Tuesday,
July 08, 2008 -
AFTER
months of delicate negotiations, Somalia’s
internationally recognised but feeble transitional
government and its Islamist opposition agreed to
work together to rebuild their ruined country.
Under an agreement signed in neighbouring Djibouti
in June, Ethiopia, which invaded Somalia in late
2006 to prop up the ailing secular-minded Somali
government, was to withdraw its troops.
Somalia’s Islamists, who have been fighting an
insurgency ever since, would stand their fighters
down. It would have been a breakthrough for a
country that has lacked a central government since
the fall of its long-time dictator, Siad Barre, in
1991. But the deal was stillborn. Since then,
Somalia has rotted away, a victim of international
indifference and its own internecine history.
Somalia’s more
extreme Islamists have shown their contempt for
the moderates by stepping up their attacks. The
extremists are led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a
wily former army officer who flirted with peace
before rejecting it. He is aided by fighters
loosely linked to the Shabab (“the
Youth”), the armed wing of the Islamic Courts
Union, which briefly ran most of the country in
2006, plus nationalist Somalis from disaffected
bits of the powerful Hawiye clan and criminals
flying a jihadist flag of convenience. And now al-Qaeda
is sensing an opportunity in a country where it
has previously got nowhere. Abu al-Libi, one of
its top men, who escaped from the American Bagram
prison camp in Afghanistan in 2005, has circulated
a video on the internet calling on foreigners to
fight alongside the Somali jihadists, with the aim
of establishing a caliphate.
The extremists
are helped by the continuing presence of Ethiopian
troops. Most Somalis in Mogadishu, the capital,
still resent them. After a recent retaliatory
Ethiopian mortar attack, a Somali living in the
capital described how he helped his neighbours:
“We collected the flesh of their bodies that was
stuck to the walls.” Some 6,500 Somalis, many of
them civilians, may have been killed since
Ethiopia invaded early last year, though no one
really knows the number.
The UN reckons
that 2.6m out of 8m Somalis need help to keep fed
and sheltered; some 1m have fled from their homes.
That figure could rise with the recent failure of
crops and the death of animals from drought.
Spiralling food costs and the diving value of the
Somali shilling have made things worse. Families
are dying of hunger in camps for the internally
displaced on the main road south of Mogadishu.
Somalia may be
one of the most dangerous places in the world for
one citizen to help another. Those who do often
pay with their lives. Last week insurgents killed
Muhammad Hassan Kulmiye, a brave local peace
campaigner, and kidnapped a local head of the
UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for
Refugees. Workers from several agencies, including
Oxfam and the UN’s World Food Programme, have
been shot dead in recent weeks. Foreign aid
workers from Kenya, Britain and Italy have been
kidnapped and are still unaccounted for.
The United
States had hoped that Ethiopia’s intervention
would secure regional stability by eliminating the
more extreme Islamists. But it has succeeded
mainly in pushing the more moderate ones together
with the most belligerent. America’s decision
earlier this year to list the Shabab as a
terrorist group has given American force
commanders a green light to launch air strikes and
send covert missions into Somalia. Some missiles
fired from American submarines off the Somali
coast have indeed killed Islamist insurgent
leaders. But others have missed them—and killed
Somali civilians instead.
Most
moderate Somalis deplore the air strikes. So do
most of the British, Swedish, Italian and Kenyan
diplomats involved in Somalia (and based in
Kenya’s capital, Nairobi), as do many in
America’s own State Department. They say that
the raids have weakened Somalia’s moderates and
strengthened the extremists.
The insurgency
may be getting fiercer again. Government
officials, including the president, Abdullahi
Yusuf, an implacable foe of the hardliners, face
frequent assassination attempts. Islamist
insurgents have attacked towns and villages across
the country, including some close to the border
with Kenya. Its army has been deployed at the
border and sometimes across it, but has been
unable to stem the influx of Somali refugees. A
complicated situation has been made worse by
Eritrea, which supports Somalia’s hardliners
because they are killing Ethiopians, whom the
Eritreans deem to be their enemy.
The only hope at
present is for a robust international peacekeeping
force to come in and allow the Ethiopians to
withdraw. The UN Security Council has passed
resolutions paving the way for its own blue-helmet
mission. But this is unlikely to happen. UN-backed
peacekeepers have an unhappy history in Somalia
and furthermore the UN lacks resources. It took a
lot of political pressure to get the Security
Council to agree to send peacekeepers to Darfur,
the blighted western region of Sudan; they have
yet to arrive in the promised numbers months after
they were due. Nor is it likely that the African
Union will add to its few thousand peacekeepers,
mainly Ugandans, in Mogadishu. Western diplomats
working on Somalia say their reports make little
impact on their governments back home. Despite the
misery, the international will is lacking. So
Somalia remains abandoned, lawless and too
dangerous for most outsiders to operate in.
