Weak Somali government boycotts talks

By Mohamed Olad Hassan
July 15, 2006

The militia, however, sent negotiators Friday to the talks venue and portrayed the government as an obstacle to peace.

"If the transitional government doesn't come, then the international community will see who wants peace in Somalia and who doesn't," said Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a leader of the Supreme Islamic Courts Council.

Transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf told lawmakers that neighboring Eritrea has armed and trained the Islamic militia, and that the militia seized control of large parts of southern Somalia with the help of foreign fighters.

"I personally know that foreign terrorists most of them from neighboring Ethiopia and including Pakistanis, Turks, Afghans and Arabs from different nations have been involved in recent fighting in Mogadishu," the capital, Yusuf said. Referring to Ethiopia, he meant ethnic Oromo rebels that Somali officials accuse of helping the Islamic group.

Yusuf said the government will not negotiate with radical militia members. Officials are considering talks with moderate members, civil society organizations and businessmen in Mogadishu. The Cabinet is expected to work out those plans, he said.

The Arab League-sponsored talks, set for Saturday in Khartoum, Sudan, were expected to be a move toward international acceptance for the militia, which Washington accuses of harboring Osama bin Laden's terror network and wanting to impose a Taliban-style theocracy.

Somalia has been a particular concern to the United States, which has long feared the Horn of Africa nation would become a refuge for al-Qaida, much as Afghanistan did in the late 1990s.

On Friday, Yusuf also accused the Islamic militia of planning to attack Baidoa and the strategic southern port of Kismayo.

AT FIRST sight, recent events in Somalia look depressingly similar to those in Afghanistan when it fell to the Taliban. After 15 years of civil war and no government, an Islamist army has swept aside warlords and firmly asserted its control. This week the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC) finally took the entire capital, Mogadishu, and it controls several towns nearby (see article). As in Afghanistan, exhausted people are finding mullah-rule better than anarchy and extortion; as roadblocks have been lifted, prices have fallen. But outsiders, especially America, fear that the CIC is a shield for al-Qaeda.

Somalia is actually very different from Afghanistan. For instance, it is ethnically homogenous. Its divisions, ever since it fractured in 1991, have mainly been between clans—or, as it has continued to fall apart, between sub-sub-sub-clans. Unlike the Taliban, which was dominated by a single Pushtun tribe, keen to assert its rights over other ethnic groups, the CIC is creaking with inter-communal tensions. Indeed, those divisions are suggested by its name. Although Islamic courts have for several years been the only dispensers of justice in Mogadishu, each one is controlled by a distinct sub-clan—and cannot try a member of a rival group. If previous feuds are anything to go by, family ties will prove stronger than Islamist unity.

An Islamist fighter inspects an armoured personal carrier surrendered over to the Islamic Courts Union from the militias loyal to a secular warlord, north of Somalia's capital Mogadishu, July 13, 2006. (Shabele Media/Reuters)

The CIC offers an opportunity as well as a threat. Although its leaders want to build an Islamist state, some of them seem to realise that this would be unacceptable to many Somalis, who are a fairly secular lot. The CIC's most pressing concern is to prevent foreign peacekeepers, from Uganda and Sudan, being deployed to Somalia under the terms of a regional peace plan. This was designed to shore up the 14th effort to make a government in Somalia. The government—a coalition of warlords and businessmen recognised by the United Nations but by only a minority of Somalis—is cowering in the town of Baidoa, under a surreptitious guard of Ethiopian troops.

If the government and the CIC could negotiate a power-sharing deal, Somalia might end up with a government that actually controls its terrain. If the two sides fight, the consequences could be dreadful. Ethiopia would be likely to send more troops to the government, rallying many nationalists to the CIC and boosting hardliners among the Islamists, such as their joint leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is accused by America of helping a few al-Qaeda fugitives in Somalia.

If that worries America, it has itself partly to blame. Early this year, it gave cash and guns to certain warlords in Mogadishu to grab the fugitives and their local friends on its behalf. This helped spark the recent conflict, in which several hundred people have been killed, and the CIC has triumphed.

With the European Union, America should urge Somalia's factions to negotiate. They should also insist that Ethiopia, a hated neighbour, withdraw its troops. And they should help uphold a UN arms embargo on the country. A governed Somalia would be easier to police—which is why America should quit meddling on the cheap, and pursue serious diplomacy. (The Economist: July 13, 2006)