Somalia: Saving Country? - Reflections On the Last 20 Years, and the Upcoming 'London Conference'

BY RICHARD DOWDEN

ANALYSIS

If I were a Somali I would thank Allah for the pirates. For more than 20 years the world has stood by while successive civil wars destroyed the country, killing hundreds of thousands of people by bullets, disease and starvation and reducing what was once a prosperous land to a war zone. But the seizure of more than 200 ships by kids with guns in small craft has changed all that. Britain, for whom shipping and trade around the Red Sea and the Gulf are vital

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