Children can now swim and play at the beaches of Mogadishu. Though still, one of the world’s biggest headaches at the moment is how al-Shabaab offers a training ground for radicalised young Muslims.
By Dan Damon
IN SUMMARY
This year, the British government is putting much of its diplomatic effort into trying to bring peace and stability to Somalia. A BBC reporter who has just returned from Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda, reports on the background to the London Conference on Somalia scheduled for February 23.
"In Somalia, nowhere to hide!” These are words of Major Duncan Kashoma who was wounded in Mogadishu five years ago while serving in the The African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) force. Major Kashoma was hit by shrapnel from an 83mm mortar shell - a large and devastating weapon in an urban battlefield. His chest and abdomen were ripped open. “My intestines came out. I didn’t realise. I was trying to find out what had happened to my soldiers. I didn’t know I was hit until someone told me!” Six Ugandan soldiers died that day, among the first Ugandan casualties. Major Kashoma didn’t stop bleeding for three days, by which time he was in a Nairobi hospital. He is waiting for further surgery on his legs and his body still carries shrapnel fragments, some are still in his eyes.
As the London Conference on Somalia takes place on Wednesday, Uganda People’s Defence Forces chief, Gen Aronda Nyakairima, says the situation has changed in Mogadishu since five years ago. With Amisom forces controlling Somalia’s capital, and Kenya on the offensive from the south, Somalis could see light at the end of the tunnel soon.
“The operation over Mogadishu is over and Amisom forces are now embarking on liberating the rest of Somalia,” Gen Aronda told this newspaper on telephone. He added that “the operation plan is complete,” and it will on four sectors, namely in; Mogadishu, Kismayo, Baidoa and Bila Tuan.
But this could not have come without a price paid by the forces of the participating countries in this campaign.
Officially, the Ministry of Defence says the death toll among Ugandan soldiers since 2007 stands at 80.
On my recent tour of Uganda, Kenya and Somaliland, I was struck by the way Major Kashoma’s words - in Somalia, nowhere to hide - can be a warning to all the governments involved in Somalia, including East African nations and their Western allies.
In Uganda, despite official efforts to control the story of the campaign against al-Shabaab, the government has not really succeeded in hiding the cost from Uganda’s people.
Opposition against the campaign
The opposition’s Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) is making the ending of the Somalia deployment part of its campaign. A senior officer in FDC, retired Major Rubaramira Ruranga told me there is increasing scepticism about the fundamental purpose of the mission.
The campaign is not about stabilising the region, says Maj Ruranga who retired from the army nearly two decades ago. He argues that it’s about maintaining the pretence of an external enemy to divert attention from what needs to change inside Uganda itself.
However, serving officers I spoke to are on message, and refer to recent successes in the north of Mogadishu. Capt Judith Asiimwe, who has served in Mogadishu, told me she is sure the UPDF has the will, the weapons and the training from British, French and US troops to fight on. But she echoed an opinion I heard from other soldiers: “I would call on other African countries to send troops so we can make Somalia stable,” she told me. In 2007, Nigeria said it would send more than 1,000 troops, Malawi up to 1,000 more, and there have been commitments from Ghana and Sierra Leone as well. So far, none have arrived in Somalia.
Unless the Amisom force reaches at least its planned strength of 20,000 there is an obvious danger. Amisom can take ground, but with too few AU troops to remain amongst the population to protect them there is little to stop al-Shabaab returning.
In the Balkans in the 1990s, I saw the futility of an under-strength peacekeeping operation. The UN ‘Protection Force’ in Bosnia was reduced to bribing local warlords with the food aid they were supposed to be taking to besieged towns and villages just to be allowed to pass checkpoints that were little more than a man sitting beside the road on a kitchen chair brandishing a hunting rifle.
Can Amisom pull a miracle?
Amisom has a more robust mandate. But strength comes from numbers. People do not trust peacekeepers who don’t hold and harden their forward positions.
Gen Aronda, whose Ugandan contigent has the biggest force in Somalia says, today (February 20), “the UN Security Council is passing a resolution to authorise additional forces for the total liberation of Somalia”. This is a boost to the Wednesday conference.
“The London conference will among other things, advocate for sustained international community’s support of Somalia’s liberation and generate the required success,” Gen Aronda adds. “Because of the success of African Union forces, more countries are now coming on board. And for the first time in many years, the UN Representative for Somalia left Nairobi last month and now comfortably operates in Mogadishu.”
Kenya’s late but timely intervention
In Kenya, I came across much more support for the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) incursion into Somalia, which began in October last year. A recent opinion poll showed more than 80 percent backing.
For Kenya, too, though, ‘in Somalia, nowhere to hide’ is a warning worth heeding. War reporting in the Kenyan media can most charitably be described as “incomplete.” Few questions are asked about the sustainability of the operation. None of the grim reality of fighting al-Shabaab is shown in any detail. TV news reports seem to focus on the delight of Somali village children as they received sweets from Kenyan soldiers.
I offer no criticism of reporters whose only access to a battlefront is on an ‘embed’, as we call it, travelling with and protected by the army you’re reporting on. There are some places where it’s plainly foolish to go off reporting on your own. Somalia is one of them; Iraq was another. I was ‘embedded’ with the US army there and was very glad of the armoured Humvees they took me around in.
Respect for the soldiers you’re travelling with does not mean you can’t ask them tough questions, though. Military missions that don’t face scrutiny are more likely to go wrong and go on too long. The way attention was diverted from Afghanistan by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a widely quoted example.
Why has Kenya decided to deploy its small airforce in Somalia, with the dangers of ‘collateral damage’? A story circulating amongst Kenyan Somalis in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi was of five children killed in a Kenyan air strike in mid-January, an incident under investigation by the KDF.
Other tough questions might usefully be asked in Kenya. Young Kenyan Somalis like one student I met - let’s call him Ismail - are rounded up whether they show their Kenyan IDs or not. “They wouldn’t believe it wasn’t a forgery,” he told me. “They kept me overnight. I missed an important exam...”
One thing that makes Somalia one of the world’s biggest headaches at the moment is how al-Shabaab offers a training ground for radicalised young Muslims. The London based think tank RUSI recently estimated there are 50 Britons among around 200 extremists training in al-Shabaab camps in Somalia. Alienating the Somali population in Kenya won’t help slow the flow of radicals across Somalia’s border.
These are the challenges facing the diplomats arriving shortly for the London Conference on Somalia planned for February 23. All the headlines, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague, describe Somalia as the world’s most failed state. Previous attempts to overcome that failure created the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Rashid Abdi, one of the most respected experts on Somalia, describes the TFG now as “divisive, corrupt and hobbled by weak leadership”. The many different Somali clans and families do not believe their interests can be protected on a national basis.
Inside Somalia
Yet Somalia’s clan system need not be the problem. It is not a mixture of ‘ancient hatreds’ and a recipe for disaster, according to Rashid Abdi.
Traditional respect for age and wisdom is said to be behind the success of the most stable part of Somalia: Somaliland with Hargeisa as its capital. “The elders sat down under a tree and agreed to live in peace,” is the legend that all Somalilanders will tell you. It wasn’t that simple, of course - there are still some parts of the territory claimed by Somaliland that do not accept Hargeisa’s authority. But the economic impact of twenty years of relative peace is obvious.
Hargeisa is at the centre of a money transfer or Hawala system that brings in millions of dollars in remittances from Somalis abroad. The US government has tried to restrict those money flows, fearful that Hawala is funding al-Shabaab. But the chief executive of the biggest money transfer company, Abdulrashid Duale of Dahabshiil, insists identity checks ensure the money is as safe as any in the region. His computer records are available for any regulator to check, says Mr Duale. “We have to comply with all international banking regulations.”
In Somalia, nowhere to hide; and the agenda for this month’s London Conference shows that the UK government now recognises that there is no point trying to hide the failure of all previous foreign efforts to stabilise Somalia. Somaliland, which has largely been ignored by the outside world, has a stability that is home-grown. Finding ways to support Somaliland and the other, less secure, autonomous regions Puntland and Galmudug, is on the London agenda.
African-led military operations will be needed and establishing sustainable funding for Amisom is another important aim of the Conference. Al-Shabaab has just been ‘welcomed’ into the al-Qaeda family by Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and remains one of the most serious global security challenges. Disrupting piracy and terrorism training camps are also on the security agenda for the London meeting.
Above all, what to do about the political process, renewed without much hope at the Kampala meeting three years ago and now considered to be broken beyond use? The mandate of the TFG expires in August this year.
After about 19 previous international conferences on Somalia, the likelihood that this gathering will finally design a workable, popular government for the whole of Somalia seems remote. The evidence I found in Somaliland is that Somalis can find their own answers in small ways in small spaces.
Not nation building, then. No grand schemes. The most hopeful political outcome for the London Conference might be East African governments, backed by European and American funding, supporting small scale programmes to encourage autonomous, commercially successful communities - with their own flags and governments, yes, perhaps, for now - from which Somali unity might be built in a far distant future.
Utility: Lessons from Somaliland
Somaliland’s forbidding landscape - sandy desert, volcanic rock and thorn bushes in temperatures up to 45 degrees, with roaming camels and goats - disguises a huge potential. The port of Berbera exports millions of dollars’ worth of livestock to the Middle East every year. The holding pens at the port hold 400,000 animals - not big enough, port director Ali Omer Mohammed told me. They are building a facility to hold a million animals at a time. “Camel herders drive their herds 2,500km from Kismayu near the Kenyan border because our systems are reliable and port taxes low,” he said.
More remarkable still is Somaliland Beverage Industries - a soft drinks factory outside Hargeisa, built by a group of young Somali investors who put in $15 million - and managed to persuade the Coca Cola Company that a franchise in an unrecognised country neighbouring a 20-year conflict zone was worth backing. The plant is as modern as any I have seen.
The obvious problem for that factory and most other industries in Somaliland is the lack of infrastructure. Local businesses pool their resources to lay sections of tarmac. But most roads are simply sandy tracks. Neighbouring Djibouti has a fine highway built with European Union funding - Somaliland’s unrecognised status means it can’t get that sort of help.
Somalilanders say they deserve better because they have established a clan-based system that works. They say the British didn’t destroy the traditional power of the elders but co-opted them. In Somalia Italiana, Italian colonisers broke the power of the clan elders, they say, and that has led to the present chaos.
editorial@ug.nationmedia.com
http://www.monitor.co.ug/artsculture/Reviews/-/691232/1331224/-/item/2/-/12u8y9e/-/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment