HARGEISA – Drought, famine, refugees, piracy, and the violence and terrorism endemic to the shattered city of Mogadishu, a capital ruined by civil war: these are the images that flash through peoples’ minds nowadays when they think of the Horn of Africa. Such perceptions, however, are not only tragically one-sided; they are short-sighted and dangerous.

On April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton United States cargo vessel, was hijacked by four Somali pirates several hundred miles east of Mogadishu. Bobbing in a lifeboat with the skipper, 53-year-old Richard Phillips, they began negotiating with the ship’s owners via cellphone for a multimillion-dollar ransom.

The outskirts of the Dadaab refugee complex are jammed with dome-like huts made of sticks, refuse, plastic sheeting and discarded cartons from aid packets. Toilets are scarce, and water is delivered periodically by truck. More than 60,000 people are occupying these makeshift encampments built atop a harsh arid landscape in the far east of Kenya, just over the Somali border. The ragged domes in the desert look like something from the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max.

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WHILE the eyes of the world have been riveted on events in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, a post-election stalemate in Côte d’Ivoire, once the jewel of west Africa but now a byword for bloody chaos and division, has been getting nastier by the day (see article). More than 400,000 Ivorians have fled their homes, three-quarters of them from Abidjan, the country’s once shinily prosperous commercial capital, most of them in the past few weeks. Hundreds have been killed, mainly by the forces of Laurent Gbagbo, the former president who has refused to step down after being roundly defeated by his challenger, Alassane Ouattara, at the polls in November.

If Egypt's uprising represents the best of the turmoil sweeping the Middle East, then Muammar al-Qaddafi's brutal effort to stay in power in Libya represents its worst. Nobody will mistake Libya's bloody handling of its uprising for the relatively peaceful overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak's regime in neighboring Egypt or Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's in Tunisia.

(Dakar) - Security forces under the control of Laurent Gbagbo and militias that support him have, since late November 2010, committed extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, and rape, Human Rights Watch said today.

LINDA E. WATT: Good morning, everyone. I think we're almost all situated. My name is Linda Watt, and I'm the chief operating officer at the headquarters of the Episcopal Church, and a member of the council.