For decades, Ethiopian fighter jets and tanks have been helping Somalia fight an alleged Islamic militia of Sunni Muslims.
Somalia's history is plagued with stories about militias, children soldiers, and warlords fighting -- some for independence from Britain, others from the Italians, and now from who knows what.
For those who don't know anything about Somalia, and that is most of us, the CIA describes it as a flat dessert with largely unexploited reserves of iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, natural gas, and likely oil reserves.
Did they say oil reserves? Isn't that the stuff President Bush has recently just stated we are all addicted to?
PBS
"There's no doubt there's oil there," said geologist Thomas E. O'Connor, the World Bank's principal petroleum engineer about a report to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
It sounds to me like as statement like that could trigger a feeding frenzy. Reuters and BBC reported that Bush's friends: Amoco, ConocoPhillips and Chevron have held concessions in Somalia.
In April of last year, AP reported Chinese President Hu Jintao signed an oil exploration contract with Kenya, the latest in a series of deals designed to keep Africa's natural resources flowing to China's booming economy.
This makes it sound like China and the U.S. are just pushing each other for world domination -- Augh, doesn't it?
Who ever controls the supply of black gold should have the upper hand.
Any way, lets not get carried away with world domination schemes and speculation. Let's just pretend that China, the U.S., and the British leading the European Union have nothing to do with it. That just sounded too funny, never mind -- let's not -- of course it does.
Somalia was born in the 1960s, and its people have had several failed attempts to create a central government desperately needed to help provide education, healthcare and economic stability. This is far from ever happening.
BBC reports that years of fighting between rival warlords and an inability to deal with famine and disease have led to the deaths of up to one million people. Yup, they said ONE MILLION people.
Sadly, some one has benefitted from Somalia's disasters. You should know that multinational corporations usually include Force majeure clauses covering "Acts of God," or natural disasters, in high risk countries such as Somalia.
It would be no wonder if any of them declared Force majeure every time each attempt to a central government collapsed. This clause may be shaped, so that the contract exempts the parties from their financial obligations.
Let's put it this way: Let me go to your crib, take your goods. Set up a deal, where I pay you for them, but since you live in the ghetto -- I put the risk on you. If anything bad goes down -- I am not responsible for keeping my part of the deal.
Easy flow: Call my hommies, set up a major F(*&k up, and then badaboom, badabam, I don't have to pay you. Go figure them geniuses? Wanna play?
ANDREWHOLBROOKE.COM
