THERE are a number of reasons why it would be imprudent for Ethiopia’s prime minister Meles Zenawi to bask too contentedly in the glow of his army’s rapid success in neighbouring Somalia. He may find cause, in the short run, for self-congratulation: after all, the military campaign is bound to have distracted attention from the problems he faces at home. And a strategic alliance with the sole superpower presumably also counts as a plus point: as an eager participant in the so-called war on terror, he can count on preferential treatment.

 

However, it may serve him well to ruminate for a moment or two on the fate of another Third World strongman who, not much more than two decades ago, was encouraged by the United States to tackle a growing Islamist threat in his neighbourhood. He was surreptitiously provided with the means of wreaking damage, including satellite surveillance maps, which is one of the means whereby the alliance with Washington has bolstered Addis Ababa’s forces. US warships were never too far from the Strait of Hormuz, just as they have lately been patrolling the east coast of Africa.

 

There are, of course, significant differences between the two scenarios, but it’s worth remembering that Saddam Hussein’s assault against Iran was just as illegal as Zenawi’s foray into Somalia. It is hard to say whether greater military success would have stood Saddam in better stead vis-à-vis the US, but it is not altogether outrageous to suggest that his eventual fate should give Zenawi pause (especially if he has designs on Eritrea or Djibouti).

 

Back in Ethiopia, Zenawi is not on particularly solid ground. For instance, it was reported last October that his government had tried to suppress the report of an official inquiry into the killing of 193 protesters during the May 2005 elections, which are alleged to have been rigged. According to the inquiry’s vice-chairman, “This was a massacre. The demonstrators were unarmed, yet the majority died from shots to the head.”

 

Zenawi has been in power since 1991, when rebel forces overthrew the regime of Haile Mengistu Mariam, around the same time that Somalia’s Mohammed Siad Barre was sent packing. Mengistu was last month found guilty in absentia of genocide after a 12-year trial. Somalia and Ethiopia fought a war in the Siad Barre/Mengistu era, although that time around Ethiopia was not the obvious aggressor, and it fought back with Soviet and Cuban support. The Ogaden region has long been the source of a territorial dispute between the two countries: as in so many other parts of the world, the borders left behind by colonial powers were not entirely logical and, as a consequence, roughly six per cent of Ethiopia’s population consists of Somalis.

 

What is perhaps of greater significance is that Muslims today constitute the largest single religious group in Ethiopia: according to the CIA’s World Factbook, they make up 45 to 50 per cent of the population. This fact potentially adds some substance to Zenawi’s fear of Islamism, although it is far from clear whether extremist variants of the religion exercise any appeal in Ethiopia.

 

The Zenawi government has in the past waged war against Eritrea, and there have been suggestions that the breakaway republic was providing support, including troops, to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) that held sway in Mogadishu and southern Somalia for about six months last year. It was also suspected that the ICU was attracting material support and personnel from parts of the Arab world.

 

An effort has been made to create the impression that Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia – with US encouragement and logistical support, purportedly to prop up a United Nations-approved (albeit essentially powerless) interim government – has served as a decisive blow against militant Islam. The ICU had picked as its chief Hassan Dahir Aweys, whose name appears on US and UN lists of terrorists, and was said to be harbouring three men suspected of involvement in the 1998 bomb blasts at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam. Aweys is earlier believed to have headed Al Itihaad Al Islami, a militant organization with possible Al Qaeda links.

 

Ayman Al Zawahiri’s statement last week calling for a jihad against the “crusader invader” nation of Ethiopia serves to bolster the preferred US-Ethiopian narrative, not least because the initial emergence of the Islamic Courts was reminiscent of the early Taliban phase. But there are alternative narratives, and the most intriguing of the lot was summed up last Friday by The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen in a report from the Somali capital: “In a way, people here said, Mogadishu was liberated by the Islamic Courts movement, which managed to rid the city of the militias and roadblocks that had functioned like a hundred Berlin Walls,” she wrote. “Movement was so restricted that some residents had not seen friends and relatives in years, and children living only minutes from the crashing Indian Ocean had never laid eyes on the turquoise water.” McCrummen quoted one Mogadishu resident as saying he carried a weapon to protect himself when the warlords were in power; he put it away when the ICU took power, but began carrying it again following the ouster of the Islamists.

 

Numerous reports of a similar nature bear testimony to the fact that the semblance of law and order established by the ICU was regarded as a blessing by many Somalis, including those who bristled at the strictures introduced by the Islamists. The restrictions were stupid and unnecessary, but not exactly draconian: Somalis were evidently willing to do without movies, Western music and the narcotic qat leaf, as long as their lives were protected. In isolation, the concept of order often has dark connotations, but in the Somalian context of 15 years of relentless anarchy, it was considered quite an achievement. It is possible that Aweys and his cohorts would have sought to talibanize Somalia to a far greater extent – which would inevitably have produced a disaster in due course. However, the ICU in the beginning evidently represented more than one strand of opinion, and had the interim government extended feelers in the direction of moderate elements in Mogadishu instead of tightening its embrace of Ethiopia, the gesture may well have helped to establish a conciliatory national mood.

 

What Somalia desperately needs is some sort of government of national unity in the run-up to elections scheduled for 2009. It may make sense to bring them forward by at least a year – which is something the Islamists, buoyed by their popularity, were apparently happy to contemplate. What may happen in the interim is far from clear. The worst outcome would be a return to clan-based fiefs effectively governed by the same warlords who terrorised Somalis for a decade and a half. Some of them are members of the transitional administrational, and quite a few joined the farcical US-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, but there are others who have little faith that their interests will be looked after by prime minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi.

 

An attempt by Ghedi to disarm civilians and militias in Mogadishu was abandoned at the weekend, after it became clear that it wasn’t working. There have, meanwhile, been sporadic demonstrations against the presence of Ethiopian troops. Official sources say such protests are being instigated or organized by the Islamists, and fears have been expressed that remnants of the ICU could organize a resistance movement along Afghan and Iraqi lines, offering one more battlefield to the international brigades of aspiring Muslim martyrs. That’s a ghastly prospect: hopefully, the likelihood of such a scenario is exaggerated. The ICU’s rank and file melted into the general population without putting up a fight and the rest of them are besieged near the Kenyan border: most of the 1,000-plus fighters killed by the advancing Ethiopians were reportedly raw teenage recruits plucked from schools by the Islamists.

 

Although the probability of guerilla warfare doesn’t seem particularly high, a peace-keeping force of some sort will be required anyhow. The Ethiopians don’t qualify for the task even on the basis of the UN Security Council resolution pushed through by the US late last year, and at the time of writing only Uganda had volunteered a contingent as part of an African Union (AU) operation. The US has been unbelievably generous: it has offered $10 million towards funding an 8,000-strong AU force, out of a total of $40 million pledged to help restore stability in an impecunious failed state. (Contrast that with the cost of waging war in Iraq, which is expected to cross $500 billion this year.)

 

Zenawi has hinted at withdrawing his troops within weeks, but the AU appears incapable of rapid deployment. The consequence could be a return to the free-for-all that US and UN forces were unable to cope with back in 1993-94. (The US was determined at the time to hunt down Mohammed Farah Aideed: his son Hussein Aideed is now a member of Ghedi’s government. No surprise there, but there is a stranger-than-fiction aspect to this story: according to the BBC’s Peter Biles, the younger Aideed became a warlord after he landed in Somalia in 1993 as a US marine, and decided to modify his profession.)

 

There are thus far no grounds for complacency: the Horn of Africa remains shorn of hope. And there won’t be any for as long as it remains pertinent to ask: why must the region that’s home to the world’s poorest 100 million people devote its meagre resources and depleted energies to an aimless and unending cycle of violence?

 

 

Email: mahir.worldview@gmail.com

 

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