Every day that gunshots ring out in a Mogadishu neighbourhood, every week that an explosion rips homes into plumes of dust, and every month that thousands of civilians flee the capital, Somalia plunges deeper into crisis.
Last week’s resignation of Ali Mohamed Gedi, the country’s Prime Minister, is the latest shake-up in a chronology of political turmoil in the Horn of Africa state, and was viewed by many as yet another indication that the transitional federal government is not in control.
Gedi stepped down after weeks of tensions in the administration and an ongoing power struggle with the President, Abdullai Yusuf Ahmed. The stalemate that resulted is now broken, but that doesn’t mean the government has become functional — nor does it make Somalia’s prospects for stability any less distant.
”The international community should recognise that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and Humpty Dumpty is not going to get back on,” says Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in the eastern American state of Virginia, referring to the Somali government.
The administration is riven by internal divisions and wounded by a dogged insurgency made up of Islamists, clan-based militia and other opponents of the government.
Analysts agree that the transitional government is not working, but alternatives will largely depend on the strength of the insurgency, the role of other countries and the willingness of warring factions to negotiate with one another.
Long-standing difficulties
The administration’s dismal prospects for survival aren’t surprising. Set up in 2004, the transitional federal government is the 14th attempt at an interim Somali authority since the collapse of the Mohamed Siad Barre regime in 1991. Since then, warlords, rival factions and militia have competed to fill the power vacuum.
When the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts rose to defeat Mogadishu warlords and take over the capital in June last year, the United States and Ethiopia became concerned over possible links between the courts and Islamic extremists such as those within the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
In December last year, Somali and US-backed Ethiopian forces ousted the courts from power, but did not manage to destroy them.
The Ethiopian intervention provoked some of the worst fighting Mogadishu has experienced in 16 years, according to observers. Targeted assassinations and insurgent attacks have become an almost daily occurrence, Human Rights Watch reports.
As Somalis are displaced — renewed fighting has caused 90 000 to flee Mogadishu over recent days, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — and drought spreads across much of the country, aid agencies cannot respond properly to an escalating humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, the Western-backed government struggles to preserve its tenuous hold over Mogadishu.
Experts agree the current government is widely distrusted and unpopular among most Somalis. ”The fact that the transitional federal government was dependent on the Ethiopians destroyed the chance of them ever winning any support from most Somalis,” says Richard Cornwell, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa. ”It basically became the Vichy government of Somalia.”
Dominated by the president’s Darod clan, the authority fails to represent the diversity of the Somali people. As a result, it has lost potential backers to the rebels, says Pham. The result is that the government, Ethiopian troops and a small contingent of African Union mission forces are confronted with an insurgency that is increasing in numbers and fervour.
The very presence of foreigners carrying guns has served to radicalise opposition groups. ”Once the intervention [comes], as you’ll find all over the world, the more moderate people withdraw after a loss, and the hardcore people keep going,” says Michael Weinstein, a professor of political science at Purdue University in the mid-eastern US state of Indiana. ”The US created a nightmare by backing this intervention.”
The outcome is a rebel movement that shows no sign of backing down. But what the insurgency gains in strength and determination, it lacks in cohesion and the potential to engage in a political process.
”The only thing that unites the insurgency is hatred of the TNG [transitional national government],” Pham remarks. ”If they toppled the TNG, they’d fall on to themselves.”
Failed talks
Recent talks failed to bring the opposition and the government any closer to negotiations.
And, a September meeting in Eritrea did not produce any consensus among members of the Somali opposition alliance, says Cardwell. Furthermore, at a highly anticipated national reconciliation conference held by the interim government at the urging of Western donors in Mogadishu in August, reconciliation was not even a remote possibility, according to Pham.
The August conference had difficulty even starting: moderate Islamists boycotted the event, stating that it was not in a neutral venue, and militias attacked the conference building with mortar fire on the opening day.
”What happened at the conference was the current transitional national government invited 1 500 of their best friends to come and collect a per diem that the international community was paying,” says Pham. ”And they were almost all from the same sub-clans and to the exclusion of others.”
Life in Parliament these days is not quite so cozy, however. In September, the chief Supreme Court justice was arrested on charges of siphoning $800 000 of UN Development Fund aid. Rifts between parliamentarians along clan-based lines have widened. More than 20 ministers called for a vote of no confidence in the prime minister in the weeks prior to his resignation.
The recent debates shaking Parliament have further undermined confidence in the government’s competence. ”Given the splits … I don’t see that it’s sustainable,” says Cornwell. ”I think we’ll see more haemorrhaging of support away from the transitional federation government.”
A government that has spiralled into dysfunction makes for a challenging situation for a donor country like the US, which, according to analysts, has not held the Somali authorities to any measures of progress.
”They’re backed in a corner,” Weinstein says of US officials. ”They’ve made it such that there’s nobody else they can deal with…they put all their chips on the transitional national government.”
Central government essential?
Perhaps more problematic than the failure of this particular government is the very idea of a national Somali administration, several analysts say. The international community needs to come to terms with this, they add.
”Until the Somalis themselves pull this together, this attempt to recognise national governments just leads to a self-defeating winner-takes-all scramble,” Pham says.
Several analysts believe Somalia’s government should be devolved into smaller clan-based units, reflecting the way its society was organised before independence. That way, they say, stability can be secured at the local level first, and then the regional level.
Pham admits that the idea of dispensing with central government would be difficult for international actors to accept, but says they have to be realistic about the limitations of the situation in Somalia. ”It’s time to stop wishing something into being that obviously is not going to happen.”
However, Sam Zarifi — Washington advocate at Human Rights Watch — believes the moment is ripe for forming a different type of administration. ”I can imagine a situation where many of the same people who are in this transitional national government establish a peaceful coexistence and ruling arrangement with some members of the Islamic courts union, for instance,” he says.
A third party like the UN should play a role in bringing actors together to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement, Zarifi adds.
But any type of discussions will have to confront complex regional interests.
The claim to the Somali-inhabited Ogoden region of Ethiopia has been the source of past wars between Ethiopia and Somalia, for example, and continues to resurface.
According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, Eritrea has supplied arms to Somali insurgents to attack Ethiopians, an enemy common to both the insurgency and Eritrea. As such, Somalia serves as a proxy battleground for the border dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
According to Pham, enforcement of the UN arms embargo on Somalia is a first step to stem the flow of arms from Eritrea.
”The two countries [Ethiopia and Eritrea] are spiralling closer to war again,” he says, adding that what happens between Eritrea and Ethiopia will greatly influence Somalia’s prospects for peace. ”If a conventional war is going to break out there, which could well happen, then all bets are off.” — IPS