Residents walk along a street filled with smoke rising from a burning petrol station in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, Saturday, Dec. 19. The cause of the fire was not established. (Reuters)Somalia’s Chaos Spreading Far Beyond Its Frontier And Coastline -- Times Online
On the first Thursday in December a young Danish-Somali man in women’s clothes blew himself up in a suicide attack in Mogadishu. Four days earlier, Somali pirates had hijacked a 300,000-tonne supertanker 800 miles out to sea. Somalia’s abject failure does not end at its own borders: the chaos is spreading far across its frontiers and beyond its coastline.
Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents denied responsibility for that suicide bombing. No one believed them. Civilians braved the streets of Mogadishu to protest against the attack that killed dozens of medical students and marked a new low in the country’s violent history.
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In Kenya, Ethnic Distrust Is As Deep As The Machete Scars -- Washington PostKIAMBAA, KENYA -- Nearly two years after a wave of post-election violence brought this East African nation to the brink of civil war, Joseph Ngaruiya has learned to ride his bike with one leg, the other having never fully healed from machete cuts. He's learned to tolerate the "sorrys" and small talk of neighbors who he believes hacked him nearly to death and burned a church here, killing 36 people in one the worst days of the ethnic bloodletting.
What he has not managed, he says, is to summon sufficient faith in their apologies or in justice to keep him from buying an AK-47 once he gathers enough money.
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