Somalia: the new target?

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.

Instead of using their success in restoring civic order and a modicum of economic activity as a building bloc for a more representative government of national reconciliation and unity, an international effort to unravel the UIC began almost immediately after the militia of the UIC took control of the capital.

Where nothing else, including initiatives by the United Nations and the World Bank, had worked, the Islamic Courts tapped into the residual respect in a Muslim society for Shariat and started reviving the concept of a law-based society. The UIC represented a mélange of the interpretation of Islamic laws but one could discern a strong moderating influence of the dominant Sufi strain in Somali Islam.

Notwithstanding this clear trend, the spectre of another Taliban-style Salfi regime that would harbour a new Al Qaeda base was raised and plans for another pre-emptive war were drawn up. Once again the collective wisdom of the UN, the European Union, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the Islamic Conference accumulated over two decades or more of the crisis in the Horn of Africa was relegated to a lower order of international consideration.

There should have been a concerted international effort for a political settlement basically between the Union of Islamic Courts and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) created in Kenya in 2004. Hopes raised by the TFG had come to nothing and its failure had made the Islamic Courts fill the vacuum. Instead, a surgical solution was devised under which small forces loyal to a number of warlords comprising the defeated TFG would be supported by a vastly superior Ethiopian army to overwhelm the entire region being administered by the Islamic Courts.

It is interesting to note that the TFG warlords include Hussein Mohammad Farrah, the son of late General Farrah Aideed who tormented the UN and the United States in the mid-1990s. The son, however, became an American citizen and may well aspire to playing a role similar to some Iraqi expatriates after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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.

What these observers, who are drawn from diverse regions and religions, have in common is their better knowledge that 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.

Writing for a foreign newspaper the other day, I had argued that the internal conflict in Somalia represented a failure of religion to superimpose once again a collective entity on strife-prone tribes and clans. The internal strife is not because of religion but despite it as it no longer appears to be able to hold Muslims together in Somalia or elsewhere.

In Somalia the people have homogeneity of language and faith and yet clan loyalties and ambitions override it. The emergence of the Islamic Courts was considered enough of a reason to apply the utterly indiscriminate criteria of the war on

terrorism. It is a war that deliberately refuses to focus on the specificity of causes underlying regional tensions and conflicts.

In retrospect, it is not difficult to see that it exploits them and the individual histories of multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian Muslim lands, which have the same diversity as states anywhere else in the world, to rip them apart. One does not need a prophetic vision to see that if it is not checked, the war on terrorism will break more and more of Islamic states into mini-states adrift in a world which otherwise puts a great premium on political and economic unions as efficient components of a globalised world.

For almost two decades after independence, Somalia did have a national project. It was a multiparty democracy for a decade when nation-building was occasionally nurtured by dreams of a greater Somalia. The leitmotif of this drive was the fact that the Ogaden region incorporated into Ethiopia by colonial powers was largely Somali. Mogadishu believed that its inhabitants yearned for a reunion with Somalia, a perception that led it into a disastrous war with Ethiopia.

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.

Since then, Ethiopia has proactively interfered to ensure that Somalia does not become a threat again. The dominant clans in the northwest of the country fought a protracted war with Mogadishu and by 1991 had established the autonomous state of “Somaliland”. Ethiopia’s own fortunes have fluctuated wildly and it has failed to prevent the breakaway of Eritrea. After this loss which meant denial of a vital stretch of the coastline, it has come to have a greater stake in friendly relations with Somaliland.

In the present war, the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has justified the invasion as a necessary attempt to ward off a serious threat from Somalia to his own country and promised that his army would withdraw soon from the Somali territory occupied by it. He has, avowedly, not been too happy with the direct aerial strikes made by the United States in the concluding phase of the military campaign. This would be an acknowledgement of widely shared fears that the “Islamists” would regroup and fight a guerilla war which would at once be nationalistic and religious.

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.

In the last few weeks, I have re-read several reports on Somalia emanating from the UN, the World Bank, Europe, the Organisation of African Unity, the Islamic world and non-governmental bodies. There is a broad agreement on the historical causes of the crisis and especially on the need to reconcile clan allegiances with the authority of a modern state. Many of them also concede that the transitional government (TFG) fostered by the international community was much too parochial and fractious to address this task of national reconciliation.

Under its rule, this task remained secondary to acquisition by force of arable riverine land and real estate in the towns by the constituent warlords.. There is need for the international community to help Somalia work out constitutional arrangements that accommodate optimally the de facto independence of Somaliland and Puntland.

None of the main studies of the conflict in Somalia show the same obsessive preoccupation with Al Qaeda as does the current US administration. What comes through instead is that failure to reconstitute a viable and secure Somali state may create opportunities for terrorists and thus the American prognostications may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The answer to that lies in a very early substitution of the Ethiopian occupation forces by an international force. Given the peculiar circumstances of the country, it will probably have to be an African force but the immensity of the task of reconstructing the country would warrant that all external help is placed under a high powered UN mission.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

Endless trouble in ‘paradise’

THERE were a couple of episodes lately that should have jolted the cabinet out of its lethargy and given its members a rude awakening. The first was the full throated call for self-rule in Gilgit and Baltistan. And the second was Mr Altaf Hussain’s highly significant epistle over the telephone to his followers.

The call made a pointed reference to certain maps which were being circulated among opinion moulders in the country which showed Balochistan and the North-West Frontier having seceded from Pakistan. He urged the people of Pakistan to rise up against the conspiracy to Balkanise the country.

This map which shows redefined borders of Pakistan is nothing new. In 2006 a map had been published in an American journal which further fragmented the country and also showed the loss of the Northern Areas and Sindh.

The US government categorically denied having had any hand in this and the Pakistan government appeared to be pacified. But even prior to the surfacing of this map rumours had been rife that a plan did exist to break up the country. After all, so the argument goes, if it can happen to Yugoslavia and is about to happen to Iraq, why should Pakistan be any different? One sincerely hopes that these are only rumours, but the disgruntlement in the smaller provinces is very real and a serious cause for worry.

One has to only glance at the newspapers to realise that there is total disillusionment and rancour in Balochistan, the interior of Sindh, pockets in the North-West Frontier Province and the Northern Areas, which make all government claims of progress and egalitarianism hollow and empty.

Occasional rumbles of disgruntlement from certain parts of the frozen north have been continuing for the last 30 years and have now coalesced into a forceful demand to be heard, adding a new dimension to the gallimaufry of problems faced by the establishment.

Recently the political spotlight fell rather heavily on Baltistan which is like a picture postcard resort, way off the beaten track, which in winter is covered by snow, like the white areas in Japanese prints, and in summer can be seen in its full glory.

While the Northern Areas don’t as a rule attract too many Pakistani tourists, foreign wayfarers are enthralled by the lofty pines and shimmering lakes, trout streams, jagged hills and fields of walnut, apricot and plum. But under all that enchanting scenery there is a hard crust of resentment which the casual observer recognises. There is, in fact, serious trouble in paradise.

The cause of the unrest in the north has a different basis and origin from the strife in other parts of the country. The reason for the restlessness and disillusionment goes back to the days before Partition when the area was administered under archaic laws passed by the British. Subsequently the laws were refined by the government of Pakistan, which left the status of the area somewhat amorphous and uncertain.

When the populations of the Northern Areas threw off the yoke of the Dogra Raj of Kashmir by taking up arms, and expressed a desire to accede to the Republic of Pakistan, the government at the time, for some curious reason, linked the accession of the region to the plebiscite which was to be held in Kashmir. Since it is highly unlikely that a plebiscite will ever be held, the status of the people of the north continues to be tentative and uncertain.

One of the major grievances of the people of the Northern Areas is that they were administered under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), the same code of laws which operate in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas which recognises the doctrine of collective responsibility. Under this system the authorities are empowered to detain fellow members of a fugitive’s tribe, or to blockade a fugitive’s village, pending his surrender or punishment by his own tribe in accordance with local tradition.

Mr Z.A. Bhutto in 1974 tried to improve matters by getting rid of the FCR and dividing the region into five districts. Though his intentions were good and introduced a certain democratic touch, the divisions resulted in a host of new problems.

Left wing national parties have now formed an association called the Gilgit-Baltistan United Alliance against what they describe as “bureaucratic colonial rule” and the sabotaging of the democratic rights of two million people.

Their catalogue of demands include the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from Gilgit and Baltistan, the removal of Indian troops from Ladakh and Kargil and the establishment of two autonomous regions on both sides of the Line of Control. Their rivals are members of the Gilgit Baltistan National Alliance who naturally came in for a bit of drubbing for pandering to the whims of the establishment and toeing the line dictated by the centre.

Apparently somebody must have nudged the federal minister for Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas in the ribs. He has finally woken up and has pre-empted further agitation by coming up with the statement that “a reform package granting fundamental constitutional powers to representatives of the Northern Areas” was now in its final stage and would be soon sent to the federal cabinet.

Now here’s the catch. Once the package has been rubber stamped, there is a strong chance that it will be handed over to the wrong people, to the stooges of the centre, the representatives of the leisure class. Anyway, it would be a beginning.

The agitation nevertheless raises a couple of questions to which there is really no satisfactory answer. Why does the centre always decide to act after the dykes have been swept away? And what was the ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas doing during the past few years? The people of the Northern Areas have a genuine grievance, and it was time the government made certain that their demands were fully met.

The struggle of nationalist forces in Balochistan, against what they regard as totally unwarranted and capricious action by the military authority, is well documented and erupts in the media from time to time. The conflict has a long history and is riddled by a host of issues and contradictions involving tribal loyalty which often evoke ambivalent reactions from liberal elements in other parts of the country.

But what about the people of Sindh who are increasingly beginning to feel a sense of deprivation at different levels of society? The latest gaffe in a long line of irritants is the cavalier way in which the centre has sold a couple of islands to a developer from Dubai, without reference to the government or the people of Sindh. It was almost as if the Sindh chief minister didn’t exist.

The sale has been roundly condemned by fishermen and a number of civic groups. Even the Sindhi Association of North America has gotten into the act by expressing solidarity with the people of the province. It is obvious the cabinet doesn’t seem to care about the damage that will be caused to the eco-system and environment in the coastal areas and the people who eke out a living from the sea.

Since the cabinet has no intention of cancelling the contract the people of this province should demonstrate their displeasure and solidarity by giving the islands a wide berth when the glass and concrete structures are completed. A complete boycott is the only way. It would at least be one way of getting a message across to the centre.

A society dripping in racism

SO, thank God, Jade has been evicted. Imagine if she hadn’t and Shilpa had walked the plank, it would have represented a popular endorsement of flagrant racism. The extraordinary fact, of course, is that no one, or virtually no one, ever owns up to racism.

Ron Atkinson described Marcel Desailly as a “… lazy, thick nigger” on air and then had the temerity to claim that he was not a racist. Jade Goody called Shilpa Shetty “Shilpa …awallah” and “Shilpa Poppadom”, and then similarly claimed that she is not a racist. Andy Duncan, Channel 4’s chief executive, in a performance which should see him sacked forthwith, claimed on Thursday that “we cannot with certainty say that the comments directed at Shilpa have been racially motivated”. Ron Atkinson, Jade Goody and Andy Duncan are in denial — like, it must be said, millions of other whites.

No one likes to admit they are racist or bear prejudices. Nor do they even like to be open and honest when they witness racist behaviour. Look at the Big Brother housemates: apart from Shilpa, not one has been prepared to call it by its name (though Jermaine Jackson, black of course, patently knows and understands). The fact that hardly anyone is ever prepared to admit to racist behaviour is perhaps a sort of strength: it speaks to the fact that racism is socially inadmissible.

But it is also testimony to profound weakness, a measure of how little distance we have travelled as a society when it comes to understanding racism. For if the truth be told, we are a society that is dripping in racism.

This is not in the least surprising. For the best part of two centuries, we British ruled the waves, controlled two-fifths of the planet, and believed it was our responsibility to bring civilisation to those who allegedly lacked it. There is now a belief that all that is long gone, dead and buried, history forgotten in a tsunami of amnesia about our past. But these attitudes live on in new forms, constantly reproduced in each and every white citizen of this country.

We are not alone in our racism, of course. Every race exhibits racism towards those whom they believe to be inferior: India is no exception, nor is China, nor is Africa. What makes Britain — and whites — special in this regard is that we have been top of the global pile for so long, inflicted our brand of racism on so many, and have no idea what it is like to be discriminated against for our colour. When it comes to our own racism, we shuffle our feet, fall silent, become incoherent and pretend it is not true: we don’t get it.

There seems to be some idea in the mind of Andy Duncan and the rest of the denial brigade that racism comes in a pure and quintessential form: the use of the word “nigger”, perhaps, or a blatant derogatory reference to someone’s colour. But that is never the main form.

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside and alongside culture and class. As a rule it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice. And that has certainly been the case in Big Brother. Food is a signifier of difference: so are names, so is language.

So Jade and her sidekicks homed in on Shilpa’s cooking and choice of food, made fun of her name and refused to learn it. And with food came the suggestion that Shilpa’s hygiene left something to be desired, that she was unclean (she had touched the food, it was claimed, and “you don’t know where her hands have been”). In other words, not only was she different, but she came from an inferior civilisation. Her colour too — the most obvious manifestation of racial difference — was tangentially drawn into the equation through the comment about make-up and the Indian desire to be white.

Of course, class is central. Race always comes with class. Jade’s reaction to Shilpa has been shaped by her own class background, her racism articulated within that context. The fact that Jade is hardly blessed with great intellectual gifts, that her conversation is littered with profanities, that her behaviour rarely rises above the crude, lacking any kind of subtlety, and that her status as a former winner of Big Brother is her only claim to be where she is, makes it easy for the middle class to dismiss her racism as that of a crude, ill-educated, white working-class young woman, and that the middle classes would, it goes without saying, never behave in that way.

Of course, they would, and do: but they practise it in a genteel middle-class kind of way. Just as Jade’s racism has a class intonation, so does theirs — the asides, the put-downs, and the rest. Indeed, in some ways they are more ignorant — while masquerading as so worldly — because in general they have far less contact with ethnic minorities, unless they employ them as subordinates and/or domestics. They live in different areas, work in different places, and send their children to overwhelmingly white schools.

Almost from the outset, Big Brother’s racism has had a new and novel dimension. Because Gordon Brown was in India at the time, and was asked about it during his trip, the issue immediately acquired an international dimension. In an earlier era, of course, this would have been dismissed as of no consequence: the natives could safely be ignored. But no longer. We saw this just a year ago in relation to the Danish cartoons and their ridicule of Islam. Europe used to ignore what the former colonial world felt. There was no feedback loop. But such was the reaction in the Islamic world that it could not be ignored. That, though, was in the context of the Muslim world which, in global terms, remains weak and marginalised.

Racial abuse of Indians is a very different matter. India is a rising giant; we can no longer afford to ignore, as we once did with impunity, the views and feelings of a country that represents one-fifth of humanity. We live in what increasingly looks like a global goldfish bowl where what we do at home will be seen by the rest of the world - and duly reacted to, in a way that cannot be ignored.

The test of our behaviour, of how racist we are, is no longer what the white British think. That started to change with the self-awareness and growing confidence of our own ethnic minorities. But the matter does not end there. The test now, in this instance, is what Indians in India think, how they perceive us.

As Goody raged and railed against Shetty on Wednesday night’s TV broadcast, she was like a cornered animal, lashing out in every direction against something she clearly detested but also feared and felt threatened by. She was confronted not only with the Other, but a hugely self-confident Other. What could be worse? It was a metaphor for the world that is now rapidly taking shape before our very eyes. –The Guardian, London

The writer is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics.

Shunning Iraq’s refugees

One of eight Iraqis is displaced, and the number is growing rapidly. An estimated 1,500 people flee their homes each day, especially in mixed-religion neighbourhoods and cities. Of those, an unknown but significant number are Iraqis who have risked their lives to provide assistance to the US-led coalition, to foreign journalists or to international nongovernmental organizations.

By any possible interpretation of the “Pottery Barn rule,” the US has a deep responsibility to assist in the well-being of these Iraqis. Yet the number of Iraqis granted political asylum in the US last year was appallingly low: 202. In September, the administration set its 2007 asylum target at a miserly 500.

Why?

One former Bush administration official has said that granting too many Iraqis refugee status would be a tacit admission that Iraq “is a losing cause.” This is politics at its most cynical. Iraq’s refugee crisis competes with Darfur’s as the worst in the world (and it is certainly the one the US is most responsible for), yet the welcome mat has gone missing. More than $100 billion in US taxpayer money will be spent on war and reconstruction in Iraq this year, but only $20 million has been allocated for migration and refugee assistance.

Among the thousands of Iraqis desperately seeking a US visa is the former translator for US freelance journalist Steven Vincent.

— Los Angeles Times