Horn of Africa may be next terror front

[Wisdom_Seeker]

Horn of Africa may be next terror front

By CHRIS TOMLINSON, Associated Press Writer

Sat Oct 21, 11:35 AM ET

 

 

NAIROBI, Kenya - From the Red Sea to Lake Victoria, the Horn of Africa is one of the few places in the world where, if careful, a traveler can move 1,400 miles across four countries without producing a passport or encountering a single government official.

 

 

These footpaths, back roads and rivers have been used for centuries by merchants and slave traders, explorers, smugglers and bandits. Rebels easily sneak around the central governments in the big cities.

 

So could any traveler. Even a terrorist.

 

Corrupt governments, porous borders, widespread poverty and discontented Muslim populations have created a region ripe for Islamic fundamentalism. The Horn of Africa, home to about 165 million people, is roughly half the area of the United States.

 

The six countries that make up the Horn - Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Djibouti - could become the next major front in the war on terrorism. Kenyan police earlier this year caught a smuggler trying to bring in an anti-aircraft missile.

 

Kenya, and Tanzania just to its south, have already been victims of al-Qaida terrorism, with the bombings at the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and attacks on a hotel and an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002. The attacks emanated from neighboring Somalia, which has had no effective central government since 1992 and has a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement.

 

Western and regional diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said they believe another terrorist attack could be imminent.

 

Robert Rotberg, director of Harvard University's Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution, said every country in the region is at risk because radicals see an opportunity to take advantage of weak, unpopular governments.

 

"Governance and the standard of living are so low in that part of Africa," Rotberg said. "There is certainly a possibility of meddling in troubled waters."

 

Ethnic Somalis are the common denominator in the Horn of Africa, and their large presence in neighboring countries has long been a source of conflict. In the mid-1970s, then Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre advocated expanding the country's borders to unite all Somali-speaking people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

 

Despite a disastrous and short-lived invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 and political anarchy since 1992, Somali nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists still advocate this Greater Somalia. An ethnic-Somali insurgency continues in eastern Ethiopia, led by the ****** Liberation Front, a small group that mostly uses pipe bombs or small-scale attacks to advance their cause.

 

Governments in the Horn of Africa have watched with concern as the Somali Transitional Federal Government they helped create in 2004 after two years of peace talks has been eclipsed by the Islamic Courts Union, led by an elderly cleric, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is committed to a nationalist, Islamic regime and allegedly has ties to Ethiopian rebel groups.

 

"The comfort zone is to look at Somalia as being far away and hope that the problem will resolve itself somehow," Kenya's Minister for Foreign Affairs Raphael Tuju recently told the U.N. General Assembly. But a Somalia with no government in place "is a danger not just to neighboring countries but to the whole world."

 

Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country, has sent troops to the Somali town of Baidoa to prop up the official government, which is also backed by the United Nations. Despite the support, though, Baidoa is the only part of the country the government controls.

 

The African Union, a continentwide diplomatic bloc, has also authorized the deployment of 8,000 Ugandan and Sudanese peacekeepers to protect the government and stabilize Somalia. But with Aweys and other Islamic leaders vehemently opposed, and no rich country ready to pay the bills, the mission has not moved beyond the planning stage.

 

The Islamic militants' sudden ascendancy and popularity have shaken the region, and the ripples have reached the United States and Europe. The United States urgently formed the International Contact Group for Somalia in July to deal with the sudden rise of Islamic militancy and to politically support the government.

 

Mario Raffaelli, Italy's special envoy to the former Italian colony, said he believes the struggle between the transitional government and the Islamic Courts Union for control of Somalia could ignite a regional war, drawing in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and possibly even Sudan.

 

"The change in Mogadishu has changed the whole regional picture," he said. "And made it much more dangerous."

 

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer has accused Aweys of sheltering al-Qaida suspects believed to be responsible for the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. diplomats also fear al-Qaida operatives will persuade Aweys to turn Somalia into a haven for international terrorists.

 

"Somalia has been a collapsed state since 1991," said Rotberg, an expert on the Horn. "It obviously opens up some territory for al-Qaida to meddle."

 

But Aweys has rejected comparisons with Afghanistan's Taliban regime in the late 1990s, which sheltered Osama bin Laden while he planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He has repeatedly said he has no contacts with al-Qaida and is interested only in bringing peace and prosperity to his country.

 

Residents of Mogadishu, though, have felt the Courts Union's hard-line Islamic law which is reminiscent of Afghanistan. It has started public flogging of convicted felons and publicly executed a convicted murderer by firing squad on Sept. 22.

 

Fatima Mohamud, a 34-year-old housewife, said she welcomed the peace the Islamic militias have brought to the capital, but as a follower of Somalia's moderate Sufi form of Islam, she is not comfortable with the Courts Union's fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.

 

 

 

Read more

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061021/ap_on_re_af/troubled_eastern_africa

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

"Terror." Maxaa nacay ereygaan.