Policy Forum
Speakers
Dr. KEN MENKHAUS, Associate Professor
of Political Science, Davidson College
Mr. JABRIL IBRAHIM ABDULLE, Director, Centre for Research and Dialogue
(Mogadishu)
Chair
Dr. Edward C. Luck, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies at IPI,
Transcript edited by IPI.
Dr. Edward C. Luck: Regarding the question of new hope in the title, one doesn't always think about hope and Somalia in the same sentence, but then again, that seems to be quite characteristic of the UN: hope in any number of cases seems to be quite intransigent. I am quite encouraged that we have a fair cross section of expertise on Somalia in our two speakers. I don't know how many people have great expertise on the subject, but I know these two certainly do. And we had a very useful prelude this morning, a small breakfast meeting for the members of the Security Council to talk about the subject and to inform experts from the council.
I'll introduce our two speakers very briefly. Ken Menkhaus will be our first speaker, and then Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle. Ken is a professor of political science at Davison College. He taught earlier at American University in Cairo. He was with the UN in the Horn on Somalia on two different stints. Among his many, many works are Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, and an article on International Security in 2007 on "Governance Without Government in Somalia," I think a very catchy and apt title.
Jabril has, I think, an even more challenging position than being a college professor, if I might say that. He is the Director of the Center for Research Dialogue in Somalia, the CRD, which must be a fairly challenging position to be in. His center, which is based in Mogadishu, is an independent not-for-profit corporation. I keep thinking, having worked for a lot of nonprofits, what does it mean to be a not-for-profit corporation in Somalia, but he can explain that for us. And it's devoted to promoting the social, economic, and political rebuilding of Somalia. In that role, he's a leading civil society activist.
I discovered this morning, not surprisingly, that they have done this dog and pony show together and worked together as a rather seamless dynamic duo. I did have to mediate before, because they couldn't decide who was going to start first. I guess they have scenario A and scenario B. I don't know if this is scenario A or scenario B, but Ken either won or lost the coin toss, and he's going to receive. He's going to start first, and we're very much looking forward to this. I've asked them to speak maybe ten or twelve minutes each to open it up, and then we have plenty of time for back and forth. And before I forget, let me give an advertisement that tomorrow, same time, same place we have a sort of dual book launch for Mahmoud Mamdani and Francis Deng talking about the future of the African state. I guess in many ways, Somalia is the epitome of the question about the future of the African state, so I think it's a fairly logical sequence. So with that, Ken, if you can begin, and then Jabril. Thank you.
Dr. Ken Menkhaus: Thank you very much. Whenever I'm involved in drawing a large crowd, I usually presume it's free food, but maybe it's the topic itself. And just for the record, it's not a dog and pony show. I think it's camel and goat? Is that how we do it? We have some good news today. I think there are opportunities in Somalia, and that's what we're here to talk about. In order for you to fully appreciate the fact that there's good news, I'd like to start with a reduced Shakespeare company, five minute summary of all the bad news that precedes this so you can fully appreciate where we are today.
Somalia has been a country in a state of complete collapse for nineteen years, and for sixteen years, that was more or less uninterrupted with the exception of the UN intervention in 93-94. In 2006, for a six-month period, an umbrella group of Islamists known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were able to consolidate power over the entire capital of Mogadishu and then most of southern Somalia, and for six months, they governed, and they governed quite effectively. They were popular among Somalis as a result. But this broad alliance of Islamists, which included moderates, including the current president of the current federal transitional government, Sheik Sharif, and hard-liners had a power struggle. The hard-
liners marginalized the moderates, and baited Ethiopia next door into a war. Ethiopia intervened in late December of 2006, ousted the Islamic Courts Union, and established what had been a paper government (the federal transitional government) in power and occupied the capital.
2007 and 2008 were disasters as a result. There was a predictable insurgency that arose against prolonged Ethiopian occupation. That insurgency, a complex insurgency, came to be led by one group, known as the Shabab. This had been a militia under the hard-liners in the ICU. The Shabab took on a direct political role, as well as military role as the head of this insurgency and succeeded in conflating their radical Islamist ideology with a nationalist anti-Ethiopian, anti-foreign occupation ideology that played well among many Somalis who didn't like their Islamist ideology at all, but who saw them as a legitimate expression of national resistance to foreign occupation.
The Transitional Federal Government at the time was widely perceived as a puppet of Ethiopia-that's not entirely fair, but that's how it was seen. It was deeply unpopular in Mogadishu, principally because its security forces were uncontrolled and preyed as paramilitaries on the local population. The result in 2007 and 2008 was a disaster in and around Mogadishu. There was massive fighting, the displacement of 700,000 of the 1.3 million residents of Mogadishu, leaving much of the capital a ghost town, and a total of 1.3 million Somalis displaced in central and southern Somalia. Somalia was rendered the world's worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN. (Currently 3.2 million Somalis are in need of emergency food assistance.) There was a rise of radicalization in the country manifesting itself in multiple ways, including anti-westernism, anti-Americanism, and anti-UN sentiments that were very strong. That was where we stood not that long ago. In late 2008, things were not looking particularly good there.
Since then, we've had several very positive developments, and Jabril will talk about some of the details of these developments in a few minutes. The first is the Ethiopian withdrawal from Somalia in late 2008 to January 2009. It's now complete. That's now diffused a lot of the insurgency. That was their main objective. With the Ethiopian withdrawal, we're seeing a reduction in the level of support for insurgents in Somalia. The second major development was a peace process. We call it the Djibouti process. It is very much a process, a set of talks that produced a power-sharing arrangement between moderates of the Islamist opposition and moderates in the Transitional Federal Government. That culminated in a unity government, a very awkward one with 550 members of parliament. That's a lot of parlimentarians, but that's how they did it. A new president, replacing a hard line president who was very unpopular in much of Somalia, that is Sheik Sharif, the moderate leader of the old Islamic Courts Union. So he has come full circle back into power. And there is a new cabinet.
These two things are really important: a new government that is not a full unity government, but a broad based government, and one that is reaching out to negotiate with groups that are still outside the agreement at this time And again, the Ethiopian withdrawal leaves us with a new political dispensation, a new hope that we can see progress, both with the Transitional Federal Government, and with an end to the fighting.
That is not yet the case. The Shabab and other hard-line Islamist groups, currently control, in varying degrees, most of the territory from the Kenyan border to the outskirts of Mogadishu, up toward the Ethiopian border, so they control much of the countryside in southern Somalia. The new TFG does not. By contrast, it controls very little territory and is very much nascent but promising. Before we get to the details of this current political dispensation from Jabril, I wanted to flag a couple of broad policy issues that I know a group that is either working directly with UN or indirectly with the UN is probably going to want us to discuss, and this is really just to flag these issues, and we can follow them up later with Q&A.
These are the policy issues that I think are going to command our attention in Somalia in the next year or so. The first is humanitarian. Make no mistake. While there has been some political progress, the humanitarian crisis in Somalia is still enormous and severe. It is the perfect storm. We've got 3.2 million people, that's half of the population in southern and central Somalia, in need of emergency food at a time when food prices have gone up, when insecurity has blocked commercial flows, and when food aid is largely unable to get to populations in need because of very high levels of security. Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian actors; a third of all humanitarian casualties in 2008 occurred in Somalia. At the same time, purchasing power is declining because of hyperinflation, which has hurt the poor disproportionately. And because of a decline in remittances, evidence is starting to trickle in that there are 10-20 percent declines in remittances from the large Somali diaspora back home because of the global economic crisis. So we are going to be seized with this, and the key issue is going to be humanitarian access and monitoring of food that is getting in. Both of those are sore subjects right now.
There are other issues as well, both in terms of humanitarian aid agencies either working through a weak Transitional Federal Government or around it. Who do you work with at the local level? Do you work with the Shabab when it is in control of areas? The answer, for some aid agencies, has been yes, we work with whoever we find. Those are all big humanitarian questions that are not going to go away.
The second has to do with the insurgency itself. It is fragmented. It is weaker today because it no longer has things to fight against. Now it has to explain to the Somali people what it stands for, and what it stands for is not particularly attractive to most Somalis, so it has encountered resistance, communal clan resistance. In Somalia, when the Ethiopians withdrew, that did not create the strategic vacuum that we feared would be filled by the jihadists. Instead they have not made inroads. Many of us think that late 2008 may have been the high water mark for Shabab and affiliated hard line Islamist groups in the country. Recently, Osama bin Laden issued an eleven-minute video exclusively devoted to Somalia. In that, he called on the Somali people to overthrow the government of Sheik Sharif, because he was colluding with the West and with Ethiopia and was compromising, doing all these terrible things. I think this was very much a reflection of the weakness of the movement in Somalia, and a real misstep on the part of al-Qaeda.
The international community, including the UN, and most of its member states now are standing on the right side of history in Somalia, promoting state building and reconciliation, compromise, co-existence in the region, all the things that are music to the ears of the vast majority of Somalis who are weary of the war, weary of state collapse, and not inclined to hear foreigners tell them that they need to kill fellow Somalis in pursuit of a global agenda about which, they have little interest.
Finally, a point about statebuilding. Another major pillar of international policy in the coming year will be devoted toward the question of how do we assist this fledgling and promising Transitional Federal Government in expanding both the size of its constituency, and make it a broader unity government, and make it more effective. And here there are many things we could discuss. Let me just flag a couple.
First, it's important to calibrate assistance so that we are not making mistakes that we've made in the past. We have to be very careful about how much money we throw at a government's security sector, for instance, in the absence of an ability to be accountable for how those security forces behave. That was a major problem with the old TFG. There are ways that we can help this government. It does need assistance, but we also need to make sure that it's not wholly dependent on foreigners, or there is a real legitimacy crisis that the Transitional Federal Government will face, vis-à-vis its own people.
Finally, we need to remind ourselves, and the government, that it is a transitional government, and that the focus, much of the focus of our assistance, needs to be on promoting a political transition. There are lots of reasons why this is a good idea. First and foremost, the political transition isn't about who rules, which is a zero-sum game, but it's about what are the rules of the game that will determine who rules. And that attracts pretty much all Somalis to the political table. It is a question about which everyone has a strong interest in Somalia, and needs to be. It's also a place where we have expertise that we can bring to bear that the Somalis really need. I'm going to stop there, even though there are many, many things that we can talk about. I hope they come up in Q&A. I turn over to Jabril.