SOMALIA:- State of utter failure

[Taleexi]

SOMALIA:- State of utter failure

Posted to the Web Dec 16, 07:09

 

A few glimmers of hope that Somalia may one day be re-invented

 

TO MOVE cash the few score miles between Mogadishu, Somalia's lawless official capital, and Jowhar, the seat of its transitional government, a local money-vendor has to pay $6,000. For that he gets an armoured lorry, 30 gunmen and three “technicalsâ€â€”jeeps with heavy machineguns. What he doesn't get is insurance or any recourse to a state authority if his gunmen are killed, for state authority does not exist. But the money vendor still moves the cash, if the amount is big enough, and still makes a profit.

 

Somalia is resilient. Consider its amazing currency, the Somali shilling, which has operated for 14 years without a central bank or reserves of any kind, save the will of ordinary Somalis. Though the country has lacked a government, it has never quite ceased to exist. But for all that, Somalia remains Africa's most utterly failed state, as it has been since 1991, when it fell to pieces after tribal militias toppled a dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, then turned on each other. Since then, the place has been torn apart by rival warlords, leaving at least 300,000 dead. The outside world virtually gave up on the country after a disastrous American-led UN intervention ended with the deaths of 18 American troops and perhaps 1,000 Somalis after a ferocious battle in Mogadishu in 1993.

 

But though the world may have tried to forget Somalia, the country refuses to forget the world. Its anarchy has made it a perfect environment for small but dangerous groups of terrorists and bandits to hide out in. Somali pirates have attacked dozens of ships off the central and southern coast, including a cruise liner and UN food ships. Jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda have also flourished, murdering, among others, foreign aid workers and journalists. Somalia's capacity to export its violence worries both the West and closer neighbours. The interior minister of Yemen, across the Red Sea, says Somalia is “like Afghanistan before the Taliban took overâ€.

 

So the tentative success of its latest transitional government, led by a widely disliked but tough former warlord called Abdullah Yusuf, has to be an encouraging sign. There have been no fewer than 13 previous attempts to form a government since 1991: Mr Yusuf's, backed by the European Union, is number 14. He may still be confined to Jowhar, unable to move to, let alone exert any influence over, the ostensible capital, Mogadishu, but his government is already the longest-lasting of all of them.

 

If peace holds for a little longer, Mr Yusuf may start to look a little more like the real thing. Parliament might even meet, and proper elections be held in 2009. The danger is that opposing factions in Mogadishu, angry at being excluded from the government and worried that their roadblocks and other sources of revenue may be curtailed, may choose to fight it out instead. A rebel force rolled out of Mogadishu a fortnight ago towards Kismayu, a southern port. The warlords in charge of the forces say they mean to negotiate with Mr Yusuf in a neutral town, but doubters say they mean to fight.

 

If the two sides do come to blows, in Kismayu or farther north, it could be some of the bloodiest fighting since the 1990s. Mr Yusuf probably needs some 10,000 troops for a march on Mogadishu, but has only about 4,000—and is short of cash to pay this “national armyâ€. Foreign donors are loth to give more money until the parliament has met a few times, which, in the short run, looks unlikely.

 

So not everyone is putting their hopes in Mr Yusuf's administration, least of all the Americans, who fear that Somalia may become another incubator of international terrorism. “It's a truck bomb,†says one diplomat. “It's not a matter of if it goes off, but when.†The United States dislikes the formula for dishing out seats in the new parliament (61 each to four large clans, 31 seats to the rest), saying it is too clunky. It also says that Italy, the former colonial power in most of the country, and Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbour to the west, which has a population of 70m to Somalia's 8m, have primed the bomb by favouring the Jowhar faction and its associated clans over the Mogadishu faction and its even more intricate web of clans, sub-clans and Islamist mavericks.

 

Some American officials privately say that Italy, despite a UN ban, is funnelling arms to Jowhar through Ethiopia. Italy angrily denies this. America, after all, has no one on the ground and no intention of sending anyone, save a few counter-terrorism agents chasing al-Qaeda suspects. In contrast, the Italians are busy on the ground—and more knowledgeable. It makes sense, they say, to go with the “centre of gravityâ€. The British and other EU countries are somewhere in the middle, supporting the Jowhar faction but trying to keep the Mogadishu lot on board too.

 

The main hope for peace lies in the northern parts of Somalia: in Somaliland, which used to be a separate British colony, and is now relatively peaceful and well governed, and in Puntland. Somaliland has in effect seceded from Somalia, and yearns for full legal independence. Puntland, Mr Yusuf's own stronghold, which was the northern part of Italian Somaliland, is now pretty autonomous, but its leaders prefer to see Puntland as a building block for a future federal Somalia.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is wretched. Most people are illiterate. Only 18% of children go to primary school. Garowe, Puntland's dusty capital, is swollen with migrants from the south. Its slums are spreading, the wells are contaminated, cholera occasionally breaks out, and polio has reappeared. Habitat, a UN agency that tries to provide housing and shelter, is struggling to bring some order here and in other Somali towns.

 

But it is more trade, not aid, that might improve things the most. Saudi Arabia could help by restoring its imports of Somali livestock that were stopped in 2000, and Somalia needs help developing its offshore fishing waters, which are being plundered by foreign boats.

Don't forget us

 

While nearby countries such as Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia get billions of dollars of aid in cash and kind, plus massive attention from diplomats seeking to bring peace to the region, Somalia is still largely ignored. Yet the risks of failing to find and bolster a government that commands a degree of national unity may outweigh the risks of getting entangled again. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, says that jihadists will gradually make headway among Somalia's despairing and disaffected citizenry. “It will only be a matter of timeâ€, it says, “before another group of militants succeeds in mounting a spectacular terrorist attack against foreign interests in Somalia or against one of its neighbours.â€

 

Source: The Economist