From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed May 26 2010 - 10:01:36 EDT
Somalia: A Strategic Analysis of the Istanbul Conference
May 26, 2010 - 10:49:14 PM
By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
>From May 21-23, the international coalition supporting Somalia's
Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) held the latest of its series of
conferences on the country's persistent conflicts, in Istanbul under the
sponsorship of the United Nations and Turkey.
Titled "The Political, Security and Reconstruction Conference for Somalia,"
the gathering was attended by representatives from 55 states and 12
international organizations. The outcome of the conference, which was stated
in its "Istanbul Declaration" issued on May 22, marked a continuation of
the coalition's position towards Somalia and engendered only perfunctory
interest in international, regional, and local media, which noted that it
had produced no new substantive commitments. The absence of substance,
however, is of interest from an analytical standpoint, raising the question
of why the coalition has reaffirmed a position that has allowed southern and
central Somalia to enter a state of frozen warfare between the T.F.G. and
its domestic allies of convenience, and the revolutionary Islamist
opposition to the T.F.G. that controls at least 80 percent of Somalia's
southern and central regions.
The following analysis is an effort to explain the coalition's strategic
position, which for a broad spectrum of Somali opinion, appears, at best, to
be counter-productive and, at worst, destructive, and seems to be
incomprehensible.
The Declaration and its Absences.
The Istanbul Declaration indicates a position of denial that is symptomatic
of deferral and hesitation to take any decisive action on the part of the
international coalition; it reveals, through its absences, a disconnect
between what is transpiring on the ground in southern and central Somalia,
and the coalition's reading of the situation.
Having expressed "its full support to President Sh. Sharif Ahmed and the
Transitional Federal Institutions," and having called upon donors and the
T.F.G. to make good on commitments made in previous conferences, "the
Conference placed particular emphasis on the urgency for the Transitional
Federal Government to address its considerable political, economic and
security challenges."
The disconnection between aspiration and operation opens up here. With only
a few districts of Somalia's capital Mogadishu under its control and even
that being dependent on the protective armor of an African Union
peacekeeping mission (AMISOM), the T.F.G. is in no position to address any
challenges. It does not have the military resources necessary to break
through its encirclement by the Islamists in Mogadishu; it does not have the
funds to provide services to the population, much less to undertake
reconstruction and development projects, and the aid that it receives is
siphoned off to its self-dealing officials; and, as the conference met, the
T.F.G. was torn by a constitutional crisis that left its institutions
non-functional. By calling upon donors to honor their previous pledges, the
participants in the conference were urging themselves to do what they have
refused to do. The conference was demanding of the T.F.G. actions that it
could not perform because in great part the conference's participants had
starved the T.F.G. of the resources that it would need to fulfill their
requirements. During the conference, the Islamist movements made territorial
gains in Mogadishu and came within one-half of a kilometer from the
presidential palace, forcing AMISOM armor into the streets to contain them.
The disconnect grows wider as the Declaration proceeds to "welcome the
progress" made by the T.F.G. by its "continued outreach and political
reconciliation with those outside the peace process" initiated by the
Djibouti agreement of 2009, citing agreements by the T.F.G. with the Sufi
movement Ahlu Sunna wal-Jama'a (A.S.W.J.) in March 2010 and the Puntland
regional state in northeast Somalia in August 2009 and April 2010; and
urging Puntland to maintain its "political cooperation with the T.F.G." The
Declaration failed to mention that the March agreement had caused a split
within A.S.W.J. and had been one of the major factors responsible for the
T.F.G.'s constitutional crisis because it involved power sharing that would
have deprived some T.F.G. officials of their positions. The agreement with
A.S.W.J. has yet to be implemented and on May 24 A.S.W.J. announced that it
would not integrate its militias into the T.F.G.'s security forces. The
Declaration also elides the fact that the T.F.G. almost immediately reneged
on its August 2009 agreement with Puntland, and that the April 2010
agreement was forced on Puntland by the active members of the international
coalition and was restricted to anti-piracy cooperation, leaving out
political integration, which had been the heart of the August 2009 accord.
Since the August 2009 agreement, Puntland has diminished its political
cooperation with the T.F.G. due to the T.F.G.'s behavior and the condoning
of it by the international coalition.
The proximate cause of the disconnect between the streets and the conference
table is the international coalition's unwillingness or inability (a
combination of both is most likely) to acknowledge its part in and take some
responsibility for the weakness and divisions in the T.F.G. The coalition's
members seek to fulfill their own and often conflicting interests in
Somalia. They come together to coordinate as best they can in attempts to
shape Somalia's political landscape, united on the goals of suppressing
revolutionary transnationalist Islamism and piracy, but they are committed
to those goals with varying degrees of dedication, because other interests
interfere. They are the ones who engineered the original T.F.G. and its
post-Djibouti successor. They are the ones who hold the T.F.G.'s purse
strings tightly and bankroll AMISOM. They are the ones who reneged on their
promise to institute a U.N. peacekeeping mission, leaving AMISOM with the
thankless mandate that restricts it to defending the T.F.G.'s perimeter. To
admit their responsibility for the T.F.G. would mean a painful admission of
failure and the need to formulate a more coherent strategy.
Of the international coalition's failures, the most important and serious is
its ineffective political strategy, which is to retain the original
clan-based T.F.G., populated by warlords and self-serving clan politicians;
and then, having grafted on to it conciliatory Islamist factions opposed to
the revolutionary Islamists, expand it to include even more factions.
Already severely factionalized, the T.F.G. was a cracked and sinking
foundation on which to build durable institutions. Adding Sh. Sharif's wing
of the Islamic Courts movement to the T.F.G. by doubling the latter's size
immediately opened up a new division between the old guard and the new guard
- no reconciliation had been effected before the merger was consummated, and
each side pressed for advantage, crippling the institutions to the point of
their collapse as the Istanbul conference met. Local analyst Ali Abdullahi
commented precisely on the T.F.G.'s situation in an interview with Voice of
America's Peter Clottey: "We have a power struggle that has boiled down to a
constitutional crisis. Whenever you have a power struggle, the insurgents
become more powerful."
Building haphazardly on a defective foundation, the big players in the
international coalition - the U.S., Western European powers, the U.N., the
African Union, Kenya, and Ethiopia - helped to precipitate the
constitutional crisis, in which Sh. Sharif dismissed the T.F.G.'s prime
minister and then reinstated him, leaving in the process the transitional
parliament without a speaker, by engineering the March 2010 agreement with
A.S.W.J. that required power sharing with A.S.W.J. without further expanding
the T.F.G. A fight to gain and hold positions, which had become a scarce
resource, resulted. Implementation of the agreement is stalled, perhaps
permanently. The attempt to implant A.S.W.J. into the T.F.G. was, again made
prior to factional reconciliation, insuring more divisive conflict. The
group of actively involved players that speak in the name of the
international coalition has pursued the strategy of agglomerating contending
factions into a factionalized T.F.G. without proper - or any - preparation,
setting the stage for further factionalization. A government that is formed
in such a way cannot be expected to be strong, rendering inadequate military
and financial support to it subsidiary concerns.
The international coalition is responsible for what the T.F.G. has become.
It will not admit responsibility; therefore, it goes into denial.
The remainder of the Declaration is mostly comprised of directives to the
T.F.G. and Somali stakeholders that they cannot fulfill, such as
establishing a unified command and control structure for nominally T.F.G.
military forces and allied militias, and setting up a partnership between
the T.F.G., business interests, civil society organizations, women, the
Diaspora and the international community for economic development. Neither
of those directives can be fulfilled given the T.F.G.'s weakness and lack of
credibility, not to mention broader divisions in Somali society. The resolve
of the international coalition to partner with the T.F.G. on economic
development and reconstructed was indicated when the conference rejected the
one concrete proposal made to the participants by U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon, which was for a "business Compact" between the "international
community," the T.F.G., and business interests. The Declaration simply
"looks forward to further consideration of a business Compact for Somalia."
In summary, the Declaration tells the T.F.G. that it "must discharge its
responsibilities to assure safe access to vulnerable populations, deliver
basic services, manage public resources wisely and ensure a just
distribution of resources, introduce anti-corruption measures, develop and
support the private sector, and build the capacity of its financial
institutions." On its side, the "international community should continue its
support to the Somali people." That the T.F.G. "must" and the international
community "should" speaks volumes itself. If the members of the
international coalition do not do what they say they "should" do, the T.F.G.
will have no chance at all, however small, to do what it "must" do, even in
the best of circumstances - and the T.F.G. is in the worst of circumstances.
Having given the T.F.G. its marching orders, the Conference thanked AMISOM
for its contribution to "lasting peace and stability in Somalia," and
acknowledged the contributions of "Somalia's neighbors in promoting peace,
security and development in Somalia." One can leave those expressions
without extensive comment: AMISOM is part of the conflict and fires
artillery rounds into civilian neighborhoods where the revolutionary
Islamists are positioned; Ethiopia is making incursions over its border with
Somalia and backing warlord and clan militias there; and Kenya is trying to
create a security zone for its own protection on its border with Somalia.
The Declaration ends with a section titled "The Transitional Federal
Government reaffirmed," in which the conference repeats its marching orders
to the T.F.G., adding that the T.F.G. should "seek innovative ways to engage
with the Somali people to draft the Somali Federal Constitution," and to
"take ownership of the tasks necessary to facilitate the full implementation
of the transitional arrangement." On May 21, when the conference began, the
chair of the transitional parliament's Committee on the Constitution
announced that the committee had "halted its work," because the
constitutional crisis had put its legality in question, and due to its
"concerns that the international community might interfere in our work."
The final words of the Declaration proclaim that the conference made "a
significant contribution to the efforts towards achieving peace, security
and development in Somalia."
Diagnosis of the Disconnect
Why does the international coalition pursue a counter-productive and
destructive strategy in Somalia?
Beyond a reluctance to admit failure and deeper than the coalition's own
internal divisions is an underlying dilemma faced by the coalition's major
players - the donor powers (U.S., European Union, and Western European
states). Having created a flawed T.F.G., they are hesitant to provide it
with sufficient support in any form. They will not do the intensive
diplomatic work necessary for political integration; they will not release
the funds for security and reconstruction, because they fear that they will
be wasted or diverted to the revolutionary Islamists; and they will not
install a U.N. peacekeeping mission or expand AMISOM's mandate, because
their political engineering is defective and they do not want to be
responsible for politically and economically reconstituting a Somalia in
which the revolutionary Islamists have been defeated. Therefore they persist
in deferring decisive action; they have staked their bets on the T.F.G. and
have no appetite for starting afresh with another constitutional conference
or, at the extreme, making Somalia a trust territory. On the other hand,
they are not willing to leave Somali factions alone to sort things out for
themselves, because they fear a revolutionary Islamist takeover of the
entire country. As a result, they remain in place, because no other option
is consistent with their perceived interests.
At the bottom of the dilemma and the consequent hesitancy is the fact that
Somalia is not at the top of the list of the donor powers' priorities.
Washington is trying to unwind wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, adjust its
relations with the BRIC countries, deal with domestic political opposition
that seeks to undermine the Obama administration, and manage a financial and
fiscal crisis among other pressing issues. The European powers are also
constrained to cope with the financial crisis and have more important
international interests - relations with Russia, for example - than Somalia.
Washington, in particular, is over-extended in its global commitments. As a
result the donor powers end up taking half measures. They do not leave
Somalia alone, but they do not genuinely help it; and they rely on proxies,
particularly on Ethiopia, which is far more important to them than the
T.F.G. or Somalia, and which has its own interests - particularly in
practicing a divide-and-rule strategy in Somalia -that are not always
consistent with those of the donor powers.
The international coalition has no special attachment to the T.F.G.; the
transitional government is merely an imperfect stopgap, as is AMISOM; they
are temporary repairs that have become permanent fixtures by default. The
members of the international coalition are likely to remain in their present
strategic position for as long as they can possibly hold it - their
perceived interests are not convergent with the interests of the Somali
people.
Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Professor of Political Science,
Purdue University in Chicago
<weinstem@purdue.edu">http://www.garoweonline.com/artman2/publish/Somalia_27/weinstem@purdue.edu>
weinstem@purdue.edu
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