No Simple Narrative in Somalia Drama

[BiLaaL]

No Simple Narrative in Somalia Drama

 

By Michael Weinstein

 

As the coalition of Western donor powers, the United Nations, the African Union, and regional African states, such as Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda and Burundi, see it, the narrative of Somalia’s contemporary political history pits the country’s new and expanded Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against an armed “insurgency” composed of “spoilers,” “extremists,” or “terrorists” operating under the banner of “radical Islamism.”

 

Just a cursory reading of that narrative shows that it has nothing to do with an objective political analysis of the most complex and complicated conflict in the world today, but is a piece of propaganda—a good guys vs. bad guys drama straight out of a Hollywood B movie—that would awaken contemptuous amusement were it not for the fact that the parties promoting it appear to believe it themselves and to formulate their policies and strategies in its terms.

 

It is to be expected, of course, that the coalition’s rhetoric would be tendentious. Its members were the ones who contrived the new TFG or found it in their interests to support it, and, as a consequence, want to believe that it will be able eventually to succeed in governing Somalia, which has been effectively stateless since 1991, and to convince others to share that belief.

 

Nonetheless, the narrative is a sheer expression of baseless hope that is meant to pass for a plausible projection.

 

As opposed to the coalition’s simplistic narrative, the political situation in Somalia is so complex, convoluted and fragmented that it is impossible to draw any grounded conclusions about how it will mutate. The myriad interests constituting the country’s power configuration include the divided factions within the TFG, the factions of the armed Islamist opposition, Islamists outside the armed opposition with their own militias, clan families, sub-clans, regional power centers, micro-political interests at the local level, legitimate and criminal business interests, the semi-autonomous sub-state of Puntland, the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, Ethiopia pursuing its own agenda apart from the coalition, and Eritrea seeking to blunt Ethiopia and the coalition. On the ground, some of these factions and interests form alliances with each other and then fall out, interests overlap and cross-cut, and uncertainty and distrust proliferate. Both the weak TFG and the coalition of “stakeholders” are not driving the situation, but are enmeshed in it like all the others.

 

Attempting to describe accurately the power vectors operative in Somalia, simply at the present moment, would involve writing a long book that would be outdated by events before it came into print. Such a study might discern some underlying patterns, but there is no one who will undertake the thankless task, so one is left with the option of criticizing ideological narratives.

 

The back story of the new TFG begins with a policy shift in late 2007 by the Western donor powers, which bankroll the transitional institutions, to move from support of the TFG to pressuring it to accept a power-sharing agreement with the conciliatory faction of the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS-D), which is dominated by Islamists and led by the new TFG’s president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad. The shift was made because it had become apparent to the donor powers that an Ethiopian military occupation of Somalia, which was mounted in late 2006 in order to suppress an Islamic revolution in the country, had failed abysmally, as remnants of the Islamic courts regrouped, initiated an insurgency, and became powerful enough to take and hold substantial swathes of territory.

 

With the primary interest of the donor powers being to block the emergence of Islamist control over south and central Somalia that might eventuate in safe havens for internationalist Islamic revolutionaries, their policy shift represented a concession to the realities on the ground. Whereas they had earlier stood fast against negotiations with the Islamist opposition, they now sought to “isolate” the “extremists” within it by co-opting the conciliatory faction and forcing it on the clan-based TFG.

 

Through a series of negotiations in Djibouti in the second half of 2008, the donor powers—spearheaded by the U.N.’s special representative to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah—engineered an agreement in which the transitional parliament was doubled in size to 550 members, allowing Sheikh Sharif to bring in 200 of his loyalists as a bloc, insuring that he would be elected to the presidency by the new parliament. As part of the deal, Sheikh Sharif was given an extension of the TFG’s term for two years from August 2009 and had to concede to choosing the members of his bloc according to the TFG’s clan representation system, and to naming a secularist prime minister, Omar Abdisrashid Sharmarke. Sheikh Sharif quickly made sure that Sharmarke named two ARS-D loyalists to run the Internal Security and Interior ministries, and a teacher without military experience to preside over the Defense ministry.

 

By jamming a predominantly Islamist faction into a clan-based government, the donor-led coalition appears to believe that it has created a “national unity government,” where in fact it has concocted an improbable hybrid that is engineered to fail.

 

There is no love lost between Sheikh Sharif and the donor powers; he represents their fall-back position and he knows that, so he will strive to continue his power play and try to take control of the TFG’s institutions and build a machine. Yet he has very little leeway—his Islamist base has organized and is pressuring him to alter the TFG’s constitution and institute Shari’a law throughout Somalia, and the coalition is exerting counter-pressure on him to govern “inclusively” and maintain the secular constitution. Meanwhile, the armed Islamist opposition groups, which control most of the southern regions of Somalia and are active in its central regions and its capital Mogadishu, have declared that they do not recognize the new TFG and will continue to oppose it militarily. In their counter-narrative to the coalition’s story, Sheikh Sharif has been bought off by a Washington-led conspiracy against Islam and has become its cat’s paw—another B-movie script with no more and no less plausibility.

 

Add to the tensions within the TFG, the conflicting pressures on Sheikh Sharif from his base and his “partners,” and the armed opposition’s confrontational stance, Ethiopia’s support for and training of warlord militias from Somalia that are dedicated to taking back their regions from the Islamists and are not loyal to the new TFG, and one begins to understand the complexity of the present power configuration, which will not succumb to any simple narrative.

 

The account above only scratches the surface, and Sheikh Sharif realizes that. In a revealing interview with IRIN, he said that the TFG is “broke and broken,” and that it was too early to tell whether the donor powers would give him sufficient support to achieve security and offer at least some hope for improvement in the lives of Somalis. The Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous diplomatic source who said that although the donors would support the new TFG, “we are not going to suddenly open a spigot that wasn’t previously opened.”

 

Somalia is not living in a cowboy movie in which the peace-loving people, led by their valiant sheriffs, face off against the “spoilers,” but encounters a looming and many-sided civil conflict that might descend into civil war. One could waste one’s breath hectoring the donor powers over their lack of resolve, their hypocrisy, and their obsessions with piracy and terrorism that afflict them with tunnel vision and spin them into political fantasy, but they are simply pursuing their own perceived interests at the expense of other actors.

 

The point is that whether or not they know that, the other actors do and will devise their strategies accordingly.

 

____________________ ____________________ ____________________

Michael Weinstein is a professor with Purdue University’s Department of Political Science.

Source