متابعات - ( خبر ) :

Last year, a spectacularly inept analysis of the chaos that is Somalia by a US think tank said that the people there “needed to make choices”. Tragically, that is precisely what they cannot do. This failed state has been riven with violence since President Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Had ordinary Somalis ever had a choice in the last 18 years between peace and endless conflict, there can be little doubt what they would have selected.

The brutal truth, however, is that they have never had the option. Outside interference, most notably by Ethiopia but perhaps most insidiously by Al-Qaeda and its satraps, has guaranteed that this pitifully poor East African country of little over nine million people has been mired in a state of anarchy.

The writ of the transitional government of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad hardly runs outside of the capital Mogadishu and indeed is not even certain within the city itself. Thursday’s suicide bombing of a graduation ceremony in Mogadishu’s main hotel, in which at least three government ministers were slain along with 16 others, demonstrates the terrible pass to which this unhappy country has come.

Indeed this merciless attack can be seen as encapsulating all that is evil about the men of violence who are fighting over the bones of this stricken society. It was aimed at the degree-awarding ceremony for a group of medical students, who against all the odds have graduated from Benadir University.

This institution was set up eight years ago to train doctors to replace some at least of those, who along with thousands of other professionals have fled abroad because of the endless violence. This whole training venture was a triumph of hope and determination in the face of immensely depressing odds. This is because if there is one thing Somalis need almost as much as peace, it is doctors and nurses to care for them.

The Al-Qaeda-connected fundamentalist insurgent group Al-Shabaab is thought most likely to have been behind Thursday’s attack. That these terrorists should plan to kill people who had studied hard in order that they could help their fellow-Somalis, demonstrates just sort of a world that they want. They have no time for compassion and no time for knowledge and learning. They have issued forth from the deep darkness of ignorance and bigotry. They have only one answer to anyone who resists their own narrow and perverted worldview and that is to kill or maim them.

In the face of such blind fanaticism, it is extraordinary that there are still Somalis stout-hearted enough to try to maintain some semblance of civilized life in this war-ravaged country. But in fact all along, while a succession of rival warlords has battled each other for supremacy, Somalia has quite extraordinarily managed to maintain some basic services. Mobile phones work, generators are sold and repaired and food somehow finds its way to markets. If only such admirably indomitable people really were free to make binding choices about their future