From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Jul 10 2009 - 00:27:59 EDT
May 20, 2009 17:07 ET
Stopping the flow of guns
The fighting goes on in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu but at least someone
is coming up with a useful suggestion.
Meeting in Addis Ababa, the capital of neighbouring Ethiopia,
representatives of six Horn of Africa countries decided that a no-fly zone
and a port blockade should be imposed to stop the endless flow of weapons
into Somalia. The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), as
the regional group is known, is calling on the U.N. to impose the blockade.
This is far from being the solution to Somalia’s troubles, but stopping
the guns would be an impressive start. “Arms supply is such an obvious
impediment to effective government that this problem has to be tackled,”
wrote Professor Ioan Lewis, a leading expert on Somalia.
The problem is there has been an arms embargo in place for more than 16
years and it has been assiduously ignored. Eritrea regularly gets the blame
for sending weapons to the Islamist opposition and just as regularly the
Eritrean government denies doing so — no one believes them.
But it’s not just Eritrea. For years now a U.N. monitoring group has kept
an eye on Somalia’s embargo busters and produces incredibly detailed
periodic reports of its findings. “Most serviceable weapons and almost
all ammunition currently available in the country have been delivered since
1992, in violation of the embargo,” the group wrote in its last report
published in December 2008.
Nor does the group pull its punches: “Every armed force, group or militia
in Somalia, their financiers, active supporters and, in some cases, foreign
donors are currently in violation of the arms embargo.”
This last sentence might explain why the current embargo is so readily
broken and why the new calls for a blockade might go unheeded.
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Source URL (retrieved on July 10, 2009 00:21 ):
http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/kenya/090520/stopping-the-flow-guns
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