SOMALIAN NIGHTMARE

INTRODUCTION:
In a military campaign lasting barely a week, Somalia’s previous transition govt, together with Ethiopian armed forces routed the Islamic militias that has held sway over the capital Mogadishu and much of the south of the country since June 2006. The victors with the help of the American naval forces are now tracking down remaining al-Qaeda operatives who were thought to be fighting with the Islamists.
Somalia has frequently been held out as an example of a failed state. For much of its post-colonial history, it has been embroiled in external wars and internecine conflicts. A tangled skein of strife lay behind the inexorable descent into chaos. After a decade and a half of anarchy, the capital, Mogadishu and much of the southern part of the country seemed to have recovered a semblance of peace under an extraordinary system of governance known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) in early 2006.
The United States quietly poured millions of dollars of weapons and sent military advisers into Ethiopia to prepare it for driving Islamic militants out of Somalia, the US media reported. By encouraging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, the US has opened a new front in the war on terrorism.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since clan-based warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, sinking the Horn of Africa nation of 7 million people into chaos. At least 13 attempts at government have failed since then. The current government was established in 2004 with UN backing.

ETHOPIAN INVASION OF MOGADISHU:
Ethiopia owned up to its large scale military intervention on December 24 last year though its units were operating on the international border and inside Somalia from July onwards. There were reports of skirmishes building up into proper battles all through the summer. It is not known for certain when the United States’ Special Forces got into the act but they played an important role in the final full-blooded invasion by the Ethiopian army.
Ethiopia has an army with Soviet T-55, T-62 and T-72 tanks and an air force flying MiG-21, MiG 27, a small number of Su-27 aircraft and Soviet era gunship helicopters. The opposing force had no armoured capability and no air force. The propaganda about a larger contingent from Eritrea supporting the so-called “Islamists” turned out to be false. The Islamists took heavy casualties but the bulk of them simply melted away. In an exclusive interview to Al Jazeera TV the president of Eritrea has now spoken of a quagmire for the Ethiopian troops unless they withdraw quickly and thus endorsed the apprehensions of many detached observers that Somalia may lapse into an Iraqi-style insurgency.

US-ETHIPIA NEXUS:
According to the reports, Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in US military aid since late 2002. That's more than any country in the region except Djibouti, where the US maintains a military base.

AMERICAN ATTACKS:
In contravention of international law and in full pursuance of the controversial Bush doctrine of pre-emption, the US has conducted air strikes on several locations in Somalia. The Americans say they are targeting Al Qaeda operators in the area, including those they hold responsible for bombing the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. As yet, no definite casualty figure is available, but it is believed that scores of people, including civilians, have died in the US attacks. The latter have been roundly condemned by the European Union while the new UN chief Ban Ki-moon has expressed his concern over the situation, fearing that the air strikes could lead to wider US-militants confrontation in the area.

WAR ON TERRORISM:
Ethiopia intervened militarily in Somalia in the 1990s to help defeat the Islamist “Al-itihaad al-Islami” and then, at the turn of the century, fought a bitter war of attrition with Eritrea. It has now intervened in the name of the war on terrorism. The ostensible destruction of the Union of Islamic Courts may, however, provide another fertile ground for Al Qaeda, whatever protean form it may have in Africa.


STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF SOMALIA:
What was clearly under-estimated by all concerned was the strategic salience of a long coastline, part Indian Ocean and part Gulf of Aden, to the protagonists of the Cold War. In the backlash of the Ogaden conflict, the Somali ideology, not very different from the mainstream Arab mix of nationalism and socialism, fragmented into clan-based internal feuds. The military regime of Siad Barre which had championed this particular blend was made to carry the cross of the Ogaden defeat and ousted.


Somalia also has the longest coastline in Africa, one with tremendous military value.

Aware of how sensitive and militarily vital the Horn of Africa is to realise its dream of global domination, the US already occupies a huge military base in next-door Djibouti; that base is now being further expanded to accommodate larger ships and more advanced aircraft.

US ULTERIOR MOTIVES:
Like Darfur and the rest of Sudan, Somalia too sits over lucrative and untapped deposits of oil, gas and uranium. That’s also a focus of interest for the US, though under the incumbent warmongers ruling the roost in Washington, military option takes the front seat in any situation where action may be required.

POWER RIVALRY:
Conflict in the region has either been a strategic tussle involving Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea that was fuelled by great power rivalry during the East-West Cold War or a perpetual contest for power and economic gains amongst Somali clans of a long lineage. Religion has not been the primary factor.

FUTURE PROSPECTS & SUGGESTIONS:
1) POLITICAL SOLUTION: Before the situation become any worse and a humanitarian crisis develops, a political solution needs to be worked out. This should include negotiations with the more moderate Islamists. UIC leaders had managed to undermine clan politics and establish the rule of law in many areas. After years of lawlessness, many citizens had welcomed their stabilising presence. Indeed, the international community recognises that there can be no durable political solution in Somalia without the inclusion of the Islamists. This has become even more necessary as religious hardliners, including those belonging to Al Qaeda, call for a jihad in Somalia. A willingness to include moderate Islamists in talks focusing on the country’s future political dispensation would send positive signals that the government is genuine in its desire to bring peace to the country.
2) Not for the first time and certainly not the last, the silence and helplessness of the so-called Muslim Ummah, and its somnolent collective organ, the OIC, is jarring, to say the least. Its silence is worse than the silence of the lambs. What would it take to jog the Muslim world into action is the conundrum of our age.
3) 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.
4) The Ethiopian invasion is illegal, unjustified and deeply, deeply stupid, but it has Washington’s strong support.
5) The Somalis, poor, destitute and forsaken by the world, weren’t posing any danger to anyone, least of all to the mightiest military juggernaut of our age. And yet they were conspired against and, in the end, hounded out of the patch of earth where they only wished to fashion their lives according to their own vision and sense of Islam. It’s not only that the Somalis have been denied the freedom to live under leaders of their choice — just as the Palestinians are being punished and pulverised for electing Hamas —by the self-anointed champions of democracy in the world.

AGAINST the mounting death toll and bloodbath in Lebanon, American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has attempted to justify her country’s explicit complicity in the Israeli crimes against humanity. She has attributed the mayhem to the birth-pangs of a new Middle East.
“The Conflict was bloodier than anyone anticipated, but it just might set the stage for a new order in the Middle East.”

AMERICAN ULTERIOR MOTIVES:
Those US strategic goals in the Middle East are:
1) The reconfiguration of the political map of the region to prevent the possibility of any challenge to US supremacy in the Middle East,
2) The tightening of its stranglehold on the oil and gas resources of the Middle East,
3) The strengthening of the security of Israel as a US outpost in the region. The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 were meant to serve these strategic goals more than anything else.
4) By now the US has pliant states almost everywhere in the Middle East, with the exception of Syria and Iran which have not yet fallen in line with US demands relating to Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. This is the real reason for US hostility towards these two states. Similarly, non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah, which are resisting Israeli acts of aggression thus deviating from the path dictated by Washington, are like thorns in Washington’s eyes.

PAX AMERICANA:
The mere fact that Bush and his associates are getting geared up for a brand new Middle East, after serious reverses in their abortive flirtation with democracy is indicative that democracy will not have a place of pride in the latest new Middle East; at best, it would occupy a corner on the back shelf. And Israel would be the vassal in it keeping the regional states in its and Washington’s thrall.
The new ME of American-Israeli ‘vision’ has no room in it for a genuine democracy, such as the one Hamas is entitled to practise on the basis of its overwhelming popular mandate from the Palestinian people; the US would rather have a corrupt and pliable regime run by a discredited PLO in its place.
“We are working very hard for a new Middle East that is a free democratic Middle East where people can realise a better way of life, a more prosperous, better educated way of life … but there’s no question of redrawing the maps,”

__________________
Do or Do Not, there is no try