Somalia: A Burning Place

[rudy-Diiriye]

Battered Somalia is trying to reconcile its warring factions. But mortar attacks, boycotts and an expiring peacekeepers’ mandate leave little room for optimism.

 

July 17, 2007 - For a peace conference, it was a particularly inauspicious beginning. Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was mid-speech when the explosions began. Shells blasted around Sunday's congress venue in Mogadishu's Shibis district and in a nearby residential neighborhood, wounding five people. Ahmed tried to tough it out. "I want to tell those sending the mortar shells to fire an atomic bomb at us as well," he intoned ironically to a smaller-than-expected audience of peace conference delegates, many of whom had arrived in Mogadishu that same day. "We are not going to stop the reconciliation congress."

 

But Yusuf didn't get a chance to finish. A conference organizer told delegates they would have to wait until Thursday to resume talks—and then quickly urged Yusuf to exit the stage. Somali clan leaders who braved three security cordons and a raft of death threats to attend the peace congress, were not reassured. Wearing turbans and fanning themselves in the intense heat, some of the delegates milled around inside the security cordon, unsure whether to stay or go. "We are shocked," Ugas Abdi Idis, a tribal clan elder from ********* district told NEWSWEEK. "It is not safe here, the bad guys have threatened to kill us and they have found ways to bomb [us]. The government must make it safe, otherwise we'll go back [home]."

 

Making anything safe in Somalia these days is a tall order. Indeed, for nearly 17 years now one government after another has succeeded only in worsening an already bad situation. The last bloody upsurge came in December, when Ethiopian forces, covertly supported and financed largely by the United States, invaded Somalia and routed the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union from the capital. Since then, fighting between radical Islamists and the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has killed several thousand Somali civilians and forced hundreds of thousands more to flee the capital in search of safety. In the last month, some 120,000 Somalis have returned from squalid refugee camps and cold floodplains, where some were desperate enough to rent space under trees. But the situation remains tenuous this week as the transitional government struggles to put together the first-ever peace conference designed to bring all the fighting factions to the same table. The conference is a last-ditch effort to jumpstart the political process. With less than two years to go before the transitional government mandate runs out in January 2009, the stakes are high. "This is the only game in town at this point," says Mario Raffaele, the Italian Special Envoy to Somalia, who returned to Kenya from a fact-finding mission to Mogadishu over the weekend. "If this conference doesn't produce anything, if it collapses, then I don't know what happens."

 

The Islamists seem to be doing everything they can to make sure the conference fails. For weeks they have been warning Somalis to stay away from the meeting, which they have derided as an effort by the TFG to "rubberstamp" the American-backed Ethiopian occupation of Somalia. The government has tried to bill it as an inclusive gathering of tribal elders, sheiks and opposition figures, and has left registration open to latecomers and skeptics who may decide they want to join at a later date. The conference is scheduled to last between 30 and 45 days, and one reason for the Sunday postponement was the non-appearance of top opposition leaders.

 

 

A hardline youth group called the Shebab, responsible for much of the targeted violence against the government and peacekeeping forces in Mogadishu since January, wants to make sure it stays that away. Last week, members began distributing fliers warning residents not to go to the conference. "Anyone who attends the conspiracy meeting is sentenced to death," the fliers stated. "We will shoot him or her in the head." One of the Shebab insurgents involved in the fighting, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter shortly after the mortar attack over the weekend, said, "We didn't intend to kill the delegates, it was just a warning." Later on, however, the fighter warned that anyone who chose to "disobey" the warning volleys would face a more serious confrontation if they continued to participate in the days to come. "You are selling your religion for a pittance," the fliers warned. "We will kill you before you get to benefit from it."

 

Outside the conference, a crippled man named Omar Salad lamented the bloodshed that has tainted his country. Salad, a grizzled elder himself, lost two legs during 16 years of civil war that turned Somalia into one of Africa's most anarchic corners. Now he wants the elders to force a change. "I know the pain of war—what I want is to see the test of peace," he said. "I don't want to lose another part of my body." The violence, however, continued unabated. Last week a mortar round killed a deputy commissioner of a district neighboring Mogadishu; insurgents killed two government soldiers by tossing a hand grenade at them, and an Ethiopian soldier was killed in Suqa Holaha, north of the capital. Lately, the government has been hitting back hard, executing two men accused of killing two TFG intelligence agents and arresting scores more in massive sweeps across the capital. Government agents blindfolded the men and shot them in front of a crowd of at least 30 people.

 

Much is riding on the success of the conference. Under U.N. guidelines, Somalia must establish some sort of power-sharing government before the TFG mandate expires. That leaves less than 18 months to draft a new constitution and a central system of government—a first for Somalia, which is comprised of numerous warring ethnic and tribal constituencies. In addition, the warring factions need to agree on a power-sharing arrangement that includes all the major clans and subclans, including the powerful Hawiya group, whose members are scattered throughout the government as well as the opposition. And then there's the question of what role Islam can and should play in a new federal Somalia. In the best of all worlds, those questions would be resolved before January 2009, when the U.N. guidelines decree that a free and fair election should take place. "If it works, great," says Tariq Chaudry, a U.N. political officer involved in the talks. "If it doesn't work, you have to find other ways of doing it. We are putting a lot at stake in this."

 

The conference also comes just as the 1,500 Ugandan peacekeepers who have been in Mogadishu since March are set to return home. The African Union peacekeeping mandate runs out on July 19, but so far none of the other African nations who were expected to send some 8,000 troops have done so, nor has the Ugandan mandate been extended. To make matters worse, the Ugandan troops in Mogadishu haven't been paid their May or June salaries. The Ugandan contingent lost four soldiers in May when a roadside bomb struck one of their patrols. Since then, the troops have scaled back their operations. "Mogadishu is a burning place," Paddy Ankunda, the spokesman for the AU troops said last week. "If other peacekeepers come, Ethiopia can pull back to its borders, but right now we can't dominate the security situation."

 

Meanwhile, uncertainty continues to plague Mogadishu. Just as conference delegates were recovering from the shock of the mortar attack, Shebab insurgents declared that they would be targeting the vehicles and hotels the delegates were using as well. As the news spread, six more people were killed in violence across the capital. Not surprisingly, ordinary citizens have little hope that the conference will bring significant change. "These talks just mean a new era of civil war," Abdi Mohammed, 40, said wryly as he watched from outside the conference venue. "These clans have their grudges and they will bring up old resentments instead of going forward." Mohammed believed it would take "a miracle" for the government to get them to put aside their differences. After the latest stalled reconciliation effort, most Somalis would probably agree.

 

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19810527/site/newsweek/