Somalia: For once, some optimism

Somalia hasn't had this much attention since the early 1990s. 

At the United Nations, the Security Council voted to add an additional 5,700 peacekeepers to the African Union’s mission in Somalia (AMISOM). In London, a British-sponsored conference of world powers this week is debating just how to end the 20-year cycle of civil war in Somalia and to create a sustainable peace. Aid groups have launched massive ad campaigns to secure funds for what has been the worst famine in the Horn of Africa for some 20 years. And on the ground in Somalia itself, African Union peacekeepers and the armed forces of neighboring countries are pushing back an Al Qaeda-linked group, Al Shabab, that has dominated south-central Somalia for the past four years.

It's a major shift from 1992, when the US intervened in Somalia to secure food aid deliveries after a crushing civil war, and then promptly withdrew after finding themselves caught in the cross-fire between feuding warlords. Remember all those battle-scenes from the movie “Black Hawk Down?" US military planners sure do, and the following two decades of US foreign policy toward Somalia was marked mainly by neglect.

But in opening the London conference, British Prime Minister David Cameron called on the international community to abandon its past fatalism.

"That fatalism has failed Somalia. And it has failed the international community too. Today we have an unprecedented opportunity to change that," Reuters quoted Mr. Cameron as saying in his opening speech. "These problems in Somalia don't just affect Somalia. They affect us all. In a country where there is no hope, chaos, violence and terrorism thrive. Pirates are disrupting vital trade routes and kidnapping tourists."

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