Troubled period of lawlessness is hard to end
Amidst the current debate about policy options in Afghanistan, Somalia offers some insights into both the challenges of bringing political order and cohesion to countries with atomised and decentralised traditional networks of authority and the risks of failing to do so. Although there have been some signs of political progress in 2009, there remain no clear solutions in view to the chronic absence of governance and security which started in 1991 when strongman President Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown in a civil war. Competing clans then commandeered weapons that had been supplied to his government alternately by the Soviets and the United States during the Cold War, and the country degenerated into a patchwork of armed clan fiefdoms without central authority. A famine that an ineffectual United Nations mission was unable to address prompted the US to lead an international military intervention in December 1992 with the relatively narrow intention of facilitating humanitarian relief.
In transforming a humanitarian mission into coercive peace enforcement, however, the US angered Somali clan militias. Their fury culminated in the infamous October 1993 ‘Black Hawk Down’ confrontation in which 18 US Army Rangers and hundreds of Somalis died in Mogadishu. This spurred a hurried US withdrawal, stoked anti-Americanism and strengthened the hand of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden and second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri cast the US as a ‘paper tiger’ with no staying power, citing the US pullouts from Lebanon after Hizbullah’s 1983 barracks bombing as a further example.
Since 1991, some 14 governments formed in negotiating processes conducted outside of Somalia have tried and failed to govern. The current Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is recognised by the UN, but has struggled to establish control over the clan-dominated country.
Terrorism: perception and reality
From the mid 1990s, the prevailing anarchy led Somalia to be viewed in the West as a potential exporter of Islamist terrorism. Threat perceptions have been high since the 11 September attacks and especially the ousting of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001. The fear has been that al-Qaeda holdouts fleeing Central Asia would reconstitute their operational base in weak states in the Gulf or sub-Saharan Africa. Pakistan’s utility as an alternative base for al-Qaeda has moderated these fears, but recent counter-terrorism successes there have revived them. Yemen is the leading candidate for such jihadist migration, but Somalia appears a fairly close second given its homogeneous Sunni Muslim population, absence of state-enforcement mechanisms, rising militant Islamism and proximity to the Persian Gulf.
Islamist elements in Somalia have helped to propagate terrorism. The explosives used in the November 2002 attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya, probably came from Somalia, while perpetrators of that attack and the nearly simultaneous attempted shooting-down of an Israeli airliner leaving Mombasa used Somalia as a bolt-hole. A number of Somalis reportedly went to Lebanon to help Hizbullah battle Israeli forces in the 2006 ‘summer war’ in exchange for military training. The al-Qaeda-linked militant Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab (‘the youth’) has some transnational ambitions, and its recruiting reach extends to the Somali diaspora in North America: one of about 20 ethnic Somalis recruited from the US perpetrated the first terrorist suicide attack by an American in October 2008 in Somaliland. Eritrea supports Somali Islamists as proxies against its arch-enemy Ethiopia with an eye to bogging it down in Somalia. However, al-Shabaab has not formally merged with al-Qaeda and Somalia has not, thus far, ripened into a fully fledged global terrorist threat.
Influenced by the terrorism threat, Washington backed Ethiopia’s suppression in 2006–07 of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a fundamentalist organisation which briefly held sway in Mogadishu and the south. Ethiopia gave support to the internationally recognised TFG. But in early 2009 Ethiopia substantially withdrew its forces, which had enraged Somalis through brutal tactics. The US has pursued a policy of making occasional targeted strikes from AC-130 gunships and Navy ships. These have killed jihadists but have also produced civilian casualties, intensifying anti-American attitudes among Somalis. Islamist militants have accordingly grown in number. Loosely estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000, they now control most territory in southern Somalia, though the TFG and African Union-sponsored African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces have managed to keep Mogadishu out of their hands.
In summer 2009, Ethiopia dispatched troops, reportedly with the tacit approval of the US, to thwart Islamist takeovers of Somali towns near the Ethiopian border – in particular, Beledweyne, which in August 2009 had been overrun by militiamen of Hizbul Islam, a more moderate and nationalistic group than al-Shabaab led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. But Ethiopia denied any intent to re-occupy the country.
