Nearly 15 years ago the United States sent troops to Somalia to ”restore order”.
Their landing was a spectacle orchestrated for the cameras. Somalia was then more divided than it is today, split up into small turfs ruled mostly by bandit warlords.
An American ”thinking” journal, Dissident, called and asked me to do a commentary on how the American face-off with the warlords might end.
Piece of cake, I thought. It was going to be a walk in the park, I opined, and painted a picture of how Somalia might pan out — with the victorious Americans overseeing reconstruction and the surviving warlords scattered and hiding in khat plantations.
A few months after the article appeared, the Americans were retreating from Somalia with their tails between their legs. That article is the most embarrassing of my career.
I learnt my lesson: in modern times, any time a country, however militarily powerful, invades another and I have to bet on the outcome, I always wager that the invader will, eventually, be routed.
Ethiopia, a poor country without anything remotely close to America’s military might, has invaded Somalia to deal with the ”terrorist” threat it claims is posed by the Islamic Courts, whose forces swept through most of Somalia in the past six months and which, through a brutal application of Sharia, ended lawlessness.
Will Ethiopia succeed where the US failed? While the Islamic Courts have certainly been put to flight, if we need an example of a likely outcome, we need go no further than what happened to Rwanda and Uganda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Rwanda, with varying degrees of assistance from Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Eritrea, helped overthrow the vile and thieving Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, and installed the wine-loving and womanising Laurent Kabila as president.
Towards the end of 1998, Kabila had fallen out with Rwanda, and Uganda then invaded the eastern DRC. Angola and Zimbabwe rallied to Kabila’s side. Directly and indirectly the conflict ended up killing five times more people than the 1994 Rwandan genocide — four million!
The Congolese used to say, ”Rwanda and Uganda might bite into Congo, but it is too big for either to swallow.” They were right.
In the end, both Rwanda and Uganda spat out the DRC and withdrew.
This was remarkable because the Rwandan and Ugandan armies at that point were among the most battle-hardened in sub-Saharan Africa, outclassed in that regard only by the Angolans.
Rwanda and Uganda went back into the DRC with more strategic advantages than Ethiopia has going into its Somalia campaign.
There’s more beyond Ethiopia’s claim that it has moved against the courts in Somalia because they are allied to al-Qaeda and pose a ”jihadist” threat to it.
There is a trend in the Horn that is not widely acknowledged — the dissolution of the colonial African state. First, Ethiopia cut Eritrea loose after the overthrow of the tyrant Haile Mariam Mengistu.
Next, Sudan signed the peace agreement with the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army. It provides for a referendum on the future of Southern Sudan. That referendum will take place in four years, but the verdict is already in — the south will vote to secede.
If Ethiopia attempts an occupation, thus courting disaster, then its Somali region (the Ogaden) will certainly break away.
The bigger worry should perhaps be what happens politically and militarily in the northern regions of Kenya bordering Ethiopia and Somalia. If the courts somehow rally and expel the Ethiopians — which, granted, looks most unlikely at present — will they stop only at trying to absorb the Ogaden into a greater Somalia?
No, and they might eye northern Kenya next.
And if Ethiopia is able to dominate Somalia, it too might be emboldened enough to look further south.
Nairobi-based Charles Onyango-Obbo is a managing editor at the Nation Media Group. This article first appeared in the East African