

Peter Beaumont
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010

It looked like many of the dhows that sail the Gulf of Aden, a nameless boat identifiable only by its registration number – 11S2. This dhow, however, was not carrying fish, or even engaged in the lethal people smuggling trade conducted across these waters.

Tracked by Yemeni intelligence officials, it was laden with a quite different cargo that had been loaded at Hes Bes on Somalia's arid coastline.

When it was boarded late last year by Yemeni coastguards, the ship's captain and his crew of 12 were discovered to be ferrying arms into a country already awash with weapons. About 60 million handguns, at the last count, arm a population of 21 million people in Yemen. The arms traffic is hardly one-way. Indeed, Yemeni ships are more often smuggling arms in the opposite direction, to fuel the terrible conflict in Mogadishu and south central Somalia.

The capture of the ship was a small event in the scheme of things, but an illustrative one. The Horn of Africa retains the potential to be one of the continent's most explosive regions, having suffered some of Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts during the past century. "The problem with this region as a whole," says Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, "is that you cannot talk about Ethiopia without talking about Eritrea and Somalia. You can't talk about Sudan without mentioning Egypt." Dowden is convinced too that a failure to understand the nature of the relationships between the various neighbours by other countries – not least the US and Britain – has contributed to the difficulties in the area. With Yemen, just across the Gulf of Aden, added to the mix, the area's multi-layered security, economic and political problems appear so interconnected at so many levels as to seem irresolvable at a local one alone.

This region has left its mark on the international consciousness over the past two decades for all the wrong reasons: war, famine and massive displacement of civilian populations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/10/horn-africa-growing-instability