Old nightmare, new danger

By Stanley A. Weiss
International Herald Tribune
Novemeber 24, 2006

Sheik Dahir Hassan Aweys says his plans are to re-claim Somali regions from Kenya and Somalia (AP)

Like a bad dream, the fear of Somalia is rooted in extreme trauma - the United Nations mission of the early 1990s that saw dozens of peacekeepers killed and the bodies of American soldiers from the "Black Hawk Down" incident dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Then there's the guilt of abandoning Somalis to brutal warlords who killed hundreds of thousands and turned millions into refugees.

So Somalia - perched on the strategic Horn of Africa astride the busy shipping lanes separating northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula - keeps coming back.

It was the planning ground for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and for the attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002. It remains a refuge for suspects in the 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in nearby Yemen.

Now, with the victory in Mogadishu this spring of an alliance of Islamic militias - the Islamic Courts Union - the world has again awoken in a panic.

The courts' radical leader, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, wanted by the United States for his ties to Osama bin Laden, has called for a Taliban-style Islamic state. Somalia has become the new Afghanistan - "the largest potential safe haven for Al Qaeda in Africa," according to the International Crisis Group.

This time, there's no ignoring Somalia. As a delegation of American executives learned on a recent visit to four of its neighbors, Somalia is more than a fight between rival clan-based militias. It's now a proxy war for foreign powers waging old border and religious disputes that could quickly engulf the entire region.

Indeed, in Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Yemen, we heard fears that Somalia's Islamists seek a "Greater Somalia," as Aweys declared last week. Officials in Christian-majority Ethiopia and Kenya worry about their own restive ethnic Somali Muslims, such as those in Ethiopia's volatile Ogaden region, over which Ethiopia and Somalia have long fought. A senior official in tiny Djibouti, home to an ethnic Somali majority, warned that Somalia's new rulers seek "an Islamic super-state."

In response, Ethiopia has sent thousands of troops to bolster Somalia's fragile secular transitional government, which is recognized by the UN but rife with divisions, and largely relegated to the single inland town of Baidoa.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who recently declared that "technically, we are at war" with the Islamists, warned that unless the world acts soon against the Islamic Courts, Ethiopia will. Ominously, Islamic and Ethiopian forces near Baidoa reportedly clashed for the first time last week.

With the Islamists backed by troops from Ethiopia's neighbor and arch enemy Eritrea, any Ethiopian military strike could spark a wider war. Eritrea, which sees Somalia as a useful second front against Ethiopia, would likely retaliate by reigniting the 1998-2000 border war that killed 70,000.

Worse yet, Iran and Syria are accused in a new UN report of providing arms and military advisers to Somalia in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sunni Saudi Arabia, always eager to contain Shiite Iran and to advance its puritanical Wahhabi style of Islam, also backs the Islamists.

Washington, meanwhile, finds its options limited, having turned a blind eye to Somalia. The State Department, our delegation learned, has just one foreign-service officer in the region, based 600 miles away in Nairobi, working full-time on Somalia.

So while moderates within the Islamic Courts have indicated a willingness to communicate, and perhaps cooperate, with the United States, Washington seems to lack both the will and a way to do so.

Nor is direct intervention on the table. Clandestine CIA support for secular Somali warlords is blamed for galvanizing the Islamic militias to victory this spring. The presence of Ethiopian troops is already allowing Islamists to evoke Somali nationalism. Even peacekeepers, warns the UN report, could be a "catalyst that sparks a serious military confrontation."

In the first act of this latest Somalia nightmare, Islamists took Mogadishu. In the second, they are extending their grip over much of the country. But as the British parodist Max Beerbohm once observed, "have you noticed there is never any third act to a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there."

For now, there may be little the world can do to dislodge the Islamists, and the Qaeda-linked jihadists among them, from their African beachhead in Somalia. But if dealt with clumsily, with military force, Islamic rule in Somalia will not be the climax of terror in the region, but just the beginning of this nightmare's third act.

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Stanley A. Weiss is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington.