A blog about the politics and conflicts of the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, and the role of the United States in facilitating peacemaking, state-building and economic development in the region.
The New York Times reports that at least 14 radio stations in Mogadishu stopped broadcasting music on Tuesday, “heeding an ultimatum by an Islamist insurgent group to stop playing songs or face ’serious consequences.’”
Because of these threats from Hizb Islam, the director of one of the radio stations said:
We have replaced the music of the early morning program with the sound of the rooster, replaced the news music with the sound of the firing bullet and the music of the night program with the sound of running horses…It was really a crush. We haven’t had time to replace all the programs at one time; instead, we have chosen these sounds.
In solidarity with the people of Somalia and music lovers there especially, I thought it would be an appropriate time to highlight Somali rap phenomenon, K’naan. The powerful lyrics from his song entitled “Somalia” help paint the painful, oftentimes grotesque, and heroic stories of his people:
This is where the streets have no name and the drain of sewage
You can see it in the boy how the hate is brewin’
‘Cause when his tummy tucks in, fuck, the pain is fluid
So what difference does it make entertaining, threw it
Some getting high mixing coke and gun powder, sniffin’
She got a gun, but could have been a model or physician
Maps: A novel by Nurrudin Farah begins with a quote by Charles Dickens: “No children for me. Give me grown-ups.” Farah indeed depicts his main character, Askar, as a precocious child beyond his years and the novel tracks his struggles in identity from birth to near adulthood. Misra accompanies Askar, an ethnic Somali born in the Ogaden (eastern Ethiopia) on most of this developmental journey. She is his Ethiopian adopted mother and soul mate – an identity that engenders conflict given that the novel takes place in the late 1970s.
In the summer of 1977, the power of nationalism propelled Somalia and Ethiopia into the Ogaden War. By this point, Ethiopia had lost control of the Ogaden to an insurgency and there was clear evidence that the Somalis were supporting the rebel movements. This assistance, once the war began, climbed to upwards of 75,000 Somali troops supported by tanks. Somalis overwhelmingly supported this invasion of eastern Ethiopia.
Calculating the worth of their two alliances, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Somalia in the fall of 1977 and upped their arms sales to the Ethiopians. Ultimately the Ethiopians pushed the Somali forces to withdraw completely from the Ogaden. In the end, over 25,000 Somalis died in the war, as well as thousands of Ethiopians. The failed campaign fought in the name of Somali nationalism also brought humiliation to the Siad Barre regime as roughly 700,000 refugees from the Ogaden flooded across the border into Somalia – creating a humanitarian crisis.
In the novel, Askar is sent to Mogadishu from a small village in the Ogaden at the height of the war to stay with a well-educated uncle and aunt. Misra stays behind, only to be accused within a year of betraying the village to the Ethiopian army, elements of which carry out a brutal massacre of many of her fellow villagers. She ultimately flees and finds her way to Mogadishu a decade later. Before her sudden arrival, Askar and his new family are informed of the alleged betrayal. And, thus, Askar is forced to manage his loyalties and love to Somalia with his intense connection to the woman that raised him.
Yesterday, I highlighted the recommendations of Somali experts – notably Bronwyn E. Bruton and Ken Menkhaus – for how the United States should contribute to counter-terrorism, conflict resolution, humanitarian relief, economic development and state-building in Somalia. Their pragmatic and cautious approaches argue against knee-jerk American responses to the real or perceived threats posed by al-Qaeda, the al-Shabab, and piracy.
Last spring at SAIS, I put together an extensive backgrounder on Somalia. The paper traces the history of state formation in Somalia from the colonial period to the collapse of the state and its current crises. At the end, I provide a brief analysis of the current challenges to peace-making and state-building placed in their historical context – something missing from much of the current writings on Somalia. I must confess that much of my understanding of Somalia has been influenced by Menkhaus, my former advisor. In reading Bruton great piece in Foreign Affairs, Ialso found that her recommendations closely match the findings that I developed. So if you are interested, enjoy…
Introduction
The five points on the star of the light-blue Somali flag proclaim a nation’s dream deferred. The predominantly nomadic Somalis met the era of nationalism and independence with high hopes. They and observers of the time saw a “well-defined geographic and ethnic unit…as a natural base for a sovereign state.” Ethiopia and the colonial powers, however, had different visions for the boundaries of a Somali state. Three points of the star – Djibouti, the Ogaden (in Ethiopia), and the Northern Frontier District in Kenya – were stripped from the Somalis before the official birth of the Somali nation. The subsequent experiments with democracy and ‘scientific socialism’ attempted to develop a modern state and in some ways rebuild a forcibly contracted national consciousness. These processes ultimately failed and led to the collapse of the state in 1991. What emerged in replace of the state were still uncongealed fragments of a dismembered nation. For external and internal reasons, Somali leaders until this day have not found a means to unite these disparate and usually warring pieces.
Final Analysis
Emerging from a dismembering birth at independence, Somali elites have constantly attempted to breed irredentist nationalism to legitimize their control of the state. The early politics of democracy challenged each government to push a hard line on securing the stripped Somali lands of French Somaliland, the Ethiopian Ogaden, and the Northern Frontier in Kenya; former dictator Siad Barre could not concede the right of self-determination for the Ogaden Somalis in the late 1970s; and most recently the Islamic Court Union (ICU) could not muzzle threats against Ethiopia long enough to consolidate and defend their military and political successes in 2006.
In his remarks, Arman emphasized the need for a “paradigm shift” in policymaking by highlighting the colossal mistakes of recent American policies toward Somalia. While he gave general recommendations for a new blueprint, he failed to outline in a systematic way any real contours for this new approach.
On the other hand, Bruton repeated her call for a policy of “constructive disengagement” from Somalia that she controversially put forward in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (non-subscription, bootleg, link). In this essay, she states that the American policy of attempting to prop up the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against the al-Shabaab militia and other threats is a useless and counterproductive effort:
With no side capable of keeping the peace if it wins the war, the U.S. government, as well as the rest of the international community, should not focus its efforts on backing any one group. It should also forget about grand political projects to create a central government authority, which are likely to be futile.
Instead, she writes:
At some later point, when the anti-U.S. sentiment has subsided, it will indeed be desirable for Washington to try to address the deeper causes of anarchy in Somalia. But it will have to be extremely mindful not to revive past prescriptions, including the idea of finding and supporting national political figures in Somalia…
Given the shortage of viable national leaders, bottom-up governance strategies might appear to be a solution to Somalia’s messy, perpetually shifting decentralized politics. For instance, the experience of the ICU, which brought unparalleled stability to an unruly Mogadishu almost overnight in 2006, is instructive…Such arrangements,although admittedly fragile, have emerged in the northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland. The best of them depend on local, rather than international, resources to deliver economic growth and other concrete benefits to the public and respect relations among clan and religious leaders, business groups, and civil society
This proposal if undertaken would represent a true paradigm shift on how the U.S. approaches the conflicts in Somalia. Rather than treating Somalia as a battleground of moderates and extremists in the Global War on Terror, Bruton would prioritize humanitarian relief, local reconciliation initiatives, and sustainable economic development. These efforts would in time, Bruton states, help marginalize most combatants:
Somali actors are generally responsive to economic incentives. Most combatants are freelancers who have been forced to join militias out of economic need; in fact, they are often stigmatized as bandits for making such a move. In order to give them options other than employment with militias, the United States should promote targeted local development initiatives, such as a decentralized microcredit scheme that would engage both the Somali diaspora worldwide and existing local authorities. So long as these projects steer clear of governance reform, they might encourage the public to pressure local Islamists into distancing themselves from radical anti-Western actors.
This concept of how warlords make decisions in Somalia is not new. Ken Menkhaus (my former advisor at Davidson College) has written extensively on the subject. For years, he has argued that, “State-building and peace-building are…two separate and in some respects mutually antagonistic enterprises. This is because the revival of a state structure is viewed in Somali quarters as a zero-sum game.”
Creating this blog gave me the opportunity to add مخ زي جزمة - "mokh zay gazma" - to the internet archives. A google search demonstrates that no one has transliterated this Egyptian Colloquial Arabic expression into English in the same way that I have. The term literally means "brains like a shoe" and in Egypt it is a derogatory term used to describe someone who is extremely stubborn. The role of intransigence and the dearth of creativity for new solutions should be clear to all those who track developments in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. This blog intends to comment regularly on these politics and the role of an often sadly, stale America foreign policy in supporting peacekmaking, state-building, and economic development in these closely linked volatile regions.
