Dilemmas of the Horn

Washington wanted to keep Somalia from turning into another Afghanistan. Now it's an African Iraq.
Scott Johnson
NEWSWEEK


The jihadist leads a double life. By day he's a government functionary in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Standing in the shade of a crumbling, Mussolini-era balcony, a phone headset clipped to his ear, he affects a casual, corporate air. But then he pulls his blue oxford shirt aside to reveal a fresh bullet scar. He spies on his co-workers, he admits, and feeds information about them to the Islamist rebels who are laying siege to Mogadishu. "God willing, we'll take over the country soon," he tells a NEWSWEEK reporter, one of the few Western journalists who have ventured into Somalia in months. The State Department recently added al-Shabaab (meaning "youth") to its list of terrorist organizations, making the group a target for attacks by U.S. forces operating in the Horn of Africa. The jihadist is unconcerned. "We're like a centipede," he says. "You cut off one of our legs, we just keep going."

Unfortunately, he's probably right. In late 2006 the United States backed Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia, designed to oust the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist coalition that had taken over much of the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. (Al-Shabaab was the Courts' military wing.) Washington accused the Islamists of harboring Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Courts had also brought more stability than Somalia had enjoyed in years. Somalis could walk the streets and do business again, and many welcomed the Islamists just as war-weary Afghans hailed the Taliban in the 1990s.

Now, by trying to prevent another terrorist haven like Afghanistan from developing, America may have helped create another Iraq, this one in the volatile Horn of Africa. "Every year this fighting continues, the situation worsens," says Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Abdul Salaam of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government. The Islamists' eviction in 2006 left a power vacuum that the U.N.-backed government still hasn't managed to fill. Ethiopian troops are loathed as occupiers and rarely leave their heavily fortified bases. And al-Shabaab has broken off from the Courts to wage a brutal and effective insurgency. The guerrillas have overrun at least eight Somali towns this year and control parts of the capital. Where once they brought order to Somalia, they now gleefully spread chaos.

Mogadishu looks like Baghdad during its darker days. Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers are hunkered down behind sandbags, concrete barriers and heavy artillery. Whenever they go out on patrol, their heavily armored convoys are blasted by roadside bombs, rockets and small arms fire. In recent weeks, al-Shabaab has stepped up a suicide-bombing campaign; an attack last week targeted a compound housing African Union peacekeepers, wounding nine and killing one. Leaflets warning of death to government collaborators likewise recall Iraq.

For ordinary Somalis, violence is ever-present and random. Mogadishu is cut up into fiefdoms more than neighborhoods, divided by checkpoints and patrolled by militias that claim varying degrees of loyalty to the government. Death can come from many quarters. Two weeks ago, when insurgents attacked the presidential palace with rockets, Ethiopian troops responded with a mortar volley into the crowded Bakara market. Seventeen people were killed and nearly 50 others were injured. Shrapnel struck shopkeeper Abdul Rashid, 25. "In your country, do you throw mortars at your own people?" he asked from his hospital bed, wincing from a clear plastic tube inserted into his ribcage. Some 600,000 have fled the country in the past year, and 750,000 are now trapped in squalid camps for the internally displaced.

Whereas in Baghdad the surge is beginning to have an effect, the violence in Somalia is increasingly random and getting worse. Noor Muktar, 35, was living in Mogadishu's sports stadium with other refugees when a fire fight broke out two months ago. She fled with her daughters—"I couldn't even get our bedding," she says—and now lives on the outskirts of town in a teetering shelter of twigs and plastic. Aid workers are being driven out of the country. Three staff members from Doctors Without Borders were killed earlier this year by a roadside bomb. As of last week two humanitarian contractors, a Brit and a Kenyan, remained hostage after being taken at gunpoint on April 1. Foreign U.N. officials are prohibited from overnighting in Mogadishu. Aid agencies stopped delivering bulk food shipments in many areas of the capital after a Somali government official told radio listeners to seize food from convoys by force. A recent U.N. report declared Somalia's humanitarian crisis the worst in Africa.

The government nominally in power, fractious to begin with, is more fragile than ever. More than 60 government employees have resigned in the past year after receiving death threats—many of them broadcast live on Mogadishu's privately owned Radio Simba. An estimated 40 senior officials and intellectuals have been assassinated by insurgents in the past year and a half. A group of Shabaab fighters recently called up Mogadishu Mayor Mohammed Deerhe on his cell phone and threatened to kill him, too. (They recorded the exchange: "I'm sure you're not a Muslim," the caller taunts the mayor. "You're just talking, it's not in your heart." Deerhe shouts back: "F––– your mother!")

With a budget of less than $10 million, the government is essentially bankrupt. Somali troops haven't been paid in eight months. One soldier in Mogadishu, a gaunt, khat-chewing sergeant wearing camouflage and a pair of ragged sandals, says government forces are near collapse. "The insurgents right now are very strong," he says. "If the Ethiopians were not here with us, the insurgents would destroy us quicker." The soldier, asking not to be named for fear of retribution, says he no longer receives a salary—only pocket money when a fight is brewing.

Like America since the invasion of Iraq, Ethiopia is rethinking the wisdom of its incursion. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi spoke to NEWSWEEK last week about the possibility of a unilateral pullout. "It's not an option we will take lightly," he said. "But it is an option." Critics ask whether Washington was too blinded by its hunt for terrorists to foresee the likely pitfalls in Somalia. U.S. intelligence agencies believe fewer than a dozen high-value Qaeda targets are holed up there, including Haroun Fazul, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Issa Osman Issa—the men accused of helping to carry out the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Since the invasion, at least one target, Abu Talha al-Sudani, has been killed in a missile strike. Others have been driven into hiding or out of the country, at least temporarily. But other strikes have misfired: on March 4, the United States targeted an Islamist militia leader named Hassan al-Turki. Six people were reported killed and 10 others injured, but the object of the attack was in another village near Kenya at the time. "In the short term [the strategy] may work for us," says Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. "But in the long term it's sowing seeds of radicalism and anti-Americanism that we're going to deal with for generations to come."

Shabaab fighters say being targeted by America only helps their cause. "What we are sure about is that adding us to the [terrorist] list will bring many young people to us," the group's spokesman, Sheik Mukhtar Robow, said in a rare phone interview. "Al Qaeda became more powerful after it was added to the list. We hope that it will be the same with us." Robow claims that the guerrillas "had no official links with Al Qaeda before," but that now "we're looking to have an association with them."

That's probably just braggadocio. But there's no question that the insurgents are growing more radical. The Islamic Courts Union included several civilian leaders who might be described as moderates: the senior leadership, including a figure named Sheik Sharif, met with U.S. officials in Nairobi last week and disavowed any connection with al-Shabaab. They have advocated dialogue and emphasized that their fight is with the Ethiopian invading force, not all "infidels." Some of them are horrified by the tactics of their onetime allies in al-Shabaab. In towns that they've conquered the insurgents have opened the jails and killed local officials before melting away again. In Mogadishu, they've begun to target more moderate Islamic leaders. Sheik Mohammed Adham, a 48-year-old madrassa teacher, says the radicals assassinated one of his colleagues and closest friends last month. "These extremists, they're mad," he says, shaking. "I try to explain to the kids what good Islam is, but when they go home they hear someone has been killed, or shot, they see the bodies and they don't understand the value of life. I tell them good things and they go out and do bad things."

Abdul Rahim Ali Moudi, a spokesman for the civilian wing of the Courts, says Washington should have worked with their more moderate leaders earlier rather than tacitly greenlighting the Ethiopian invasion. "It would have been better if the Americans had listened to the Islamic Courts. But the problem is America hears only with one ear," he says. That may be starting to change. Somalia's current prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, has opened the door to talks with "any Somali," regardless of background. (He's also blasted his own security forces as "looters" preying upon the populace.) The United Nations has appointed a new, optimistic special representative for Somalia who is aggressively working to bring both sides to the same table. "We have to have a solution," says Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah. "I'm going to organize it in the next few weeks or days." Last week Ould-Abdallah met in Nairobi with representatives of the Courts' moderate wing.

The State Department is backing such efforts, and embassy officials in Nairobi met with Courts moderates last week. "We remain committed to resolving the ongoing political and humanitarian crises in Somalia," says Greg Garland, a State Department spokesman. There's one problem: the jihadists may have their own plans.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/131836

Kenya's Sad State of Affairs

Many years ago, when I was first living in Kenya, back when Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was barely alive but still propped up in the office of the presidency -- (He was literally propped up, sort of like Weekend at Bernies. They would drag him from place to place and have him photographed. My favorite ever headline in Kenya's Daily Nation was "Mzee Looks at Birds.") -- I met with a group of Kikuyu students at the University of Nairobi. These were, presumably, Kenya's best and brightest, a generation beyond the tribal prejudices that had torn their parents generation apart. This group of young Kikuyus, preparing for the day when Kenyatta, the Kikuyu president would die (it was actually illegal to speculate that Mzee might die)told me that they had been hoarding weapons, preparing for the war that was sure to come when the old man was gone. Kenyatta died shortly thereafter, and despite some real tensions, the serious violence never came.

It is now 30 years later. Yet another generation has adopted the destructive tribalism of the past. And though, I don't foresee Kenya becoming another Rwanda, it certainly has the potential to get much worse than it is now.

Yes, it is tribalism. But it is not, as some news reports have stated, age-old tribal antagonism. It is freshly minted tribal antagonism, the result of the fact that in Kenya, as in much of Africa, control of the government means control of the country's wealth and resources. It is the government, not the people nor the farmers nor the business community that control resources. So the stakes involved in running the government are much higher than they should be.

Part of the problem is the result of foreign aid. (It is the very definition of a resource that comes from the top down.) Aid causes corruption by empowering bureaucrats, not workers and farmers. Governments dole out the resources to their supporters in order to maintain a power base. In turn, their supporters are willing to kill an pillage on behalf of their government sponsors. Welcome to Africa.

Here's what you can do in the short term. Buy only Fair Trade Coffee. Especially if it's Kenyan coffee. Right now most Kenyan coffee is making the government's political cronies rich while keep farmers working just above a subsistence level. Starve the patronage system, and you'll be feeding the people.

On Strike!

I know that I've done a crappy job maintaining this web site. The reality is that most of the issues that it deals with are from my past life as correspondent in Africa, specifically Somalia. I put NomadNet up in 1993, and programmed the HTML using MS Word. So I've kept it running largely because NomadNet is in fact one of the oldest continually operating sites on the web. It still gets several hundred hits a day, mostly people searching for humanitarian information on Google. And every once in a while I get a burst of energy and a little free time and make an honest effort to update things and clean up some of the pages and repair damaged links.

So what am I doing now? I'm a screenwriter, which means I'm on strike! If the strike goes on long enough I'll have enough free time to really fix up this site, but in the short term I've a few things to do, like walk the picket lines.

In the meantime, if you're wondering what the writers' strike is all about, watch this:

The West also fails Muslim women, freedom

By Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie


As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.

The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Hirsi Ali first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know. Once there, in hiding from her family, she began working as a cleaning lady. But this cleaning lady spoke Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English and was quickly learning Dutch, so she soon found work as a translator for other Somali refugees, many of whom, like herself, were casualties of Islam. These women had been abused, mutilated, denied medical care and proper educations and forced into lives of sexual subjection and compulsory childbearing.

After attending the University of Leiden, where she studied political science and philosophy, Hirsi Ali began speaking publicly about the repression of women under Islam, and shortly thereafter she started receiving death threats from local Muslims. Her security situation eventually became so dire that she moved to the United States in 2002. However, she was soon contacted by Gerrit Zalm, then deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who urged her to run for the Dutch parliament. When Hirsi Ali voiced her security concerns, Zalm assured her that she would be given diplomatic protection wherever and whenever she needed it. She returned to the Netherlands with this assurance, won a seat in parliament and became a tireless advocate for women, for civil society and for reason.

The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film "Submission," which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The uproar from the Muslim community confirmed both the necessity of Hirsi Ali's work and the reasonableness of her fears. Van Gogh, having declined bodyguards of his own, was soon gunned down and nearly decapitated on an Amsterdam street, and a letter threatening Hirsi Ali was staked to his chest with a butcher knife.

Hirsi Ali was immediately forced into hiding and moved from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day, for months. Eventually, her security concerns drove her from the Netherlands altogether. She returned to the U.S., and the Dutch government has been paying for her protection here -- that is, until it suddenly announced last week that it would no longer protect her outside the Netherlands, thereby advertising her vulnerability to the world.

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international best-seller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."

The Dutch parliament will be debating Hirsi Ali's case this week. As it stands, the government's decision to protect her only within the borders of the Netherlands is genuinely perverse. While the Dutch have complained about the cost of protecting Hirsi Ali in the United States, it is actually far more expensive for them to protect her in the Netherlands, as the risk to her is greatest there.

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament, and to become the world's most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Gerrit Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands, while refusing to grant her even a week's protection outside the country during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

The Dutch government should recognize a scandal in the making and rediscover its obligation to provide Hirsi Ali with the protection she was promised.

There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.

More U.S. Military for Africa

US Opens Africa Command HQ in Germany


Oct 1st, 2007 | BERLIN -- The U.S military's contentious new command covering Africa began operating on Monday from a base in Germany, and will be gradually brought to full capacity over the next year, a military spokesman said.

But several African leaders have expressed doubt about the command's necessity, saying they want to avoid foreign troops on their soil.

The U.S. Africa Command headquarters, known as Africom, is being created to help African security forces tackle regional crises and terrorist threats — a nod to the continent's increasing strategic importance.

The command begins with a staff of 120 under Gen. William E. "Kip" Ward and will increase to about 800 over the next year, said Air Force Maj. John Dorrian, a spokesman for U.S. European Command in Stuttgart.

It will initially operate from the U.S. Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, but diplomatic efforts are still under way to find a permanent location in Africa, Dorrian said.

"No final decisions have been made about the final location of the headquarters," he said.

Liberia is the only country to publicly offer to host the command, though U.S. officials say other nations have made private offers.

Still, the plans have met with sharp resistance from many other African nations, most recently Nigeria, which angled to block the headquarters from being established in the Gulf of Guinea region.

"The Africom initiative has raised a lot of interest and attracted a lot of attention because ... Africa has to avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil," South African Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said in August.

Last month, however, senior Pentagon official Ryan Henry denied the new command represented a "militarization" of U.S. relations with Africa. "This represents no change in policy," Henry insisted. "There are a lot of myths and rumors out there."

Under the U.S. military's system of regional headquarters, responsibility for Africa has been split between the Pacific Command, Central Command, and European Command.

Over the next year programs currently overseen by those commands — like joint training exercises and humanitarian operations — will be taken over by Africom, Dorrian said.

The U.S. plan foresees a small headquarters, and five regional teams spread around the continent. The Pentagon has emphasized it is not building new bases.

"Plans call for the footprint of U.S. forces to be small," Dorrian said.

Africom is a so-called "unified combatant command" that will be made up of all branches of the military, as well as civilians from not only the Defense and State Departments, but also the Agriculture, Treasury and Commerce Departments, as well as USAID.

Why We Don't Hear About the Conflict in the Ogaden

In recent months, reports have begun to spill out of Ethiopia detailing human rights abuses and misuse of food aid in its eastern Ogaden region. Human Rights Watch issued a report urging Ethiopia to stop "abuses [that] violate the laws of war."

The U.S. government considers Ethiopia an important ally in the war on terror, since it shares borders with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, the latter invaded by Ethiopia this past Christmas with Washington's approval. Ethiopia has not been able to extricate itself from Somalia, and the military has been accused of possible war crimes there. Mogadishu even has a new nickname: "Baghdad on the Sea."

Read the article in Slate.

Old war not working? Start a new one!