05/13/06
Fred Bridgland - Johanesburg, SA - Agencies    

From Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg

TO say Somalia, where conflict between warlords and al-Qaeda-backed jihadists is claiming hundreds of lives, is in a shambles is the grossest of understatements. The country of seven million Sunni Muslims has no banks and has been without a government since 1991, when President Siad Barré, a cold war dictator puppet loyal first to the Soviet bloc and then the West, was overthrown. Former allies fell upon one another and sliced up the country – in the Horn of Africa – along highly complex clan and subclan fault lines. A ruinous man-made famine followed. Skilled and wealthy Somalis began deserting the country and there are now perhaps three million refugees outside the country, living mainly in Kenya, Yemen and Britain.

Today truckloads packed with gun- toting young militiamen, high on drugs and loyal to a variety of godfathers, roam the land in a new phase of Somalia’s tragedy. There are widespread reports in Washington that President George W Bush has issued an executive order to arm a local “anti-terrorist alliance”, led by three veteran warlords. The Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter- Terrorism (ARPCT) was formed on February 18 this year to fight the increasingly powerful al-Qaeda-backed Islamic courts’ militias, known as the United Islamic Courts. Violence is almost the national sport in Somalia, but people in Mogadishu, the capital, are saying that this time the conflict is different. Previous violence amounted to a kind of old-fashioned brigandry based on clan rivalries, said Abdullahi Shirwa, a member of Civil Society in Action, an umbrella organisation of more than a dozen anti-violence groups in Mogadishu.

“This time it is not between clans but between two groups with different ideologies,” Shirwa told the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a humanitarian news agency covering sub-Saharan Africa.

The ARPCT is widely believed to be receiving weapons from Ethiopia, Yemen and elsewhere that are paid for by the US – “with Pentagon enthusiasm”, according to the London-based intelligence newsletter Africa Confidential. The newsletter reported that junior State Department officials have told their European counterparts that the White House and the Pentagon are running a “parallel Somalia policy” into which the State Department, under Condoleezza Rice, has no input.

America’s clandestine support of the warlords is in violation of an arms embargo imposed on Somalia by the United Nations Security Council. UN experts say they are now investigating “an unnamed country” providing support for the warlords’ alliance. The experts, charged with monitoring enforcement of the UN embargo, have given no hint as to the identity of the country providing the secret assistance: but all the leaks from Washington make it clear that it is the US. Last Wednesday the Security Council voted unanimously to extend the mandate of its monitoring group on Somalia and called on all UN member states to abide strictly by the arms embargo and “take all necessary steps to hold violators accountable”.

Washington has long viewed Somalia, with its vast ungoverned spaces and 15 years without an effective government, as a terrorist haven. Somalis generally have a laidback and loose interpretation of Islam and are distrustful of the kind of foreigners who make up the leadership of al-Qaeda. However, Abdullahi Shirwa warned that President Bush’s support for the warlords in an attempt to reduce the power and influence of the United Islamic Courts is backfiring.

“If anything, the courts are more popular today than in February,” he said. The courts’ militias have earned some popular praise for bringing a semblance of order in areas under their control, something the warlord factions have been unable or unwilling to do.

“At least the courts don’t loot or steal from us and they have been able to arrest some criminals,” said Muhobo Salad, speaking from Mogadishu’s Medina Hospital, where she is keeping vigil over her five-year-old daughter who was injured in crossfire during the current fighting. “We need help but instead [the warlords] have been feeding us bullets for the past 16 years. It is our children they are killing. Their children are in safe countries.”

According to some accounts, 60% of Mogadishu is now controlled by the United Islamic Courts, to the huge concern of Washington which sees al-Qaeda-linked terrorists taking root in the Horn of Africa. The US first tried to impose order on Somalia in 1992 with 30,000 troops spearheading a UN “humanitarian intervention”. It ended in humiliation and dishonour when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded during a battle with one particularly recalcitrant warlord, Mohamed Farah Aideed. Those actions, immortalised in the Hollywood smash hit Black Hawk Down, underlay President Bill Clinton’s conclusion that it was better to leave “the skinnies” – as American troops dubbed the thin and starving Somalis – to their own devices.

Clinton pulled US troops out of Somalia and out of the nation-building programme designed by Washington 15 months earlier. The UN was left high and dry to pursue the programme and inevitably found the going rough after Clinton washed his hands of the operation. Heavily influenced by the retreat from Somalia, Clinton and his administration then refused to respond to the genocide in Rwanda that began in April 1994. International civil servants complained they had been “seduced and then abandoned” by the US. Following Clinton’s flight, many aid agencies also withdrew from Somalia, leaving the country and its people to fester. Washington’s policy towards Somalia changed again only after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Suddenly the dangers of a collapsed state – albeit one thousands of miles away – became apparent.

A new transitional Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, emerged at a session of the transitional parliament, composed of warlords and politicians, in neighbouring Kenya in October 2004. But President Abdullahi has been living ever since in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, because he regards Somalia as too dangerous to go back to. His government has no buildings, no army and no budget. He has called upon some 10,000 Sudanese and Ugandan troops, under African Union auspices, to be deployed in Mogadishu to make it safe for his return.

But Matt Bryden, an expert on Somalia with the International Crisis Group, the world’s most prestigious political think-tank, has warned: “If that happens, all the errors of the past will be compounded. Somalis will unite against the common [foreign] enemy and the jihadists will be totally legitimised. The whole situation is now extremely dangerous. It could destabilise all of east Africa.”

The UN says Somalia was a transit point, and maybe more, for those behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as a 2002 attack on a hotel in Kenya and the attempted shooting down of an Israeli airliner. The US has set up a regional anti-terrorist base in Djibouti, on Somalia’s northern border, called the Combined Joint Task Force: Horn of Africa. Its main focus is Al Itihad al Islamia [Islamic Unity], the most fervent and best-organised of Somalia’s Islamic courts’ movements which seek to establish Sharia law to end the years of anarchy. Though most Somalis deny there are any terror camps in their country, a UN report in March said Al Itihad al Islamia already has 3000 regular troops and 17 training centres to prepare resistance to both President Abdullahi and to any foreign forces that might try to intervene in Somalia.

IN a country without a government, it is largely futile and almost impossible to put labels on who are the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. Last year the International Crisis Group reported from Mogadishu: “In the rubble-strewn streets of the ruined capital of this state without a government, al-Qaeda operatives, jihadi extremists, Ethiopian security services and Western-backed counter-terrorism networks are engaged in a shadowy and complex contest waged by intimidation, abduction and assassination.”

Somalia took years to reach its current nadir. It will take years for a fundamental reconstruction even if the current slaughter can be ended. The truth is that the international community does not possess the necessary tools to tackle the long-term political reconstruction of a country that has no government.

Since its inception in 1945, the UN has fundamentally been a decolonisation machine, its main purpose to assert that every newly independent state was able to govern itself.

“The idea that Somalia was not able to rule itself now, or for a long time, went so deeply against the organisational grain of the United Nations that an approach incorporating long-term reconstruction was never considered,” said Walter Clarke, an independent consultant on military affairs who was deputy chief of mission in the US embassy in Mogadishu during Clinton’s disastrous Operation Restore Hope.

“The UN, in taking over the Somalia operation in 1993, clearly did not have the resources or the ability to do the job the United States drew up.

“Defining a failed state is an area that needs work. A new term is needed to express the idea that a state’s fundamental institutions have so deteriorated that it needs long-term external help, not to institutionalise foreign control but to create stronger domestic institutions capable of self-government.”

14 May 2006