The Herculean nature of the task facing Somalia’s new government has been brought to the fore again in recent days, as efforts proceed to have the administration installed in the capital, Mogadishu.
Reports on Thursday said three people had died while seven were injured in what appeared to have been a bomb blast outside the building that used to house the foreign affairs ministry.
This followed a series of protests about the composition of an African Union (AU) force intended to provide security for the Somali government, and the murder on February 9 in Mogadishu of a journalist from the British Broadcasting Corporation, Kate Peyton. She had been visiting the capital to compile reports on the situation in Somalia following efforts to re-establish a central government in the Horn of Africa state.
Somalia collapsed into lawlessness in 1991 after dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted by a coalition of militia groups formed along tribal lines. These factions later fell into disagreement, leaving the country to be carved into fiefdoms by rival leaders.
The new government, formed last year in Kenya after about two years of talks, is now confronted with the challenge of restoring order to this lawless society.
“We will not watch silently our citizens being held hostage by the political extremism. We will try to negotiate to secure peace with those out to cause trouble. If this fails, then it is upon our security forces to take all necessary steps ‒ but reduce as much as possible casualties,” said Yusuf Baribari, head of the press service for President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
The head of state has called on the AU to provide upwards of 15 000 troops to secure the relocation of Somalia’s government from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to Mogadishu. According to Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi, the administration will have moved across the border by the end of this month.
However, demonstrations accompanied the arrival in Mogadishu on Monday of a delegation sent by the AU to assess how a deployment of peacekeepers could be carried out.
The protests appear to have been sparked by the Ethiopia’s offer to contribute soldiers to the AU force in Somalia. Acrimonious relations have often prevailed between the two states, which came to blows in the late 1970s over control of the Ogaden region: a part of Ethiopia which Somalia laid claim to, then invaded in July 1977.
Ethiopia later fuelled civil strife in Somalia by backing the rebel Somali National Movement.
There are apparently also tensions in Somalia at the prospect of non-Muslim troops being invited into the country.
A Brussels-based think tank, the International Crisis Group, says the concerns of the demonstrators, if not addressed, could overflow into violence.
“Such threats and protests must be taken seriously because they represent the feelings of the public in Somalia,” said Matt Bryden, director of the group’s Horn of Africa Project.
“The government must counter this by discussing whether it will move with international peacekeepers, and if so which countries will contribute to the peacekeeping force ‒ because this is where the problem is coming from,” he added. “This issue must be discussed by parliament and cabinet so that a consensus is reached first.”
However, even members of Somalia’s government seem divided over whether to rely on international peacekeepers for their security: reports indicate that the housing minister has appealed to Somalis to fight any troops which set foot in the country.
The unhappy experience of the last peacekeeping mission to be deployed in Somalia may also be fuelling uncertainty about a future AU force. This mission, a United Nations initiative, was sent to Somalia in 1992 to help stop the country’s downward spiral into anarchy, and to distribute humanitarian aid. By the final months of that year, a combination of drought and civil war had brought famine to millions in the country.
While the mission did succeed in providing emergency assistance to many, matters went awry when it tried to disarm militias in a bid to bring order to Somalia.
Following an attack in June 1993 by faction leader Mohammed Farah Aideed in which 24 Pakistani peacekeepers died, the UN mission became drawn into fighting with Aideed’s supporters. A few months later, in October, hundreds of Somali civilians and 18 American troops were killed during a battle in Mogadishu.
This served as a turning point for UN activities in Somalia: all peacekeepers were withdrawn from the country by 1995.
Talks on restoring a proper government to Somalia were held under the auspices of the Inter Governmental Authority on Development, a regional grouping that comprises Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda, Somalia and Sudan. Apart from the election of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the negotiations also resulted in the creation of a parliament in August 2004 ‒ and the appointment of a cabinet last month.
Two regions of Somalia, Puntland in the north-east and Somaliland in the north-west, refused to participate in the Kenya talks. Somaliland broke away from the rest of Somalia in 1991, while Puntland has declared itself autonomous. — IPS