الواقع السياسي في الصومال وآفاق المستقبل

Somalia's Political Reality and the Prospects Ahead

This article was first published on Al Jazeera Net (Opinion section) on 20 November 2008. Link to the original text

No sooner does the Somali question emerge from one crisis that convulses it than it enters another, in a whirlpool that provokes both anger and pity.

As the crisis runs its course, questions keep multiplying, for the positions of its main actors keep shifting: enemies meet and friends part company in a struggle in which religion and the clan are put to use, and whose strings are pulled by regional and international powers, each steering it to suit its own strategic interests. They exploit those who are sick with a mania for leadership and power, men who crave it even if it means standing on the skulls of the people, or riding on the backs of the tanks and missiles of their bitterest enemies.

In its latest chapter the course of the crisis looks astonishing, and it raises questions about where the Somali question is heading, in the near future and the distant one. The struggle now under way, between the Islamists and the Transitional Government on the one hand, and between each of them and its own core components on the other, has led to shifting positions and changing statements.

What, then, has brought matters to this pass, and where will it lead in the future? That is what this article will try to answer, as far as space allows.

The Courts and the Forces of Resistance

The fragmentation of the Islamic Courts, and the divergence of views among their components, began when the Courts fell apart like a broken string of beads after the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia at the end of December 2006¹. Groups formed representing different visions of how to deal with the Somali question. They were united on the principle of confronting the occupation and the government it had brought in, but they differed over the aim of that resistance.

Some stopped at driving out the occupier and bringing down the government, and then bringing all Somalis together to form a government representing the people in all their diversity; this is the position of most of the Islamists described as moderate. Others held that, once the occupation had been driven out and the collaborationist Transitional Government brought down, a Somali Islamic state applying the Sharia must be established.

A third camp believes that the jihad must go on after that, to free the remaining parts of Somalia from the clutches of Ethiopian and Kenyan occupation², with the aim of founding a national Islamic state that would be the largest in the Horn of Africa and would support the oppressed of the world. This camp is represented by the Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen and by the Ras Kamboni group led by Sheikh Hassan Turki³.

The moderates managed to gather the forces taking part in the resistance, and those supporting it at home and abroad, and in September 2007 they founded the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, which brought together the Islamic Courts Union, the Free Parliament, the Somali diaspora and a number of notables⁴. The founders' visions differed, so the founding charter was drafted by consensus, but it was the moderate vision that prevailed.

The aim was to unite efforts and create a voice that would speak for the resistance abroad and wage the diplomatic battle: explaining the Somali cause and the need to drive the occupation out of Somalia, and rallying support for the resistance at home.

From the moment the Alliance was announced, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen was displeased with the content of its charter, with those taking part in the conference and with the place where it was held. They declared their rejection of the Alliance, and since then they have worked separately and openly, adopting the ideology of al-Qaeda.

Less than a month later, the founding of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Somalia was announced. It represented the groups of al-Ittihad⁵ who were unhappy at joining an alliance that had been founded on a national basis, that made clear neither its Islamic frame of reference nor any aim of establishing an Islamic state, that included secularists, and that did not openly embrace jihad but fought its battle in the name of resistance. A number of al-Ittihad leaders, however, stayed inside the Alliance, trying to steer its course in the direction that suited them.

Although al-Shabaab and the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Somalia were no match for the Alliance in numbers, in arms or in political experience, their departure from the Alliance brought into the open the ideological dispute raging within the forces of resistance.

Taming the Islamists

After two years of confronting the Somali resistance, the United States, Ethiopia and the West in general reached the conclusion that a military victory over the Islamic and popular resistance was impossible, and that strengthening and backing the Transitional Government would achieve nothing unless some of its leaders were changed to make it acceptable to the people.

Knowing that the Islamic resistance could not, in its present form, be accepted as a participant in Somali politics, they set out to break it up and to tame whatever part of it could be tamed, so that this part might enter the political make-over required for the institutions of the federal government and become acceptable.

At meeting after meeting, bait after bait was cast to hook those whom Western circles call the moderates and draw them away from the hardliners. These efforts were crowned by the appointment of Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah as the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Somalia, after the dismissal of his predecessor, who had been accused of not performing his role as required⁶.

Ould-Abdallah was chosen for reasons that went unstated. Among them: he comes from Mauritania, a country with the same nomadic, pastoral and clan background as Somalia; his appointment would reassure the Arab and Muslim side; and he was able to win the trust of the Islamists and the Arab nationalists in Somalia.

Ould-Abdallah succeeded in persuading the Alliance leadership and a group within the Somali Transitional Government to begin negotiations, which started indirectly and then moved on to direct talks and mutual embraces.

The decision to enter negotiations angered factions within the Alliance as well as the Alliance's host country, Eritrea, and the first split occurred, giving birth to the Asmara wing and the Djibouti wing⁷.

The Djibouti wing had the majority, and it included the heads of the Alliance's two most important components, the Courts and the Free Parliament, who were also the chairman of the Alliance's Executive Council and the chairman of its Legislative Council⁸. This gave it a moral authority that was crowned by the legitimisation of the negotiations, once the Legislative Council had approved the results of their first round. Even so, the other side included Islamist leaders who could not be taken lightly, even if they held no official position within the Alliance.

The leaders of the Djibouti wing believed they had achieved something important: they had persuaded the world to recognise them as a key party in shaping Somalia's future, and they had lifted the charge of terrorism from the resistance and the Alliance. They entered a new stage that called for new roles and new cards to play, cards the Alliance did not see clearly, did not adequately understand and was not agreed on in full; more than that, it lacked the experience to play them.

The Djibouti wing believed it had made a breakthrough with the international community and was on its way to its military aim, the removal of the Ethiopian military occupation, and to its political aim, freeing the Somali question from the tutelage of IGAD⁹, and of Ethiopia and Kenya behind it. Somalia's cause has suffered under that organisation from the very start, for it engineered the continuation of the crisis and kept it marking time.

Negotiating with the government through the United Nations, and refusing to accept Ethiopia's presence at the negotiating sessions, was seen as achieving this political aim. It would culminate in bringing in these elements, which reject Ethiopian tutelage and Ethiopia's military and political control over Somalia. They would then be able to frustrate the Ethiopian scheme by entering the institutions, which would in the end be subject to the voice of the people, and the people, if allowed to express their opinion, would no doubt spit out Ethiopia's agents at a stroke.

With the opening of the door to negotiation, a process began, one that most members of the Alliance and of its negotiating team did not notice, aimed at taming the Islamists and the nationalists within the Alliance, so that they would accept what they had to accept as the price of being included in Somali politics and merged with the Transitional Government.

The UN officials and Western diplomats overseeing the negotiations had found an opportunity to study the Alliance at close quarters and learn its strengths and weaknesses. Bringing in Ethiopia's ambassador to Djibouti and including him in the sessions of dialogue was a trial balloon, one in which the Alliance's delegation was made to take a step backwards, coming after the Alliance had agreed to sit face to face with representatives of a government that only yesterday it had regarded as the occupation's agent.

Entering negotiations scattered the Alliance's efforts and weakened its strength on the ground, especially that of its Islamic force, the Islamic Courts. As a result, other forces grew stronger, taking advantage of the situation to present themselves as the true resistance. They had refused from the outset to come under the Alliance's banner, chief among them Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, which was joined by the Ras Kamboni group led by Sheikh Hassan Turki. Voices in this camp began to declare the leaders of both wings of the Alliance unbelievers¹⁰, because they had “inclined towards those who do wrong” and towards those who disbelieve, and so “the Fire will touch them”¹¹.

As for the group that had come in under the Alliance's banner, it was divided, though it had not announced a split from the leadership of the Courts. But it was plainly embarrassed before others by the content of the agreements that Sheikh Sharif's wing would later sign, which seemed devoid of anything that might let them save face. Yet it kept up the resistance, striking the enemy and making him suffer, him and those in the collaborationist government behind whom he shields himself¹².

At first Ethiopia was uneasy about the course of the negotiations in Djibouti and aware of the Alliance's aims in pursuing them, but it was repeatedly reassured by the international community and by the UN team overseeing the talks. Intensive efforts were also under way behind the scenes, made by regional parties, of which even most members of the Djibouti wing's negotiating team knew nothing.

The aim of these negotiations was to tame the leader of the Alliance, Sheikh Sharif¹³, using the carrot most of the time, and tempting him with the promise that Somalia's future would be in the hands of the Alliance, and in his own hands personally, if he reassured the Ethiopian side so that it would not object.

The result was the surprise that astonished everyone: Sheikh Sharif took part in the IGAD summit in Nairobi chaired by Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister who invaded Somalia, and sat before him like one of his disciples¹⁴, listening to his speech rebuking the Transitional Government that IGAD itself had created. And he kept silent over the summit's decisions and recommendations, which placed Somalia under IGAD's tutelage.

A number of Somali observers, inside the Alliance and outside it, regarded Sheikh Sharif's agreement to take part and appear at this conference as a historic and strategic blunder: by taking part he squandered the Alliance's efforts towards its political aim of removing IGAD and Ethiopia from the Somali question. For this reason a group of the negotiating team refused to travel with Sheikh Sharif to the summit, and even advised him not to attend, but he had already made up his mind.

The summit also made things clearer to President Abdullahi Yusuf¹⁵: he was unwanted, he was a spent card, and new players must be brought onto the Somali stage from now on. But it took the question back to square one.

This was followed by Sheikh Sharif's visit to Somalia, also a surprise, and his meeting with his field commanders. The visit was meant to erase the traces of his participation in the IGAD summit and to prove that he was still the real leader of the Alliance and of the Islamic Courts. It was also meant to persuade the field commanders at home and the clan elders, who had announced their rejection of the latest agreement concluded by the Alliance on 27 October 2008¹⁶, to adopt his point of view and work with him to make the agreement succeed and to implement it. But he seems to have had little success on that front.

The Transitional Government

The government has not been immune to the divisions for which it is known; indeed, the gulf has widened between the camp that believes in negotiating with the Alliance, headed by the prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein¹⁷, and the opposing camp led by the head of state, Abdullahi Yusuf.

But President Yusuf looked like a bird with clipped wings once Ethiopia began to strengthen the other side and back it against him, for reasons to do with its own strategic calculations.

After the IGAD summit, the disputes among members of the Transitional Government came to a head and exploded in an unprecedented way, once Abdullahi Yusuf was certain that every measure taken from now on was aimed at removing him from the seat of power and bringing new knights onto the battlefield, and that he had lost his principal backer, the one that had brought him to power: Ethiopia.

Abdullahi Yusuf's determination to cling to power at any price is well known, and this explains all his desperate attempts to obstruct or delay that outcome. Among them were his refusal to approve the cabinet formed by his prime minister, Nur Adde, and his strange and astonishing announcement that there was no legitimate government in Somalia and that the country had fallen into the grip of the Islamists.

So he set out in search of a way out of his predicament. He went to Libya, hoping it might be a rope to haul him out of the well into which he had fallen, and from there he is trying to call on the Libyan leader for rescue by having the Somali peace process moved to Libya. But the hope of achieving any of this seems very slim.

A Reality in Crisis

We now face a reality whose signs portend outcomes that cannot be predicted and that will most probably not be in the Somali people's interest. Some of the Islamists, and of the resistance with them, have been tamed to the point of being pushed over the precipice into the well of treason; others have been pushed to the brink of extremism and hard-line militancy in order to court al-Qaeda; and still others have turned to working to the beat of personal and clan interests.

Things have gone so far that they now declare one another unbelievers, which threatens battles among the Islamists themselves. Out of them will rise new warlords for Somalia, but this time in religious garb, mobilising their fighters in the name of religion instead of the clan. That is the worst outcome of all.

Amid this crisis between the parties of the government and the parties of the resistance, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen has profited and grown stronger. It has taken control of strategic coastal towns that are the lifeline of the south, from Kismayo to Merca¹⁸, and its fighters are now at the gates of Mogadishu, the capital, which they have caught in a pincer. It has presented everyone, the government, the Ethiopian forces and the other resistance groups, with a fait accompli.

Prospects for the Future

The question that inevitably arises as al-Shabaab advances on Mogadishu is this: will the regional and international situation allow the most extreme of the Islamists to return and take control of Somalia once more?

Internationally, there is an important change that Somalis hope will contribute, even if only indirectly, to solving their problem: the departure of Bush and his neoconservative team from the White House, and the arrival of a black leader who promises change in the handling of international dossiers¹⁹, among which Somalia will be one.

The previous administration saw Somalia as a front in the confrontation with terrorism, and Ethiopia exploited this to push its own project through and tie it to the American one.

With the new Democratic administration taking office, some of whose members in Congress call for the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces from Somalia and for a government on which the Somali people agree, so that the situation there may stabilise, the Ethiopian project may not find the support it found under the previous administration. That is why, in the view of some observers, the change may be turned to account to end the Somali crisis.

But we should not dream too much. There is no doubt that the international and regional powers still hold to their refusal to accept or allow Islamists of whatever affiliation, moderate or hard-line, to rule Somalia alone, for many reasons. Still less, then, will they allow a force accused of loyalty to al-Qaeda to take control of Somalia, a country of such strategic importance.

So we cannot expect this to be tolerated, and to go on dreaming of it is to prolong the suffering of the Somali people, exhausted by fighting and displacement.

Now that the regional and international powers are convinced, from the experience they have gained, that keeping the Islamists out of power altogether cannot be achieved, they have become ready to accept the inclusion of the moderate Islamic forces and their participation in sharing power, though not in monopolising it. And even these must first be judged safe before they are allowed anything.

Regionally, we find Ethiopia exhausted by the blows it has received from the resistance, and by the damage done to its image among international human rights organisations by the crimes against humanity it has committed in Somalia. That is why it keeps saying that it is not prepared to go on supporting the interim Somali government “indefinitely”, and presents itself as anxious for the success of the peace process and the Djibouti Agreement.

But it is planning something else: to pull its forces back to the border to watch the situation, while claiming that this is in implementation of the Djibouti Agreement and appearing truly anxious for peace in Somalia.

Yet it has done this only after making sure that it has put the Somali question back in the drawers of IGAD, which it controls, and after making sure, too, that it will not leave behind a government able to survive. Either that government will collapse completely and fighting for control of power will break out again among all the factions, or the government heralded by the Djibouti Agreement will be formed, which many of the resistance forces will not accept, and it will then have to be confronted by force.

Ethiopia has succeeded in sowing the seeds of discord and conflict among the clans, by making itself appear at every stage to side with one party against another. This will explode later, and will affect the resistance, which is not yet immune to the influence of the clan, so that each will return to his own clan to draw strength from it.

And since in Somalia the religious, the clan and the political cannot be separated, for each trails the loose ends of the others, we may see clan and religious alignments that deepen the people's suffering.

At that point the opportunity will be ripe for regional or international organisations, such as IGAD, the African Union or the United Nations, to take new decisions, perhaps to reinforce the African “peacekeeping” forces now present²⁰, which is what is now being cooked up in the corridors of IGAD. These may later be turned into “peace enforcement” forces, and Ethiopia will be ready to take part in them under one name or another, though not immediately after its withdrawal.

Kenya has recently announced its readiness to take part. And so the occupation will have gone out by the door only to come back in through the window.

The Somali people and their political forces must not be taken in by the plays being staged. They must work to strengthen the country's institutions and to include everyone in government, so that there is no pretext for waging war, whether under a clan banner or a religious one.

As for the Arab states, which have mostly been content to look on, they must act, not only for the sake of Somalia but for the sake of the Arabs themselves. The warning signs of the Somali state's collapse are now reaching them through piracy at sea, which international powers are using as a pretext to internationalise the security of the Red Sea and take control of it²¹.

English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.