Somali Government on Last Legs
Saturday, December 13th, 2008“What Somali government?” you might be wondering. I know that I did. That’s why the article in the Dutch religious daily Reformatorisch Dagblad – “Government in Somalia about to collapse” – turned out to be so educational, as well as directly relevant to what recent readers will recognize as my continuing concerns about what we’re going to do about all those pirates (. . . arrrrr, matey!).
The current “Somali government” is called the Transitional Federal Government (“TFG” for short). It was established in 2004, with backing from the UN, the US, and Ethiopia, but basically had to stay in Kenya for a while until the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces drove back various Islamist insurgent groups and so enabled the TFG to set up shop in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. You can even see a picture of the current TFG prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, accompanying that Reformatorisch Dagblad article – so are you satisfied, doubting Thomases? He’s of course the guy on the right. (more…)
