UPDATED.....Islamic cultural police have replaced the murdering, raping, dismembering warlords who held sway in and around Mogadishu, although moderate Muslims are making a bid for control of strife-torn Somalia's capital city, too. The New York Times reports.

A week ago, when Mexico and Iran were still playing the first half of their World Cup soccer match, gunmen allied with the Islamic courts burst into a tiny theater in the Hiliwaa neighborhood of north Mogadishu, condemned the place as ungodly and angrily switched off the television set. When they caught sight of a man with a trendy Afro, with lines shaved into it, they tied his hands behind his back, took out a pair of scissors and evened it out into a scalp-revealing buzz cut. "They said, 'Your hair is against our culture and is not Islamic,' " recalled the man, Abdi Fatah, 26. They whipped him with a belt, then jailed him for three days.

...In the old Mogadishu, militiamen would barge into a home and haul a girl or woman away and rape her. Bullets rang out routinely, and gunmen set up roadblocks and charged taxes on anybody who happened by. Fewer guns are visible now....But a new, more silent battle is under way, for control of the Islamic movement in Somalia....Mohamed Ali Aden, 19, who commanded 350 men in the recent war and said he would settle for nothing less than a full-fledged Islamic state. "We've neglected God's verses for so long," Mr. Aden said in an interview. "We want our women veiled and we want them at home. We men have to grow our beards.....If you will not join Islam, you are not my brother," he said, refusing to offer his hand. "I am a holy warrior and those who disturb Islam, we will disturb them...Al Qaeda's concept is right and one day they will rule...The name Muslim and Al Qaeda are the same to me. We are alike."

Quick: get this guy a spin doctor. Or maybe he's beyond that. Let's hope the moderate sheiks in Mogadishu, led by Sharif Ahmed, prevail.

"We are a Muslim people, we want to live in a peaceful way, we want to live with the rest of the world in a peaceful way," said the bearded Mr. Ahmed, 41, who was trained in the Koran in Sudan and Libya. "We are not terrorists and we do not associate with terrorists." The Islamic courts are not World Cup haters, either, Mr. Ahmed has said, explaining that a rogue militia, not an official order, led to the closing of some theaters....Other Somalis...continue to pack into public theaters in other parts of town, where the local militias have opted for moderation.

But there have been other confrontations. Earlier this year, Islamic militiamen stopped Ismahan Ali Mohamed, 18, on the street and ripped the long, tight-fitting skirt she was wearing. They ordered her to wear a looser garment next time....Malyun Sheik Haidar, 31, who publishes a small newsletter devoted to women's issues, heard from a man involved in one of the Islamic courts that her publication would probably be shut down. "He said, 'Women have a right to sit in your house and do domestic things,' " she said. " 'You don't have a right to do a journal on human rights.' "

Across the continent, struggling kleptocrat Robert Mugabe's grip on Zimbabwe continues to rely on military force, devalued currency and expropriation of private property. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

As soldiers rolled past Lot Dube's land and set up camp, they passed along a blunt message. "They told us, 'We are taking away your fields from you,' " said the 63-year-old farmer, who has farmed his 10 acres in the south of the country for a generation. The soldiers forbade him to grow tomatoes, onions and sweet potatoes -- market vegetables he sold to pay his children's school fees -- and ordered him to plant maize. He was told, he said, that the government's Grain Marketing Board planned to buy the entire maize harvest and sell it abroad to obtain foreign currency.

Replacing food with a cash crop aimed at the foreign market is just one of the increasingly desperate measures the government of President Robert Mugabe is taking to ease an economic crisis so severe that inflation for many consumer goods is running at more than 1,000 percent a year...To bolster his hold on power, Mugabe relies increasingly on the military. Not only do soldiers carry out his farm policies, he has appointed military commanders to top slots at the reserve bank, the electoral commission, Zimbabwe railroads, the Ministry of Energy, the Public Service Commission, the national parks and other key institutions.

Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking for the past six years, and the nation has been dependent on food aid since 2002. Eighty percent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and food and fuel are scarcer than ever...."The economy will only turn around when you get competent and experienced people running it, not the military," said David Coltart, a white member of Parliament with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "The appointment of military people to run things like the railroads will only speed up the demise of the regime."....Militarization "is an admission that things have fallen apart and national governance can no longer continue in a civilian mode," said Jonathan Moyo, a former secretary for information who is currently Zimbabwe's only independent member of Parliament.

Somalia and Zimbabwe are only two of numerous trouble spots in Africa. At the African Growth and Opportunity Forum earlier this month in Washington D.C, U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told representatives of 36 African countries that the U.S. and African nations will continue to promote humanitarian aid, a healthy and educated populace, peace and security, democracy and good governance, and economic development.

From his lips to God's ears. Bill Gates and his foundation are on a the right track. But his and other NGOs can only do so much. It is the people of Africa - educated and healthy - with whom the continent's fate rests.

UPDATE: Writing about Western African nations such as Ivory Coast and Senegal, New York Post columnist Ralph Peters says the U.S. is a beacon of hope, but we must be careful to avoid the taint of association with France and its troubling record of "neo-colonial" exploitation in the region. Peters recently visited, and writes:

In West Africa, everyone has a friend or relative, or the friend of a relative, in one of New York's boroughs or in Chicago. Their vision of America is of hardworking immigrants building prosperous lives impossible elsewhere. The American dream is alive and well - in Dakar or Abidjan. In contrast, West Africans know that their relatives imprisoned in the suburban slums of Paris or Lyon have no hope of getting ahead, but suffer relentless discrimination. As a result, street-level Africans consistently express tremendous good will toward Americans (although they're mystified by African-American heritage tourists who complain about their lot - Africans would gladly swap places).

...Meanwhile, the French know they're in trouble. They know that their African victims are sick and tired of being robbed and treated as inferiors. They want the French out of their economies, out of their elections and out of their countries. The French response is to offer "cooperation" with the United States. Implying none too subtly that "white powers should stick together, after all," they misread the times and they wildly misread America....many French-speaking African countries have majority-Muslim populations - Muslims who are not anti-American. On the contrary, they practice tolerant, local forms of Islam and resent Wahhabi extremist efforts to "purify" their religion....By accepting the proffered French embrace in Africa, we risk needlessly alienating tens of millions of Muslims who are our natural allies in the war against Arab fanaticism.

Certainly, we should cooperate with France when it's genuinely in our interests. But, in West Africa, the cooperation Paris wants is a sham that would benefit only French neo-colonialists, while doing America's image and cause great harm. If we really believe in freedom and democracy, we should stand up for the striving people of Africa, not for the crumpled imperialists on the Seine.

TECHNORATI TAGS: MOGADISHU, SOMALIA, MOHAMED ALI ADEN, SHARIF AHMED, WORLD CUP, WOMEN'S RIGHTS, HUMAN RIGHTS, ISLAM, ZIMBABWE, ROBERT MUGABE, MILITARY, LAND CONFISCATION, AFRICA, PUBLIC HEALTH, EDUCATION, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, DEMOCRACY, BILL GATES, IVORY COAST, SENEGAL, FRANCE, UNITED STATES