The good, the bad and the ugly
The Somalia-Somaliland talks and the British co-opted roadmap
Ahmed M.I. Egal
2012-07-13, Issue <
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/593> 593
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The British-led process to replace the current illegitimate and
intrinsically unrepresentative structure in Somalia with another equally
illegitimate one is an affront to the best interests and rights of the
Somali people.
When I was a teenager I saw a movie with the above title with which I fell
in love. I later learned that it was from a genre that was disparagingly
termed ‘Spaghetti Western’ in Hollywood since they were made in Italy. In
fact, it was one of a trilogy made by the legendary director Sergio Leone,
the other two being A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, and I
am very pleased that Mr. Leone has had the last laugh since he is now
recognised as one of the greatest directors of film and a true artist, and
this trilogy is widely acknowledged as timeless classics. Perhaps, however,
Leone’s sweetest victory over his Hollywood detractors is that the young,
unknown actor that he discovered and gave the leading role to in this
trilogy went on to become the living embodiment of the Western hero, one of
Hollywood’s greatest actor-directors and he has paid homage to his mentor by
updating and Americanising the Spaghetti Western with his own classics, such
as Pale Rider and The Unforgiven. This actor-director is, of course, Clint
Eastwood.
The topic which is the subject of this paper is the talks between Somalia
and Somaliland which were mandated by the ill conceived London Conference on
Somalia in February this year. Unfortunately, there is no strong, silent
hero (‘man with no name’) character that comes riding in to summarily
dispatch the bad guys and claim the gold for the good in this particular
production. Instead, we have a cast of leading players that can be
accurately described as ‘The Winner, the Loser and the Duplicitous’. These
are, respectively, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, President of the Transitional
Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia, Ahmed Mahmoud Silanyo, President of
Somaliland, and the British Government.
Sheikh Sharif is the undisputed winner since the talks have enabled him to
elevate his political status to that of budding statesman while securing for
him substantial funds and a raft of votes for his campaign to retain the
Presidency of Somalia in the ‘permanent government’, without conceding
anything. He can, and has been, presenting himself to the people of Somalia
as the statesman who has brought a recalcitrant Somaliland to the
negotiating table, and who will eventually bring it back into the Greater
Somalia (Somaliweyn) fold. One can only admire him for the political skills
he has developed while in office – he has truly come a long way from the
unworldly novice he clearly was a brief four years ago when he acceded to
the TFG Presidency at the behest of the Western Powers.
By contrast, the clear loser is President Silanyo, Somaliland’s putative
political eminence gris or ‘rug cadaa’ in Somali (meaning endowed with
expertise and wisdom). He has participated in talks with a lame duck,
interim ‘government’ that has been judged by both independent auditors and
the World Bank to have flagrantly stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in
aid money, that is widely reviled for incompetence and corruption by the
people it purports to represent and which openly and repeatedly dismisses
out of hand the central issue of importance to his people regarding these
talks, i.e. the independence of Somaliland. Creating the political space to
proceed with the talks has required the Silanyo government to resort to
tortuous semantics and syntax, outright mendacity and open warfare with the
independent press and dissenting voices at home with the widespread, illegal
detention of journalists and political opponents. The government has also
not only lost face, not to mention moral leadership, but that most precious
of assets, namely trust, among much, if not the majority, of its people. The
Somaliland public desperately want to believe that the talks will lead to
their cherished dream of sovereignty and international recognition, but they
fear and suspect that the talks will only lead to a political cul-de-sac,
and worse, that the government knows this full well, but is going along with
this tawdry charade (as these talks have been accurately and elegantly
termed by a US academic who is well versed in Somali politics) for its own,
hidden reasons.
Now we get to the Duplicitous, or the Ugly – take your pick. This is the
British Government which has forced the Silanyo government to participate in
the talks with the threat of withdrawing all British aid to Somaliland if he
did not comply. The Cameron government decided to take a lead role among the
Western powers in combating the scourge of maritime piracy emanating from
the coast of Somalia and which is based principally in the autonomous region
of Puntland. They felt that this assumed role required them to take a
similar role in resolving the ‘Somali problem’ and promptly set about the
task in typical, British, workman-like fashion by sponsoring and convening
conferences to direct the ‘transition’ towards a stable, permanent
government for Somalia. In fairness to the British (or perhaps in their
condemnation), they promptly fell in with the current conventional wisdom of
the Western powers and their collaborators among Somalia’s neighbours, i.e.
Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, that the way to achieve their goal of a
permanent government for Somalia that is friendly to their interests is to
impose a structure and government that can be made to appear representative
and legitimate. Welcome to the age of 21st century neo-imperialism as
pioneered by George W. Bush and Tony Blair!
Having defined and cast the main players in our drama of the absurd, we can
now move on to the plot of the story. The Western powers and their African
allies have developed a twin track strategy which comprises the military
track focused upon eliminating Al-Shabaab as a significant security threat,
and the political track focused upon establishment of a permanent government
for Somalia. The military track is proceeding well with the expulsion of
Al-Shabaab from its strongholds in Mogadishu and its environs, particularly
the strategic village of Afgoi which is both a key destination for displaced
people fleeing war and/or drought from the agricultural hinterland of the
Juba and Shabelle rivers, as well as a strategic access route to Mogadishu.
There have been credible reports of significant numbers of the foreign
fighters and commanders of Al-Shabaab fleeing north to Puntland and onwards
to Yemen, as well as serious divisions within the organisation’s ranks as it
has continued to suffer defeats. Recently, Dahir Aweys, the leader of Hizbul
Islam, who was forced to join Al-Shabaab some years ago when faced with the
prospect of being wiped out by them, was able to defect, and is now
negotiating his surrender to AMISOM/TFG forces. In response to these
military successes against Al-Shabaab, Britain has jumped into the fray on
the political front, with the aim of crafting a corresponding success on the
political track.
This British-led effort in ‘nation-building’ in Somalia, aided and abetted
by the vast UN and NGO relief and development nomenclature, is breathtaking
in its sheer audacity of seeking to impose a ‘permanent government’ upon a
upon a country that has been utterly destroyed physically, economically and
psychically, through a process that doesn’t even make a perfunctory nod at
legitimacy by seeking the consent of the people to be governed. The
ludicrous construct whereby one illegitimate and intrinsically
unrepresentative structure is amended and updated by another, equally
illegitimate one is illuminated and exposed here
(
http://somalilandpress.com/somalia-phony-constitution-crafted-through-un-ri
gged-process-31360) by Mohammed M. Uluso. However, this farce of creating a
‘permanent government’ for Somalia will continue since none of the major
players in this charade, even the Western powers, believe that they can
endorse yet another ‘transitional government’ after 20 years and four,
successive such transitions. Therefore, they have decided upon another
transition that will henceforth be called ‘permanent’ and justified to be so
by a convoluted, inherently illegitimate and undemocratic process that was
cooked up by foreign bureaucrats, endorsed by their paid, Somali puppet
leaders and imposed upon a bemused, beaten and damaged populace desperate
for any semblance of normality. The Somalia-Somaliland talks are part and
parcel of this British-led effort to craft and impose a political solution
for Somalia.
In an address given to the Royal African Society on 22 March 1968 by Mohamed
Ibrahim Egal, the Prime Minister of the Somali Republic, entitled ‘Somalia:
Nomadic Individualism and the Rule of Law’, he spoke of the historical
relationship between Britain and the Somali people. He characterised the
decision of Britain in 1962 to ignore the findings of their own Commission
that some 88% of the people of the Northern Frontier District (NFD) wanted
union with the Somali Republic and not to be part of the nascent Republic of
Kenya, in order to cede the NFD to Kenya thereby breaking their promise to
the Somali people, as “…[a] classical example of the proverbial perfidy of
Albion…”. He went on to point out that “It is perhaps a great irony that the
Somalis, of all people in this world, should so genuinely and touchingly
attribute to the British an unimpeachable sense of justice and fair play.
With all due respect, in his own dealings with the British, the Somali was
never shown an example of this quality which he so sincerely attributed to
the British.” This latest intervention by the Cameron government in the
politics of its erstwhile protectorate, by strong-arming the Silanyo
government into the empty and essentially meaningless talks with Sheikh
Sharif’s TFG, constitute yet another example of the ‘proverbial perfidy of
Albion’.
Clearly, the British wish to lend some element of legitimacy to the Roadmap
process whereby a ‘permanent government’ for Somalia is being created, and
these Somalia-Somaliland talks are part and parcel of this spurious
legitimacy. However, the entire ‘permanent government’ enterprise is
irrevocably tainted since the people of Somalia view it with either
bemusement and frustration, anticipation of impending wealth and power or
just plain ignorance and apathy depending upon which segment of society they
belong to. For example, the intelligentsia are frustrated and deeply unhappy
that, despite all the pious statements about the Somali ownership of the
Roadmap at the various conferences, an illegitimate, externally financed and
externally-driven process is being imposed upon them. The political elite
(and their business community backers), comprising warlords, present and
past ‘government officials’ and Diaspora carpet baggers, are girding up for
the auction of political posts and ministerial seats as they eagerly
anticipate the flow of riches and patronage to come. The vast majority of
the long suffering population of Somalia, however, are apathetic about the
entire enterprise since they have no say in the proceedings; they just
desperately hope that some semblance of normalcy can be restored, even if
they can hardly recognise it should it somehow arrive.
Further, as can be seen by the anodyne statements that have been issued
after each round of the said talks, including the fatuously named Dubai
Declaration, they are not only an exercise in futility, but they devalue and
demean the substantive talks on future relations between the two parties
that must and will take place. However, such talks can only take place when
there is a legitimate government in Somalia which is freely chosen by its
people and which therefore enjoys their political consent. Such talks will
not be limited to the Western agenda of combating terrorism and piracy, but
will focus upon the major issues facing their populations, e.g. a post
irredentist paradigm to drive inter-Somali cooperation and fraternal
relations in the context of political realities in the Horn of Africa and
regional supra-national organisations, i.e. IGAD and COMESA; settlement of
claims between the two countries arising from assets located in one country
but owned by the citizens of the other; extradition to Somaliland of war
criminals responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity that are
hiding in Somalia, etc. Because the current talks do not, and will not,
address these vital issues, the real danger inherent in these talks is that
they will destabilise Somaliland, which has achieved national
reconciliation, representative government and political stability with no
outside help or interference, by enmeshing it in the political charade of
the Roadmap that comprises Western nation-building in Somalia. It is
important to recognise here that perfidious Albion could not have ensnared
Somaliland in its doomed designs for Somalia, if it did not have a willing
partner, however resistant they may wish to appear, in the Silanyo
government. The President of Somaliland and his neophyte Foreign Minister
have allowed themselves to be bullied and cajoled by the British into a
political dead-end that not only robs them of moral standing in front of
their electorate, but in fact jeopardises the realisation of their peoples’
defining dream.
What is truly galling, not to mention pathetic, is that the threatened
retribution of the withdrawal of British aid amounted at that time to a
grand total of some £4.5 million in current aid and promises of more in the
near future. This is a very small recompense indeed for which to sacrifice
the honour and moral standing of one’s government, not to mention risk the
central dream of one’s nation and people. The fact is that the Silanyo
government is now stuck with this farce of talks with the TFG which are
doomed to achieve nothing, since the principal topic for discussion is off
the table, and they have the unenviable task of maintaining the fiction that
the talks are substantive and will lead to independence to their people. To
appropriate a gambling metaphor, this is a dog that just won’t run and it
will not be long before the Somaliland government will have to pay the price
for its massive error in judgement through popular disaffection and dissent.
Meanwhile, we have the prospect of the birth of the new ‘permanent
government’ in Mogadishu to look forward to, with all of the attendant
tragi-comedy that the delivery of such misbegotten creatures gives rise to.
What is certain, however, is that the machinations of the self-aggrandising
Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the weak and uninspired Silanyo government and the
overreaching and overweening Cameron government have conspired against the
best interests of the Somali people, both in Somalia and Somaliland. They
have actively promoted and sought to legitimise a bogus, undemocratic and
unconstitutional process to impose a supposedly permanent government in
Somalia and jeopardised Somaliland’s stability and representative,
constitutionally established government by making it party to this fraud
perpetrated upon their brothers to the south. This is truly another perfidy
perpetrated by Albion upon the Somali people, albeit this time with the
connivance of their own leaders. One can only hope that this time the people
of Somaliland and Somalia see this British-led fraud for what it truly is,
and that it will lift the scales from their eyes with regard to British
‘justice’ and ‘fair play’. One can also hope that the ‘man with no name’
would ride in and chase these self-seeking charlatans off the scene, but
unfortunately this is real life.
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Received on Fri Jul 13 2012 - 08:58:13 EDT
