dougmcgill

Is Somalia, the world’s ultimate failed state, on the brink of authentic renewal and reconstruction? Is its bloody, famine-furthering, piracy-producing 20-year-old civil war close to an end?

That has been the fierce if fragile hope recently of tens of thousands of Somali refugees living in Minnesota, most of whom last saw their homeland in the period after its last functioning government was toppled in 1991.

At the Bright Moon Cafe at the corner of Cedar Ave. and Lake Street in Minneapolis last weekend, Abdikarim Hashi sipped on steaming cinnamon-ginger Somali tea, peering into his cell phone for news of home.

Hashi’s home is the sun-drenched Somali port city of Kismayo, where year-round blue skies, lush vegetation and sugar-white beaches would normally qualify it as among the most stunningly beautiful cities in the Horn of Africa.

Except that today, Kismayo is located on the most active front line of Somalia’s torturously complicated civil war, which has been raging for 20 years and is now escalating to new heights -- or more accurately, depths.

In churches, schools and meeting halls around Minnesota, the state's sizeable population of Ethiopian refugees is rallying to free a heroine to them who is wasting away in a prison hellhole in Addi

It was a peaceful peace conference, which in itself was a kind of miracle.

It was a miracle because the countries represented at the conference - the "Africa Peace Forum" held last Friday at the Hubert Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis - are all in one way or another at war today, either with each other or in a state of civil war.