The failed Somali State and terrorism (Part2)

By Evarist Kagaruki

Previously, I pointed out in this column that one of the reasons for the failure of past attempts by the so-called international community to resolve the Somali conflict was the agreed policy by the West that a radical, Islamist Somalia was unacceptable. I said that the fragile transitional government was formed on the basis of that invidious policy whose thrust was to exclude all “extremist” Islamic elements.

This, I argued, was a wrong approach because any clan composition of government that did not take on board Islamists (and, of course, all other social, political, ideological groups and clans as well as regions like Puntland, for example) would not function; it would be a government built on quicksand. And this is exactly what we have witnessed since 2004, when the current dysfunctional transitional government was established in Nairobi.
The other wrong approach to the Somali crisis, which has precipitated the situation, was the tendency on the part of the Western powers to see the problem through the prism of “al Qaeda-connected terrorism” and the threat this posed to the whole region. This perspective has distorted the dynamics of the conflict and led to the application of wrong “solutions” to the problems of the Horn of African country. Forexample, the Western, and essentially American, strategy on Somalia since the Clinton administration has been militaristic. The whole concept of “peacekeeping” in Somalia has been twisted and redefined to mean sending troops there to fight terror. It all began with the failed American humanitarian/military intervention in Somalia in October 1993 (ahead of a UN peacekeeping force), code-named “Operation Restore Hope”.
The UN-backed peace mission hit a snag when 18 American marines were killed by Somali gun men and one of the bodies was dragged (naked) in the streets of Mogadishu by angry mobs. About 300 Somalis were also killed in the operation. This incident occurred as a result of a military confrontation between the Somali militias and American soldiers; it was triggered by the US military raid (with helicopter gun ships) on a meeting of clan elders in Mogadishu three months earlier, in which more than 60 Somalis died and several others were seriously injured.

The attack, which had the approval of the UN, was part of the manhunt for only one warlord, Gen Mohamed Farah Aidid, whose Somali Congress forces (which he led) had seized Mogadishu and other cities after the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siyad Barre in January, 1991. After chasing out Barre, Aidid became the key military, if not political figure in Somalia; something which made the West uncomfortable. The singling out of one warlord (Aidid), when the objective ought to have been disabling all warlords, was one of the biggest mistakes of the US in its mission in Somalia. The mishap in the get-Aidid agenda marked the end of the US/UN operation which, instead of restoring hope, escalated the situation.

The failed disastrous operation evoked a sense of cynicism and indifference in Washington and other Western capitals (and at the UN) over the Somali problem. It completely changed Western perceptions about African conflicts and engendered the UN and its member-nations in the West to lose the strand of peacekeeping in the continent. US policy makers have since become paranoid and swore never to risk sending troops anywhere not vital to America’s so-called national security interests; and her Western allies have, as would be expected, followed suit. Thus today, no Western country is prepared or willing to send its troops on a peacekeeping mission to any conflict area in Africa.

Then, as the West was getting more unconcerned about Africa’s conflicts, came the terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998 by al-Qaeda who were said to have found sanctuary in lawless Somalia, followed by the horrific events of September 11, 2001 - also the devilish work of al-Qaeda. These tragic experiences reinforced the argument (in the West) that “terrorism” (read: Islamic extremism) was the basic and immediate problem of Somalia, which needed to be tackled by the international community - not directly, but through proxies like Ethiopia. The suspected links between the country’s Islamists and al-Qaeda were often cited as evidence of how serious the problem was.

But the reality is that “Somali terrorism” was a manifestation of the fundamental problem: a failed state. Granted, that the Islamists (particularly al-Shabaab - the military wing of the Islamic Courts) may have links with al-Qaeda which has made no secret of its approval of them. But al-Qaeda operatives would have found no safe haven in Somalia if the state there had not collapsed, as the international community looked the other way. If the UN had lived up to its responsibilities in Somalia, today we wouldn’t be talking of the al-Shabaab (real) threat, as the recent terrorist bombing of Kampala would harshly remind us.

Source: www.thecitizen.co.tz