Somalia may have a new government, but it can't seem to shake its history of chaos.
In Mogadishu, the capital of the Horn of Africa nation, gunmen threw grenades and a land mine exploded near the convoy of Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi on Sunday, killing at least five bodyguards and wounding several others, said Mohamed Ali Americo, a senior official in Gedi's office. Gedi was unharmed.
It was the second such narrow escape for Gedi. On May 3, an explosion went off just 10m from Gedi during his first visit to Mogadishu since he took office last year. He was not harmed and said the incident was an accident, but others suspect the blast was an attempt to kill him and guarantee his exiled government never takes power.
Gedi's transitional government, formed late last year after lengthy peace talks in Kenya, faces opposition from warlords who thrive in the anarchy Somalia has known since opposition leaders ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Fundamentalist Muslim leaders also oppose the secular transitional government.
The government is further weakened by internal rivalries. Gedi and President Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed have set up in Jowhar, a Somali town 90km northwest of the capital, saying Mogadishu is considered unsafe. Rivals have set up another camp in Mogadishu.
This nation of 7 million has since 1991 been a patchwork of battling fiefdoms. The transitional government makes little pretense of having much influence on land, let alone on the seas, where pirates have been seizing merchant ships and holding them for ransom.
Somalia lies along key shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
Even before the recent cruise ship attack signaled pirates had opened a new and bolder chapter, Gedi had called on neighboring countries to send warships to patrol his 3,000km coastline, Africa's longest. The International Maritime Bureau, citing a sharp rise in piracy this year along Somalia's coastline, has for several months warned ships to stay at least 240km away.
On Saturday, two boats full of pirates approached the Seabourn Spirit about 160km off the coast of Somalia and fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
The cruise ship sped away. None of its passengers, mostly Americans with some Australians and Europeans, were injured, said Bruce Good, spokesman for the Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp. One member of the 161-person crew was injured by shrapnel, cruise line president Deborah Natansohn said.
Judging from the location of the attack, the pirates are likely to have been from a group that hijacked a UN-chartered vessel in June and held its crew and food aid hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program.
Somali pirates "are getting more powerful, more vicious and bolder day by day," Mwangura said.
Britain's National Union of Marine Aviation and Shipping Transport, which represents merchant navy officers, called on Sunday for a naval task force to protect ships traveling off the coast of Somalia.
US and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters further out, but they are not permitted in Somalia's territorial waters.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS