The Somalia Situation

Posted by Kate Butler Dec 29, 2006

Right now, the people of Mogadishu are apparently very happy: the Muslim rebels are leaving the city behind. After months of controlling many of Somalia's biggest cities, these Islamic insurgents are being pushed back by government and Ethiopian forces.

The mainstream media in Canada and the U.S. have been covering this story with some interest. There is a sense in many of the pieces I have read that Somalia is simply another example of the Islam-West conflict which we are seeing played out on a number of stages.

What is often ignored is that the Western countries were very involved in Somalia a few short years ago and the legacy that they left here must be examined if we are to understand the current situation.

In the early 1990s, Somalia was in the midst of a civil war, and the U.N. wanted to send in peace-keepers to monitor what was going on. Canadian, American and other troops were sent into a very problematic situation, and problems began to arise. In one very troubling incident, 2 Canadian soldiers brutally beat a Somali teenager to death in 1993. The Americans also had difficulties, and lost a number of troops in their time in the region; their struggles were recently portrayed in the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down.

Whether the actions of the western nations in the early 1990s are at all a factor in the current fighting is questionable. However, it is difficult for westerners to understand what our actions in current conflicts might mean in the future if we are not shown by the media how past international involvements might affect what is going on today. Specifically, the fall-out from the Canadian incident might have one of many reasons that certain Somalis began to distrust western troops.

In an age where the media is everywhere, all the time, it has a major responsibility to report on international conflicts, both those that are occurring presently, as well as those that occurred in previous years.