From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Aug 04 2009 - 15:35:16 EDT
No Easy, Short Term Solutions for Somalia, says Analyst
By Joe DeCapua
Washington D.C
04 August 2009
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 24 Jul 2009
U.S. Secretary of State Clinton begins Africa tour in Nairobi
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will not visit Somalia on her Africa
tour, but the situation there will be addressed. Mrs. Clinton is expected to
meet with Somalia's president Thursday in Nairobi.
The ongoing conflict between the Somali Transitional Federal Government
(TFG) and Islamist militias has created one of the worst humanitarian crises
in the world.
Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project and a
member of the board of directors of the Association of Concerned Africa
Scholars, spoke to VOA about where Somalia falls on Mrs. Clinton's list of
priorities.
"I'd say it's very much in the top three to five issues. She does have a lot
of very important Africa-related issues on her agenda - oil, democracy,
conflict, etc. - as well as her announced agenda of food security and
promoting trade and investment and political reform," he says.
How tough a problem to solve?
"They're all really tough issues to solve. And I have to say I don't think
that the Obama administration has a very good understanding of a lot of the
complexities of these issues or of what needs to be done to solve them. But
it's certainly one of the more complicated," he says.
He blames that in part on the fact that the TFG actually controls very
little of the country.
Volman, who's an expert in security and military policy, says the Obama
administration lacks a broad approach to Somalia, as have past US
administrations.
"President Obama himself and.most of his advisers, continue to believe that
militaryinstruments.are, if not the best and preferable instruments for
pursuing US policy, that they're really the only instruments that they have
at hand.and need to rely on them," he says.
Volman also disagrees with the current strategy of waging a global war on
terrorism.
"I think it makes absolutely no sense to define terrorism as a military
issue and to try to use military instruments to deal with it," he says. But
he says that policy affects how the US responds to Somalia, just as it does
to Afghanistan.
Available options
"The primary principle that needs to be employed here is first do no harm.
That in the rush to do something, they're making serious errors of judgment
in the belief that they have to respond immediately,' he says.
Volman says a longer term view and policy are needed for Somalia and warns
against politicians basing decisions on election cycles and opinion polls.
"This is a bipartisan problem in American foreign policy.. By rushing in to
provide security assistance to the Transitional Federal Government.we
delegitimize that government. We stigmatize it as an agent of American
policy. We make it much more difficult for it to reach out and achieve any
kind of broad-based political solutions," he says.
He says the US needs to develop alternative approaches and instruments to
these problems.
"President Obama himself has spoken quite eloquently about the need to
address these problems - to take a global approach - to use his phrase
"transnational means," he says.
Volman says such an approach means working through the African Union, the
United Nations and other multi-lateral institutions.
What the US can do
"The United States government itself has to develop its own capacity to
engage much more multi-laterally. Part of that is to develop the (US) Agency
for International Development (USAID). Another part of that is to really
push for serious reform at the United Nations and to do whatever it can to
make the African Union a much more effective organization," he says.
"Part of President Obama's problem is that the only instrument he has at his
disposal is the Pentagon. He doesn't have an effective State Department
because it's been denuded of its resources and its personnel. The (US)
Agency for International Development is in even worse shape," he says.
Many vacancies went unfilled during the past several years in what some
critics have said was an attempt by the Bush administration to weaken the
department in favor of the Pentagon.
Long-term solution to Somalia could take a long time
"It's going to take decades to solve these problems just as it took decades
to create them. You have to take a long term view of how you're going to
solve them. And there's no guarantee that you're going to solve them," he
says.
The Somalia conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, while
millions are in need of emergency food aid and other assistance.
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