For the next decade, the Western world mostly stayed away.
But Arab organizations, many from Saudi Arabia and followers of the strict Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, quietly stepped in. They built mosques, Koranic schools, and social service organizations, encouraging an Islamic revival. By the early 2000s, Mogadishu's clan elders set up a loose network of neighborhood-based courts to deliver a modicum of order in a city desperate for it. They rounded up thieves and killers, put them in iron cages, and held trials. Islamic law, or sharia, was the one set of principles that different clans could agree on; the Somali elders called their network the
Islamic Courts Union.
CIA agents deputized the warlords, the same thugs who had been preying upon Somalia's population for years, to fight the Islamists. According to one Somali warlord I spoke with in March 2008, an American agent named James and another one named David showed up in Mogadishu with briefcases stuffed with cash.
The plan backfired. Somalis like to talk; the country, ironically, has some of the best and cheapest cellular phone service in Africa. Word quickly spread that the same warlords no one liked anymore were now doing the Americans' bidding, which just made the Islamists even more popular. By June 2006, the Islamists had run the last warlords out of Mogadishu. Then something unbelievable happened: The Islamists seemed to tame the place.
I saw it with my own eyes. I flew into Mogadishu in September 2006 and saw work crews picking up trash and kids swimming at the beach. For the first time in years, no gunshots rang out at night. Under the banner of Islam, the Islamists had united rival clans and disarmed much of the populace, with clan support of course. They even cracked down on piracy by using their clan connections to dissuade coastal towns from supporting the pirates. When that didn't work, the Islamists stormed hijacked ships. According to the International Maritime Bureau in London, there were 10 pirate attacks off Somalia's coast in 2006, which is tied for the lowest number of attacks this decade.
The Islamists' brief reign of peace was to be the only six months of calm Somalia has tasted since 1991. But it was one thing to rally together to overthrow the
warlords and another to decide what to do next. A rift quickly opened between the moderate Islamists and the extremists, who were bent on waging jihad. One of the most radical factions has been the Shabab, a multiclan military wing with a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. The Shabab drove around Mogadishu in big, black pickup trucks and beat women whose ankles were showing. Even the other Islamist gunmen were scared of them. By December 2006, some of the population began to chafe against the Shabab for taking away their beloved khat, the mildly stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum.
U.S. State Department later designated the Shabab a terrorist organization. American officials have said that the Shabab are sheltering men who masterminded the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Somalia may indeed have sheltered a few unsavory characters, but the country was far from the terrorist hotbed many worry it has now become. In 2006, there was a narrow window of opportunity to peel off the moderate Islamists from the likes of the Shabab, and some U.S. officials, such as Democratic Rep. Donald M. Payne, the chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa, were trying to do exactly that. Payne and others met with the moderate Islamists and encouraged them to negotiate a power-sharing deal with the transitional government.
But the Bush administration again reached for the gunpowder. The United States would not do much of the fighting itself, since sending large numbers of ground troops into Somalia with Iraq and Afghanistan raging would have been deemed insane. Instead, the United States anointed a proxy: the Ethiopian Army.
Not everyone in Washington swallowed the Ethiopian line. The country has a horrendous human rights record, and
the Ethiopian military (which receives aid for human rights training from the United States) is widely accused of brutalizing its own people. But in December 2006, the Bush administration shared prized intelligence with the Ethiopians and gave them the green light to invade Somalia. Thousands of Ethiopian troops rolled across the border (many had secretly been in the country for months), and they routed the Islamist troops within a week. There were even some U.S. Special Forces with the Ethiopian units. The United States also launched several airstrikes in an attempt to take out Islamist leaders, and it continued with intermittent cruise missiles targeting suspected terrorists. Most have failed, killing civilians and adding to the boiling anti-American sentiment.
The Islamists went underground, and the transitional government arrived in Mogadishu. There was some cheering, a lot of jeering, and the insurgency revved up within days. The transitional government was widely reviled as a coterie of ex-warlords, which it mostly was. It was the 14th attempt since 1991 to stand up a central government. None of the previous attempts had worked. True, some detractors have simply been war profiteers hell-bent on derailing any government. But a lot of blame falls on what this transitional government has done-or not done.
From the start, leaders seemed much more interested in who got what post than living up to the corresponding job descriptions. The government quickly lost the support of key clans in Mogadishu by its harsh (and unsuccessful) tactics in trying to wipe out the insurgents, and by its reliance on Ethiopian troops. Ethiopia and Somalia have fought several wars against each other over the contested Ogaden region that Ethiopia now claims. That region is mostly ethnically Somali, so teaming up with Ethiopia was seen as tantamount to treason.
“The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives.' Walter Lindner, German Ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country's acting president last week. Displaced persons are 'at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape - including by uniformed troops' at a various "checkpoints." "Cholera - endemic to the region during the rainy season - is beginning to cut a swathe through the displaced,' he continued, adding that attempts by international groups to offer assistance to the victims are being obstructed by militias who are stealing supplies, demanding 'taxes' and threatening relief workers.”
The Islamists tapped into this sentiment, positioning themselves as the true Somali nationalists, and gaining widespread support again. The results were intense street battles between Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian troops in which thousands of civilians have been killed. Ethiopian forces have indiscriminately shelled entire neighborhoods (which precipitated a European Union investigation into war crimes), and have even used white phosphorous bombs that literally melt people, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of thousands of people have emptied out of Mogadishu and settled in camps that have become breeding grounds for disease and resentment. Death comes more frequently and randomly than ever before. I met one man in Mogadishu who was chatting with his wife on her cellphone when she was cut in half by a stray mortar shell.
It's incredibly dangerous for us journalists, too. Few foreign journalists travel to Somalia anymore. Kidnapping is the threat du jour. Friends of mine who work for the United Nations in Kenya told me I had about a 100 percent chance of being stuffed into the back of a Toyota or shot (or both) if I didn't hire a private militia. Nowadays, as soon as I land, I take 10 gunmen under my employ.
The U.S. bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya and three days before a large anti-war action in Washington, January 27, 2007. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN) was present in Nairobi, and after returning home asked out loud how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'
On April 3, the Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that 'Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes and that donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court," the e-mail said.
Feb. 7, 07, wrote in this space that 'If the unfolding events in Iraq are any indication, what started out as a swift invasion and occupation could turn out to be a long and widening war.' That was an understatement. As of May ‘07, 1,300 people are reported to have perished in the fighting, over 4,300 wounded and nearly 400,000 have fled their homes.
Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reported drowning off the Somali coast.
And, just as in Iraq, the U.S. supported forces - the small army of the enthroned and very unpopular government and the invaders - are caught up in a civil war, set in motion by the invasion and occupation. In addition to the forces loyal to the overthrown Islamist government, the regime in power is opposed by the Hawiye, one of the country's largest clans. A spokesman for the clan recently called upon 'the Somali people, wherever it exists, to unity in the fight against the Ethiopians. The war is not between Ethiopia and our tribe, it is between Ethiopia and all Somali people,' he said.
"For the major [world] leaders, there is a tremendous embarrassment over Somalia," Michael Weinstein, a US expert on Somalia at Purdue University told Reuters. "They have committed themselves to supporting the interim government -- a government that has no broad legitimacy, a failing government. This is the heart of the problem. ...
In April 2007, during what was described as a lull in the fight, Ethiopian soldiers were moving from house to house in the capital Mogadishu, taking hundreds of men away by the truckloads to an uncertain fate. Meanwhile, the traumatized residents of the rubble strewn city were reported gathering up bodies, many of them rotting, for burial. 'Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu's outskirts, where the scenes are medieval,' reported The Economist last week. 'People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter.'
Martin Fletcher wrote in the London Times, April 26, about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis. 'Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.'
April 27, 2007, the Washington Post reported that interviews it conducted in Ethiopia and testimony given to diplomats and human rights groups, 'paint a picture of a nation that jails its citizens without reason or trial, and tortures many of them -- despite government claims to the contrary.'
“More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia's capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees -- including a U.S. citizen -- picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.'
'Both horrific events can be attributed partly to fallout from Ethiopia's messy intervention in neighboring Somalia,' said the newspaper. 'Initial battles last December were decisively in Ethiopia's favor. But like the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians in Somalia were ill prepared for the aftermath. A growing insurgency has delayed the withdrawal of their troops, exposing the government to attacks at home. It has also inflamed tension among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia, who fight for the ONLF.
The US participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border. Washington let be known it was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects.
'None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened.
Actually, there is little reason to believe the
Bush Administration promoted this war (a clear violation of international law and the UN Charter), 'to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men,' than that the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. What has unfolded in over the past three months, flows
from much larger strategic calculations in Washington.
The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon's now operational plan to build a new 'Africa Command to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed 'Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda.'
For most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the U.S. it was another strategic move to secure positioning in the region where there is a lot of oil. On file are plans - put on hold amid continuing conflicts - for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips.
Salim Lone, spokesperson for the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003, 'the prime minister's attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his
crying wolf about al-Qaeda at every turn. Every time you interview a Somalia official, the first thing you hear is al-Qaeda and terrorists. They're using that. No one believes it. No one believes it at all, because all independent reports say the contrary.
The unlawful U.S.- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new - and still mostly hidden - war in many ways similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason.”
In the meantime, the Bush Administration has worked hard to raise troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Promises were made, but with one exception, remain unfulfilled. In a telephone conversation, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised President Bush to provide between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia's transitional government and train its troops. The Ugandans arrived but are said to have been largely confined to their quarters, refraining from taking part in the effort to crush the opposition. Meanwhile, the 'Transitional Government' and Ethiopian forces were been reported shelling civilian areas in the capital from the government compound they are supposedly guarding.
None of the reporters on the scene appear to have explored the question of why the other African governments failed to send troops but I think the other African governments have refused sending troops for although they would be called 'peacekeepers,' would be injecting themselves into a civil conflict on the side of an unpopular puppet government, something they are loathed to do.
[Excerpted from Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil by Carl Bloice, Black Commentator, May 7, 2007 and from Carl Bloice of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism]
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By late January 2009, the only territory the transitional government controlled was a shrinking federal enclave in Mogadishu guarded by a small contingent of African Union peacekeepers. As soon as the Ethiopians pulled out of the capital, vicious fighting broke out between the various Islamist factions scrambling to fill the power gap. It took only days for the Islamists to recapture the third-largest town, Baidoa, from the government and install sharia law. The Shabab are not wildly popular, but they are formidable; for the time being they have a motivated, disciplined militia with hundreds of hard-core fighters and probably thousands of gunmen allied with them. The violence has shown no signs of halting, even with the election of a new, moderate Islamist president-one who had, ironically, been a leader of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006.
If the Shabab do seize control of the country, they might not stop there. They could send their battle-hardened fighters in battered four-wheel-drive pickup trucks into Ethiopia, Kenya, and maybe even Djibouti to try to snatch back the Somali-speaking parts of those countries. This scenario has long been part of an ethereal pan-Somali dream. Pursuit of that goal would internationalize the conflict and surely drag in neighboring countries and their allies.
The Shabab could also wage an asymmetric war, unleashing terrorists on Somalia's secular neighbors and their secular backers-most prominently, the United States. This would upend an already combustible dynamic in the Horn of Africa, catalyzing other conflicts. For instance, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a nasty border war in the late 1990s, which killed as many as 100,000 people, and both countries are still heavily militarized along the border. If the Shabab, which boasts Eritrean support, took over Somalia, we might indeed see round two of Ethiopia versus Eritrea. Among the best suggestions I've heard is to play to Somalia's strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders.
Western powers should do whatever they can to bring moderate Islamists into the transitional government while the transitional government still exists. Whether people like it or not, many Somalis see Islamic law as the answer. Maybe they're not fond of the harsh form imposed by the Shabab, still, there is an appetite for a certain degree of Islamic governance. That desire should not be confused with support for terrorism.
[Jeffrey Gettleman is East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times]
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A consequence of the collapse of governmental authority that accompanied the civil war has been the emergence of a significant problem with piracy in the waters off of the coast of Somalia.[94][95] Piracy arose as a response by local fishermen from littoral towns such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere to illegal fishing by foreign trawlers.[96][97][98] An upsurge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean has also been attributed to the effects of the December 26, 2004 tsunami that devastated local fishing fleets and washed ashore containers filled with toxic waste that had been dumped by European fishing vessels.[98][99] In August 2008, a multinational coalition took on the task of combating the piracy by establishing a Maritime Security Patrol Area (MSPA) within the Gulf of Aden.[100] and the wider Indian Ocean.In
Due to renewed fighting in the southern half of the country for the
US and US sponsored attack on the defacto Islamic Courts government, at the end of 2009, about 678,000 Somali refugees were under the responsibility of the UNHCR, constituting the third largest refugee group after war-afflicted Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively (all for US crimes against humanity). Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali [88]and Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, UN special envoy to Somalia[89] have referred to the killing of civilians in the Somalian Civil War as a "genocide".
“On OCT. 29, 2011, several thousand Kenyan troops invaded neighbouring Somalia, The Americans claim that the offensive took them by surprise. That is hard to believe, especially since several of the missiles fired at jihadist fighters hidden in the mangrove swamps on the Somali side of the border seem to have been
fired from American drones or submarines. France is also reported to have bombarded settlements near the Somali port of Kismayo, a base for the al-Qaeda-linked Shabab militia.” [The Economist]
A month later came report of heavy Kenyan losses and worries of disaffection among Somali Kenyans.
