Somalia: A failed state is back from the dead
Less than two years ago, its capital was a war zone. No longer
<
http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=
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James%20Fergusson%22%29&displaySearchString=James%20Fergusson> James
Fergusson
Sunday 13 January 2013
Eighteen months ago, central Mogadishu was like an African Stalingrad. The
heat may have been equatorial but everything else seemed strangely familiar:
a dirty cat-and-mouse war, often fought hand to hand among the spectacularly
bombed-out ruins of a once-thriving city centre.
On one side were the forces of the Western-backed government, supported by
thousands of Ugandan and Burundian troops of AMISOM, the African Union
Mission in Somalia. On the other was al Shabaab, a virulent militant
Islamist organisation aligned with al Qaida. The two sides had been fighting
for control of the capital for three years.
Between offensives it was possible to take a tour of the battlefield,
courtesy of AMISOM, whose troops commuted there from their base by the
ocean-front airport, shuttling back and forth in convoys of Casspirs,
hulking armoured personnel carriers with bullet-cracked windows and V-shaped
hulls designed to deflect mine blast.
The front line was an imposing wall of sandbags that snaked through miles of
roofless residential districts, a post-apocalyptic ghost town where the
danger of random mortar or sniper fire was constant. The soldiers on the
fire steps manned their gun-slits from the comfort of smashed-up sofas and
armchairs rescued from abandoned sitting rooms. Al Shabaab had developed an
extensive network of tunnels and trenches, and in some places they were dug
in less than 50m away. They had learned to crawl even further forward, under
cover of night and the sound made by the shredded tin roofs flapping and
clanging in the hot sea breeze, and to lob grenades over AMISOM's parapets.
AMISOM had been advancing recently, although progress was costly and
desperately slow. A Ugandan commander told me that it could take three days
just to clear one small house. At this rate, he calculated, his men would
still be fighting through Mogadishu in 2015.
Today, though, there are no trench lines in Mogadishu. On 6 August 2011, to
the astonishment of just about everyone, al Shabaab pulled back overnight
from all city centre positions. Their propagandists called it a tactical
retreat, but it turned out not to be temporary. The insurgency was
collapsing across central Somalia and falling back on its heartlands to the
south.
Sensing the opportunity, Somalia's neighbours Ethiopia and Kenya quickly
joined the AMISOM effort and invaded from the west and south. In September
2012 the Kenyans captured al Shabaab's last remaining stronghold, the
southern port of Kismayo, effectively ending the insurgents' long ambition
to take over Somalia.
This is an astonishing moment for a country long dubbed the "world's most
failed state": the first chance in a generation for genuine change, and what
the UN Special Envoy Augustine Mahiga called "an unprecedented opportunity
for peace." As turning points go it is comparable, perhaps, to the US
ejection of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.
Somalia has, famously, had no properly functioning central government for
over 20 years. Its leaders have long been riven by internal clan rivalries,
and hamstrung by outrageous institutional graft. For the last six years,
Somalia has consistently beaten Afghanistan to the bottom spot on
Transparency International's annual 'Corruptions Perceptions index.' Yet in
2012, Somalis held their first democratic elections in decades, ousting
their former Islamist president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and replacing
him with Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, a little-known university professor who used
to work as a consultant for the UN.
There are other reasons for cautious optimism. So many of Mogadishu's
long-abandoned seafront villas are being rebuilt, in many cases by owners
returning from twenty years of refugee exile, that the city is experiencing
a minor property boom.
Meanwhile, piracy in the Indian Ocean, although far from eradicated, appears
to have peaked thanks to land-based efforts by the regional Puntland
government and cleverer counter-piracy measures at sea. There were 70
Somali-related attacks on shipping in the first nine months of 2012,
compared to 199 over the same period in 2011, according to the International
Maritime Bureau. It was reported this month that the Gulf of Aden has now
been surpassed by West Africa's Gulf of Guinea as the world's piracy
hotspot.
On the face of it Somalia represents that rarest of things, a good news
story from the Muslim world. Even the threat of further famine, which
followed the region's worst drought for 60 years and that killed tens of
thousands of children in 2011, suddenly receded thanks to unusually kind
winter rains.
There is, though, no room for complacency. The new government is still
unproven, and al Shabaab are far from defeated. Indeed, the militants had
already begun a switch to a deadly, Taliban-style hit-and-run strategy
before their withdrawal from Mogadishu. Terrorist attacks are also rising
alarmingly in neighbouring Kenya, including in the once-safe Somali enclave
of Eastleigh in Nairobi, and the Muslim-dominated tourist areas in and
around Mombasa.
As the British ambassador Matt Baugh points out, fixing Somalia is not just
in Somali interests but affects the security of us all. "Somalia represents
a kind of threat we haven't seen before," he said. "There are massive
numbers of Somalis living in all the neighbouring states as well as around
the world. It is not a traditional, geographical country, but a diffuse,
global entity - and that is not physically containable."
Some 2 million Somalis fled abroad after the civil war of the 90s, and now
form one of the largest diasporas in the world. There are perhaps 300,000 of
them in Britain alone. The Islamists have already shown a willingness to
export their ideology abroad, as well as an ability to recruit in the West.
The danger of 'home-grown' Somali terrorism was amply demonstrated by the
failed suicide bomb attacks against London Transport in 2005: two of the
21/7 conspirators, Ramzi Mohamed and Yassin Omar, were born in Somalia.
If a security threat cannot be contained, the only alternative is to
neutralize it by tackling the main driver of terrorism: the discontent of
the Somali young, whether here in the West or in their homeland. As
Afghanistan has shown, Somalia's problems will not be solved by military
means alone. The Somali state needs rebuilding from scratch, through
sustained Western commitment to political, social and economic reform. The
question is whether the West truly has the appetite for this mammoth task.
A major international peace conference in London in early 2012 - the 20th on
Somalia since 1991 - was trumpeted as an outstanding success by the Cameron
government, yet many Somalis complain that there has been no real follow-up
on the pledges and promises then made. They know that their country remains
a very sick patient that will need the best aftercare available if the
disease of state failure is not to go into remission.
Somalis want what young people want everywhere: education, jobs, security, a
home. Without the hope of these things, young people, and particularly young
men, may turn in desperation to violent rebellion; young Muslim men may also
turn to extreme forms of Islam. The clue, perhaps, was always in the
insurgents' name for themselves: al Shabaab in Arabic means 'the Youth'. It
is no doubt significant that Somalia has a particularly low median age of
17.8, and that this is about the same as in Afghanistan.
As in all those countries affected by the so-called Arab Spring, the
challenge for the West is primarily a demographic one. 'The US does not
have a robust and comprehensive strategy for targeting the connection
between youth and conflict,' Professor Jennifer Sciubba, a demographer and
adviser to the US Department of Defence, said recently. (She was talking
about Afghanistan, but might just as easily have been referring to Somalia).
'Victory, in whatever form, will remain elusive as long as this segment of
the population is marginalized.'
In the course of my research I was constantly struck by the similarity of
al-Shabaab foot soldiers, pirates and the members of Somali street gangs I
interviewed in Britain and the US. They were all young men, and in some
cases - such as Abdi-Osman, a 23-year-old ex-pirate, ex-al-Shabaab fighter
whom I met in Mogadishu - literally interchangeable. 'Every man who has
nothing will try something to get money,' Abdi-Osman explained.
Salvation will likely come from two directions. The first may be the oil and
gas sector. It has long been known that Somalia possesses important
reserves, both in the north of the country and to the south off the shore of
Kismayo. With al Shabaab in retreat, the more adventurous prospecting
companies are already circling, bringing the promise of massive foreign
investment and, eventually, Gulf-style oil wealth to this impoverished
nation.
The second, paradoxically, is the diaspora itself. Of course, not all young
Somali exiles are potential terrorists. A whole generation have grown up in
the West who are out of patience with the old ways of doing things, above
all the traditional system of quabyalad, tribalism, which played such a key
role in the destruction of their country in the first place.
The best of them have taken advantage of the opportunity to better
themselves through work and education, absorbing Western values and ideas
along the way. They represent a rich sump of reform-minded talent, and an
extraordinary number of them are movingly determined to export their ideas
back to Somalia in order to help rebuild their troubled homeland.
The young should be the West's partners of choice in any African
nation-building project. The future of Somalia may depend on our ability to
listen to them.
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Received on Mon Jan 14 2013 - 14:13:00 EST
