World Leaders Are Meeting in a Script All Too Familiar to Somalis
Feisal Omar/Reuters
A Somali government soldier patrolled Mogadishu on Tuesday. The mandate of the transitional government ends in August.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: February 22, 2012
TABDA, Somalia — On Thursday, foreign policy heavyweights will gather in London and spend about six hours trying to solve a problem that has bedeviled this forlorn country for more than 20 years: establishing a functional government.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Arab sheiks, Turkish diplomats and other representatives from about 40 countries are all scheduled to file into Lancaster House, a stately building near Buckingham Palace, for the latest in a long string of high-powered international efforts to fix Somalia.
But here on the ground, in scorching-hot Somali villages like Tabda, where people live in twig huts and stagger from shady spot to shady spot to avoid the wrath of the sun, there is laughing disbelief that any conference 4,000 miles away will solve anything.
“Another conference?” asked Ahmed Madobe, an Islamist warlord who is the de facto power in this area. “Every day you call a conference, and what’s been done? You need to involve the people on the ground, those who have suffered, to rebuild this country from scratch.”
A group of elders sitting under an acacia tree heartily agreed. They all spoke of very prosaic needs.
“We need food,” said Ibrahim Mahamoud Mohamed.
“We need animals,” said Abdullahi Sheik Ahmed.
Western diplomats say the key to Somalia’s problems, like poverty, piracy, famine and two decades of civil war, is more international support for Somalia’s fledging Transitional Federal Government and the small local administrations that are starting to assert themselves across the country. One of the goals of the London conference is solidifying a plan for what happens in August, when the mandate of the transitional government ends.
But the conference is not expected to produce many surprises — especially since a draft of the final communiqué popped up on Somali Web sites more than a week ago.
“We agreed that this is a critical time in Somalia’s history,” the communiqué begins. It goes on to add: “So we met in London to take stock, and to take decisions which will sustain the momentum of change.”
British officials declined to comment, but other Western officials said that the draft was authentic and that the leak was thoroughly embarrassing for Mr. Cameron. Apparently, the document had been shared with Somali officials, who then passed it around freely.
Britain has not been a big player in Somalia for years, and Mr. Cameron’s original interest was in piracy. London is a hub of the global shipping industry, which spends billions of dollars on higher insurance premiums and security to protect ships from Somalia’s indefatigable pirates. Late last year, Mr. Cameron offered to host a major conference on Somalia, citing terrorism concerns and saying the country had become “a failed state that directly threatens British interests.”
Likewise, American officials believe Somalia has become a sanctuary for some very dangerous men. Just this month, the most fearsome Somali insurgent group, the Shabab, known for chopping off hands and starving its own people, announced it had officially joined Al Qaeda.
The Shabab, though, seem to be losing territory rapidly. On Wednesday, Ethiopian troops and militias allied with Somalia’s government took control of Baidoa, a market town that used to be a Shabab base (and the seat of the transitional government before that). Shabab fighters raced out of town as the Ethiopian forces approached. Residents rejoiced.
Western countries have shied away from sending their own troops into Somalia’s morass, aside from the occasional special forces strike, like the one last month when American commandos swooped in and rescued two aid workers who had been kidnapped by a heavily armed gang.
Instead, the approach has been to give Western money and Western weapons to African armies to stamp out the Shabab. But it has not been so easy. Around 10,000 African Union peacekeepers are fighting it out in Somalia, and their mission has turned into one of the bloodiest peacekeeping operations of recent times, with more than 500 soldiers killed. On Wednesday, the United Nations approved increasing the force to nearly 18,000 peacekeepers.
The expanded African Union mission is most likely to incorporate several thousand Kenyan infantrymen who crossed into Somalia in October in the most ambitious military assault Kenya has undertaken since its independence in 1963. The Kenyans called their incursion Operation Linda Nchi, or Operation Protect the Nation, branding the Shabab a regional threat and vowing to take over Kismayo, a port town and a major Shabab stronghold, within a few weeks.
But four months later, the Kenyan troops are still miles from Kismayo, and their biggest military gains have been capturing a bunch of impoverished villages like Tabda that few have ever heard of.
Even in December, a guest columnist wrote in The Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, “Operation Linda Nchi is starting to get stale.”
Many analysts contrast Kenya’s tortoise pace with the lightning offensive in which the Ethiopian military, with covert American help, punched into Somalia in 2006, ousted an Islamist group then in control and seized the southern half of the country in about a week.
But the Kenyans may be on to something. They say if they race ahead too fast, without stabilizing the areas they occupy, the Shabab will be able to regroup behind them. That is precisely what happened in the Ethiopian invasion: Within a few months, the Shabab began launching guerilla attacks and were soon taking back town after town.
“Time is not important,” insisted Brig. J. M. Ondieki, the commander of the Kenyan troops. “We must secure the areas to make sure the Shabab does not gain a foothold as we move forward.”
Military experts say wars are won with logistics, and if that is the case, the Kenyans have their work cut out for them. During a trip this week organized for foreign journalists to show off Kenya’s war-fighting machine, a Kenyan military plane got a flat tire and a Kenyan military chopper broke down, stranding several foreign journalists at a small dusty field base for the night.
But the Kenyan soldiers were excellent hosts. They provided each of the hapless — and filthy — journalists with a cot, a mattress, a blanket, a sheet, a towel and a bar of soap, along with a tasty dinner of ugali (a polentalike starch) and goat.
![People look at the wreckage of a car used in a suicide car bomb attack in Mogadishu on Wednesday (February 8th) near the presidential palace. [Abdurashid Abdulle Abikar/AFP]](http://sabahionline.com/shared/images/2012/02/10/somalia-mogadishu-attack.jpg)