The year began with war in the Horn of Africa, and seems destined to end that way. Somalia, anarchic since 1991, was at the heart of it.

On New Year’s Day an Islamist movement that had brought peace to much of Somalia folded before the invading Ethiopian army. The US took Ethiopia’s side, bombing fleeing Islamist fighters and helping interrogate Somalis crossing into Kenya.

Instead of simply installing Somalia’s weak government in the capital, Mogadishu, and withdrawing, Ethiopia became bogged down by Islamist-led insurgents. By the end of the year, fighting had caused 600,000 people to flee.

Inside Ethiopia a long-simmering rebellion by the Ogaden National Liberation Front burst into life in April, when rebels attacked a Chinese-run oil installation near the Somali border. The government crackdown, which included a food blockade, was harsh enough to prompt a UN investigation.

Further west the people of Sudan were faring little better. The authorities in South Sudan, who will vote on secession from Khartoum in two years, pulled out of the national government, blaming President Omar al-Bashir for failing to honour key points of the peace agreement. Meanwhile the conflict and misery in the western state of Darfiir continued. The African Union peacekeepers came under frequent attack, losing 15 soldiers in two incidents. The spillover of the Darfur conflict into neighbouring Chad worsened. The Democratic Republic of Congo marked its first year of real democracy.Zimbabwe was seldom far from the headlines. As the economic crisis worsened, inflation rose to more than 10,000 per cent before a shortage of basic goods made calculations impossible. 

The World Bank reported that African countries were expected to record average growth of 5.4 per cent in 2007, comparable to global rates and better than many advanced economies.  
     (The Guardian)