The murders in Lebanon and Somalia show that wars we thought we could forget are still simmering away. Expect trouble in Kosovo before long

Just when you think the war is over, some bastard gets up and kills someone who matters. It happened twice in the past ten days. First, a Somali gunman murdered Kate Peyton, a BBC producer in Mogadishu. Then on Monday, a car bomb in Beirut blew up the ex-prime minister of Lebanon Rafiq Hariri. And you thought wars in Somalia and Lebanon were over.

There is a school of punditry and think-tankery that specialises in disasters to come. A few hours before Hariri was killed, a student tried to sell me another early-warning website, which would alert me to crises yet to blossom into war. Kyrgyzstan, Ossetia (North and South), Swaziland - it could all get a helluva lot worse. It probably will. But apart from places like that, there are also wars and supposed peace deals that journalism forgot.

The last time outsiders gave Somalia much thought was in 1994, when US troops pulled out. Since then, the country has lived without government, a collection of enclaves ruled by warlords. Now the African Union is to send in peacekeepers to support a new government, formed in Kenya and due to return to Somalia from 21 February. But the AU is ignoring a basic rule of peacekeeping: never send in the neighbours. Kenya and Ethiopia are providing troops, even though both have historical claims over Somali territory, and Ethiopia fought a war against Somalia in the 1970s. Islamist extremists in Somalia say they won't accept a non-Muslim force. (Most Kenyans and Ethiopians are Christian.) One warlord calculated that the best way to ward off these meddling neighbours was to kill a foreigner; after all, that worked before. The idea was predictable - if anyone had bothered to predict it.

Eight journalists have been killed in Somalia since 1991, when the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown. Mogadishu has no police force, so Peyton's death is being investigated by a former police chief, Abdi Hassan Awale, using his amateur sleuths and thugs. His gunmen set up checkpoints near the hotel where she was shot in the back by a passing motorist. Awale knows about the murder of journalists. He worked for Mohamed Farah Aideed, the warlord the Americans were trying to kill when their Black Hawk helicopters were downed in 1993. A mob killed four journalists outside his house that day.

An analyst from the International Crisis Group, the think-tank, warns that if Somalia is left to fester, Islamist insurgents could threaten western and neighbouring African interests. But the politicians aren't looking, partly because there is no public outrage. Somalia isn't an immediate threat: it can be filed in an in-tray marked "Too difficult to handle".

So it was with Lebanon. The war there ended in 1989. While Israel occupied the south, Syrian forces took the rest of the land; shortly afterwards Hafez al-Assad, then Syria's president, obligingly plumped

for the US side in the first Gulf war. Today, 14,000 Syrian soldiers and a network of intelligence agents control Lebanon. Yet last Monday, they did not prevent a 320kg car bomb from entering Beirut to blow up a motorcade in the city centre.

Rafiq Hariri, as prime minister for more than a decade, had been the Syrians' friend. Last year, however, he fell out with his masters. When they wanted his chief rival, President Emile Lahoud, to extend his term Hariri resigned, fearing Lahoud would back an indefinite Syrian occupation. In September, the UN called for Syria to withdraw its forces by April - nearly five years after the Israelis pulled out. Even France, an old ally, says it is time for the Syrians to go. Hariri had started to campaign for a Syrian pull-out. His supporters claim he was murdered by agents of Damascus.

As ever, we were looking the other way. Lebanon has been more or less calm for some years now. But another politician, Marwan Hamadeh, has accused Syria of trying to kill him last year. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt (remember that name?) has also turned against the Syrians. Will he be next? You thought the war was dead, but it was only sleeping.

Once the "international community" manages some kind of interim settlement, we turn away, hoping time will rob violent men of their enthusiasm

for murder. So now look towards Kosovo, where a fragile UN mandate governs what is still, officially, a province of Serbia. Ethnic Albanians, once the victims, are turning on the few remaining ethnic Serbs in the enclave. Crime is a major driver of the economy, partly because Kosovo is not a sovereign nation under international law, and so many banks and insurance companies refuse to operate there. Yet Europe and the US are reluctant to address Kosovo's status, and Albanian aspirations for independence, because it's all too contentious. Easier to let sleeping dogs lie. But the lesson of Somalia and Lebanon is that they don't

lie for ever. They get back up and bite you.

Kosovo isn't barking yet - but it will.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

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