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MOGADISHU: In Mogadishu, motorists drive on the right, left or centre: It’s up to them. Bereft of police, victims pursue community justice against rapists and murderers.
Offshore, foreign ships fish or dump toxic waste at will, their only concern to dodge the guns of Somali pirates. The Somali capital’s airport and sea port have been shut since 1995.
Tax goes only to warlords, who buy weapons in defiance of an arms embargo even as they talk peace and have their pick of 240 bush airstrips to trade an array of contraband and hard drugs.
Mediators toiling to reverse Somalia’s long collapse must confront a 12-year-old puzzle: the failure of the Horn of Africa country to cobble together even a figment of central authority.
If warlords in Afghanistan or Democratic Republic of Congo can agree a semblance of government — and win rich pickings in donor funds in return — why not their Somali counterparts?
The stakes are high, and not just for Somalis. The country is now cited by US officials as an ideal transit point for “terrorists” wishing to attack Western targets in east Africa.
The reasons are many: divisive clan rivalries, the irresponsibility of power-crazed faction leaders, fear of a revived predatory state, destabilization by neighbouring countries and ill-informed, incompetent external diplomacy.
These realities, however, are common to many of the world’s most troubled countries.
QUARRELLING ELITE: “Somalia’s inability to preserve even a minimum fig leaf of central administration over 12 years puts it in a class by itself among the world’s failed states,” wrote Ken Menkhaus, a US scholar on Somalia.
“The fact that Somalia’s quarrelling elite has not been able to make such a cynical bargain among themselves is itself a puzzle. Somalia is, in an odd way, a failure among failed states.”
The country disintegrated into anarchy after former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991 as clans pressured by famine and political turmoil launched battles for territory.
The country now comprises two self-declared enclaves in the north and a patchwork of quarrelling clan fiefdoms in the south.
These days Somalia watchers explore other reasons why the nation of up to 10 million remains in the grip of lawlessness.
Key businessmen and politicians, they say, have learned to thrive in such conditions. And crucially, each has the ability by himself, or in alliance with just one or two other “spoilers”, to sabotage promising peace initiatives.
“Unless you can make peace more profitable, and war more risky, chances are things will continue the way they have been,” said Somalia expert Andre Le Sage.
In the early 1990s, warlords were the main players, making fortunes from the diversion of foreign aid.
But as aid to the violent south has diminished, those opportunities have vanished. Also, financial gains from the capture of land in inter-clan conflict were mostly exhausted long ago.
In recent years a new breed of warlord-businessmen has emerged with the acumen to run quasi-legitimate ventures.
These days, to earn money, it is usually not enough for the original warlords to apply the skills they know — piracy, kidnapping and extortion. They must also pursue tie-ups with the new business elite, whose security tend to include better gunmen and weaponry than the warlords’ own private armies.—Reuters
