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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Aug 30 2010 - 09:17:14 EDT
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060802a1.html
Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006
Perfect storm brewing in Horn of Africa
By GWYNNE DYER
LONDON -- It has the makings of a perfect storm extending right across
the Horn of Africa. The 15-year war of all against all in Somalia is
threatening to morph into an international war bringing chaos and
disaster to the rest of the region, and the al-Qaida-obsessed
"securocrats" in Washington are the ones to blame.
The Somalis have nobody to blame but themselves for their basic
plight. Although Somalia has only one ethnic group, one language and
one religion, its people are deeply divided by clan, and when
long-ruling dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, the
clan leaders were unable to unite and form a new government. Instead,
the country fell into civil war and anarchy.
A U.S.-led military intervention in 1992 tried to restore order, but
after 18 American soldiers and a thousand Somalis were killed in a
single day (the "Black Hawk Down" episode), U.S. forces pulled out. By
1995 all the other United Nations troops had followed, and Somalia was
abandoned to its fate as a real-life version of the Mad Max films: no
government, no police, no schools, no law, just the trigger-happy
troops of rival warlords roaring around in "technicals," pickups
mounted with machine guns or anti-aircraft cannon, stealing and
killing to their heart's content.
But U.S. interest in Somalia reignited after the terrorist attacks of
2001, because as a Muslim country without a government it seemed a
potential haven for Islamist terrorists. At first American policy
concentrated on re-creating a national government, and by 2004 a
transitional regime blessed by the United Nations and the African
Union and led by one of the warlords, Abdulahi Yusuf, was installed in
the town of Baidoa. But he was not in the capital, Mogadishu, because
the three warlords who ruled that city rejected his authority. So did
most other Somalis.
Meanwhile, a different kind of authority was emerging in Mogadishu:
the Islamic courts. It was an attempt, paid for by local businessmen,
to restore order by using religious law to settle disputes and punish
criminals.
Each clan's court has jurisdiction only over its own clan members, but
it was a start on rebuilding a law-abiding society, and in 2004 they
all joined to form the Union of Islamic Courts. Unfortunately, the
mere use of the word "Islamic" spooked the U.S. government.
As usual, Washington's response was mainly military. It decided that
the Union of Islamic Courts was a threat, and in February CIA planes
delivered large amounts of money and guns to the three warlords who
dominated Mogadishu. They named themselves the Alliance for the
Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, and started trying to
suppress the UIC.
Rarely has any CIA plot backfired so comprehensively. Volunteers
flooded in from all over southern Somalia to resist the warlords'
attack on the only institution that showed any promise of restoring
law and order in the country.
By early June the last of the warlords had been driven out of
Mogadishu, which is now entirely in the hands of the UIC, and for the
first time in 15 years ordinary citizens are safe from robbery, rape
and murder.
It is by no means clear that the UIC must fall into the hands of
Islamist radicals who will turn Somalia into a safe haven for
anti-American terrorists. Left to their own devices, the moderate
majority of Somalis can probably ensure that what finally emerges is a
moderate Islamic government with strong popular support.
But Washington panicked, and last week it let Ethiopia send troops in
to protect the isolated "Interim Government" in Baidoa. That probably
means renewed war, and across borders this time.
Ethiopia has five times as many people as Somalia and has already
fought two border wars with it, in 1964 and 1977. (Somalia claims most
of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, where the people are mostly Muslim and
ethnically Somali.) But now it's more complex:
Ethiopia is a largely Christian country with big and restive Muslim
minorities, and President Meles Zenawi is terrified that militant
Islamists in power in Somalia might help those minorities to rebel,
but this would not be happening without Washington's consent. It is
exactly the wrong response.
On June 10, Abdulahi Yusuf's unelected "parliament" in Baidoa voted to
seek foreign troops. On June 20 the first Ethiopian troops were
spotted in Baidoa -- and on the same day Sheik Mukhtar Robow, the
UIC's deputy head of security, declared: "God willing, we will remove
the Ethiopians in our country and wage a jihad against them."
Just when Somalia was about to escape from its long nightmare, a new
and worse one has appeared: the prospect of a war that would consume
the entire Horn of Africa (for Eritrea, teetering on the brink of
another war with Ethiopia itself, is already sending aid to the UIC).
The entire Horn of Africa could spend the next five years going
through a catastrophe similar to what the Great Lakes region of Africa
suffered in the later 1990s.
Sometimes you really wish that the State Department, rather than the
Pentagon and the White House, ran American foreign policy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
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