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Comment by babayega2 | Hacker News Reader

From the article : >"Every member of Parliament in Mogadishu gets a salary paid mostly by U.S. and EU funds," one Somaliland official told us. "And every one of them is a killer. If you kill enough people, you are called a warlord and you get invited to conferences. Meanwhile, I was elected by thousands of votes in a free election, but the international community does not consider us a country. They should be rewarding democracy, not killing."

That's sadly the truth in some of our African states.

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What possible benefit does the US and EU get from paying these people’s salaries? I understand the real Politik aspect - they’re now “owned”, to be perhaps a little crude, by the powers paying them - but what does the arrangement get the US and EU? Asked a different way, what would happen if we stopped paying them?

We pay them money so they stay in power and don't get usurped by other killers, namely the Islamic groups that want to kill Americans. Right now the warlords just kill other Africans, which the U.S. government considers a win, sadly. Its a foreign policy based on the idea if we didn't support these warlords, other groups that kill Africans AND Europeans will take power.

> ...namely the Islamic groups that want to kill Americans. Right now the warlords just kill other Africans, which the U.S. government considers a win...

The Islamic killers kill more Africans too. Boko Haram are killing far more Somalis than they are Americans or Europeans. It is cynical, but it's probably not (on balance) morally wrong to support the opposition, god knows BH and friends get plenty of foreign support from our favourite Islamic customer in the middle east and others, so it's not as though the Americans are the only ones corrupting the failed state there.

For example, in my neighborhood country DRC, there all kind of minerals that are used to build every tech product. You guess why EU and USA needs to keep a good relationship with the warlords there? In Somalia, I think it is a question of terrorism. The state of lawless that come with the downfall of Somali in 1991 made the country being prone to warlords running the country, even the seas. You remember how they used to take hostage of ships passing through the Red Sea. You better pay warlords or they will come back and take hostage tankers and stuffs.

In the end, maybe they came to the conclusion that it's better to buy peace with money than to deploy US/EU troops ( now there are African Union troops in Somalia assisted by US units).

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