Just beyond the terminal at Mogadishu’s Aden Abdulleh International Airport sits a rusty, hulking wreck of a plane. It has been there since 2007, shot down as it attempted to deliver equipment to the first batch of African Union troops deploying into the Somali capital. It was an inauspicious start to a mission that has today helped provide Somalia with the best opportunity it has had in two decades to achieve lasting peace.
Today, as sleek passenger jets taxi past, bringing ever increasing numbers of visitors, it stands as a reminder of just how much things have changed. One recent guest, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, summed it up perfectly. “A few years ago, people tended to think of Somalia as a place of famine or bloodshed,” he said. “We finally face a moment of fresh opportunities. We must seize it.”
Within the city, there is a palpable sense of hope. Ever since Amisom and the Somali National Army forced the Al-Qaeda linked extremist terror group, Al-Shabaab, to withdraw from the city, violence levels have come down markedly. For the first time in years, the people of Mogadishu can walk the streets at night and relax on the beaches with a measure of safety. As many who had fled the chaos and anarchy return, homes are being repaired and rebuilt and shops and businesses reopening.
Barely a month after the terrorists were defeated, political leaders from across the country gathered in Mogadishu and agreed on a roadmap to the eventual return of permanent government in August 2012. The improved security situation has enabled the delivery of emergency food aid to hundreds of thousands who came to the capital seeking refuge from the famine in Al-Shabaab controlled regions in the south, where access for aid agencies is severely limited.
It is easy to forget that when the United Nations Security Council, the body that bears the primary responsibility for the preservation of global peace, mandated the African Union to deploy a peace support mission to Somalia, few gave it much chance of success. Bigger and better resourced interventions had already failed to stabilise the country. Amisom deployed with few troops, and even fewer resources. For much of the time it has been in Somalia, it has been significantly below its mandated strength, initially 8,000 but now at 12,000 troops. This is still far less than the 28,000 deployed under the second United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) with a similar task in 1993.
Force enablers
Even the way the mission is resourced is unique. For example, nowhere else is there a UN-mandated peace operation that has no support from the air, no aircraft for battlefield reconnaissance, transport or ground support. Though since 2009, Amisom has been supported logistically and technically by the UN, the funds do not always come from the UN-assessed budget. Rather the mission is forced to also rely on voluntary donations by individual nations that are neither predictable nor sustained or guaranteed. The Amisom Trust Fund, set up to receive such contributions, has for example not reimbursed contingents for the use of their equipment since March — an area not covered by the UN logistical support package.
As a result, the success in Mogadishu has come at considerable cost to the Ugandan and Burundian soldiers who have borne the brunt of the struggle to erase the menace of violent extremism from Somalia. The gains made, though remarkable, remain fragile, as the recent terrorist bombing campaign has shown. With the help of the local community, many of the improvised explosive devices and car bombs are being found and disposed of before they can kill and maim. However, Amisom must be urgently reinforced and given the resources it needs to adequately and effectively protect the population in the city and to expand the gains to other areas of the country.
Amisom commanders estimate that they will need up to 20,000 troops to secure the whole of Somalia and African countries are stepping up. This month, the mission welcomes its third contingent, a battalion from Djibouti. With Kenya, which already has troops in the south, accepting the AU invitation to rehat them as Amisom, and Burundi planning to insert another battalion, Amisom has now been offered more troops than currently allowed under the UN mandate.
It is therefore critical that the Security Council urgently considers raising the ceiling, as indeed it has committed to do once the limit is reached. Further, the mission needs to be financed in a predictable and guaranteed fashion and given the necessary force enablers, including air assets such as helicopters, a marine capability and military engineering capabilities.
As Amisom secures the ground, there is, too, an urgent need to continue to build up the capacity of the Transitional Federal Government to deliver services to its people and improve governance. Functional institutions are a prerequisite for long-term stability and support must be provided for budgets, training programmes and quick impact projects. Amisom’s civilian and police components have made strides in training and mentoring Somalia’s civil servants and police officers and these efforts need to be complemented by greater international engagement and assistance.
In his short and famous speech at Gettysburg honouring the sacrifices made on that great battlefield of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln called on his young nation “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Those words are as true of Somalia today. The shattered wreck at the airport is a monument to the price fellow Africans have paid for Somalia’s “moment of fresh opportunities.” The sacrifices they have made on all our behalf must not be in vain.
Wafula Wamunyinyi is the Deputy Special Representative of the Chairperson of the AU Commission on Somalia.
Source: Africa Review
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