From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Oct 27 2009 - 08:13:32 EST
Somalia: The Struggle for Kismayo and Clan-Based Islamist Warlordism
27 Oct 27, 2009 - 5:37:15 AM
By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
Intelligence:
A closed source on the ground in south-central Somalia reports on the
financial dimension and motivation of the current conflict in Somalia's far
sourthern Jubba regions between Harakat al-Shabaab Mujihideen (H.S.M.) and
Hizbul Islam (H.I.), the two major armed Islamist opposition groups to the
internationally recognized and ineffective Transitional Federal Government
(T.F.G.) that control and have set up administrations in those regions.
The source centers the conflict in a dispute over revenues from the port of
Kismayo, south-central Somalia's second largest city and the economic and
political hub of the deep southern regions. The source says that revenues
are currently running at US$1 million per month, of which H.S.M. has been
taking ninety percent, driving H.I. to try to force H.S.M. to alter the
proportions.
The source goes on to say that the antagonists are currently playing a
waiting game to find out "who gets money in first." H.I., says the source,
now has a faction that is ready to join the T.F.G. if the latter receives
sufficient infusions of foreign aid. Meanwhile, the source reports, H.S.M.
has been leading in the contest for donations from Somali businessmen in
Nairobi.
Significance
The significance of the intelligence resides in its diagnosing the conflict
as a case of economic motivation. Independent monitoring confirms that
neither H.S.M. nor H.I. has raised any ideological or strategic issues in
the conflict. There has been no controversy over H.S.M.'s transnational
Islamism and H.I.'s Islamist nationalism, and H.S.M.'s severe interpretation
of Shari'a law and H.I.'s presumably less punitive take on Shari'a. There
has been no controversy about contrasting strategies for achieving the
Islamic emirate/state that they both claim is their goal. Instead, the
conflict has been over control of the administration of Kismayo pure and
simple - who gets what - and has been increasingly fought on a sub-clan
basdis.
The conflict began last August when H.S.M. refused to honor an agreeement
with H.I. that it would turn the administration over to the latter,
according to a schedule of rotation among the coalition partners. By late
September, H.S.M. had succeeded in ousting H.I. from Kismayo and announced
that it was forming an administration of its own, excluding all other
factions, and was linking that administration to the wider H.S.M.
administration of the Jubba regions. Since then, H.S.M. and H.I. have fought
a series of indecisive skirmishes in towns around Kismayo, with H.I.
maintaining its stronghold in Afmadow. With H.S.M. holding Kismayo, fissures
have surfaced in H.I.
As the conflict over Kismayo has proceeded, its clan dimension has become
conspicuous. Vulnerability to sub-clan rivalries was built into H.I., which
is an amalgam of Islamist resistance groups that is represented in the Jubba
regions by Harakat Ras Kamboni (H.R.K.) and Anole, both of which are rooted
in southern sub-clans of the Darod clan family. H.S.M., which proclaims
itself to be trans-clan was forced to rely on other Darod sub-clans when
H.I. challenged it. On October 8, Sh. Hassan al-Turki, the leader of R.K.B.,
said that the conflict had "become tribal."
Local media were quick to see parallels between the current conflict and the
naked southern Darod sub-clan struggle over Kismayo between warlords Barre
Hirale of the Marehan and Gen Morgan leading the others that occurred before
the 2006 Islamic Courts revolution. At present, by relying on the Marehan,
H.S.M is playing Hirale's role and H.I. Gen. Morgan's. Hirale himself is
reportedly mobilizing his militias in Kenya, with the aim of restoring his
pre-Courts Jubba Valley Alliance.
Clan-Based Islamist Warlordism
Putting together the source's report that the conflict in the Jubba regions
is primarily financially motivated, the absence in the conflict of appeals
to ideology and strategy, and the sub-clan character of the conflict, a
picture emerges of an incipient clan-based Islamist warlordism.
Warlordism is familiar to Somalia observers as the dominant form of
political organization in the south-central regions after the fall of
dictator Siad Barre in the early 1990s. As it developed in Somalia,
warlordism became a practice of economic predation carried out by a
strongman with local and sometimes regional ambitions whose base of support
was sub-clan militieas and their members' dependents, and intimidated or
favored businessmen. This conventional warlordism was particularistic (based
on clan and personalistic identification rather than commitment to program
or principle) and played out as a struggle over spoils and extortion or
protection rackets. Its administrations were self-dealing and its justice,
if one could call it that, was arbitrary and biassed; it was gangsterism in
the name of sub-clan protection - the last social refuge in a disintegrated
political community. Always a balance between public function and private
interest, politics - in the form of warlordism - tips the balance
overwhelmingly in favor of the latter. Where warlordism is pervasive, the
population is beholden to it, because the dynamics of fear and mistrust have
cut so deeply that they are nearly impossible to overcome - social entropy
ensues.
The conventional warlordism of the post-Barre period was broken by the 2006
Islamic Courts revolution, which proposed to unify Somalia according to a
political formula based on the creation of an Islamic national state based
on the practice of Shari'a law and governed by clerics. When the Courts were
dispersed by the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of south-central Somalia
at the end of 2006, Islamist resistance to the occupation, which dislodged
the Ethiopians two years later, differentiated into the armed opposition
groups to the T.F.G. that are present today and that held uneasily to
tactical cooperation until that was shattered by the Kismayo conflict, which
appears to be ushering in a new Islamist warlordism.
Like conventional warlordism, the Islamist variety is clan-based, local and
oriented toward economic gain. It adds, however, an Islamist ideology or at
least identity to the conventional type, as an overlay. The Courts
revolution had the formula of Islam+clan; the new warlordism has the formula
Clan+Islam. This is not to say that the Islamist overlay is merely
rhetorical or simply an after-thought; when Shari'a courts are operative, as
they are throughout the regions controlled by the Islamists, they provide at
least a semblance of legal order, whereas that cannot be said for
conventional warlords.
Clan-based Islamist warlordism presents the prospect of localized power
centers dominated by military leaders with clerical claims who preside over
Shari'a courts in the name of sub-clan identification. The conflict in
Kismayo, regardless of the eventual balance of power that results from it,
portends that outcome. The same tendency has appeared in most of the other
south-central regions without the same level of violent conflict, perhaps
because the prize is not as great elsewhere. It is plausible to judge that
the energy of an Islamist political formula for Somalia has been spent, and
that the entropy of defensive sub-clan identity has set in.
Conclusion
Expanding on the source's report to produce a picture of an incipient
clan-based Islamist warlordism helps to explain why the extreme scenarios
presented in the media and by domestic political actors have not
materialized. On one side, fueled by statements to that effect from H.I.,
there were predictions of all-out war between H.S.M. and H.I. On the other,
fueled by the hopes of the T.F.G. and its ally of convenience, the armed
Sufi Ahlu Sunna Wal-Jama'a (A.S.W.J.) movement, there were predictions that
the Islamists would self-destruct, leaving the path open to the T.F.G. to
exert control over the south-central regions. Neither scenario has
eventuated; instead, the Kismayo conflict has remained localized, as have
the conflicts in the central and southwestern regions, indicating an
assimilation of Islamism into sub-clan - neither explosion nor implosion,
but a form of social grafting. Indeed, the Islamic Courts originated within
sub-clans and for a brief period seemed to transcend them.
Should the current pattern persist, clan-based and personalistic factional
splits are likely to continue to occur within armed opposition groups. There
have been reports that officials of H.S.M. from the Hawiye clan family have
distanced themselves from or quit the group because they do not want to be
part of an intra-Darod fight. There is greater evidence that H.I. has split
into factions supporting Sh. Adan Madobe's militant stance on taking Kismayo
by force and factions seeking conciliation or, as the source reports, ready
to go over to the T.F.G. if the deal is sweet enough. Another reported split
in H.I. is between its chair, Sh. Hasan Dahir Aweys, and its former chair,
Dr. Omar Iman, whom Aweys has supposedly accused of leaning too far toward
H.S.M. and who is reportedly trying to mediate between H.S.M. and H.I. On
October 14, Sh. Abdirahman Odawa, H.I.'s military commander in Elasha Biyaha
- Aweys' base in the Lower Shabelle region just south of Mogadishu -
defected to the T.F.G. with some of his fighters because he was dissatisfied
with H.I.'s investigation of the assassination of his brother Ahmad
Talibani. None of these tensions, of course, spells self-destruction, but
only fragmentation and realignment along the lines of calculations of
positional advantage by the myriad actors. One must remember that the T.F.G.
is also seriously split, as it has been from its beginning in 2004, by
factions allied with its president, now Sh. Sharif Sh. Ahmad from the
Hawiye, and its prime minister, now Omar Abdirahman Ali Sharmarke from the
Darod, who are currently contesting the composition of a new cabinet that
Sharmarke is expected to name under pressure from donor powers.
In the Jubba regions, the waiting game to see who gets the money if it
comes, when they get it, how much they get and with whom they are ready to
share it remains in play. That is what one would expect from warlords.
Sub-clan loyalties are hard to break when conflict feeds on itself.
Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Professor of Political Science,
Purdue University weinstem@purdue.edu
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