United States counter-terrorism policies and support for the Ethiopian-backed transitional federal government in Somalia have helped create an increasingly desperate humanitarian and security situation in the East African nation.
This is the finding of a new report by a major US human rights group on the situation in Somalia, whose population has become increasingly anti-US and radicalised.
The report, authored by Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College professor who is regarded as one of the foremost US experts on the Horn of Africa, calls for a thorough reassessment of US policy, including its support for the transitional government and the primacy it has given to its ”war on terrorism” in Somalia.
”US counter-terrorism policies have not only compromised other international agendas in Somalia, they have [also] generated a high level of anti-Americanism and are contributing to radicalisation of the population,” concludes the report, entitled Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Foreign Policy Nightmare.
”In what could become a dangerous instance of blowback, defence and intelligence operations intended to make the United States more secure from the threat of terrorism may be increasing the threat of jihadist attacks on American interests,” the report stresses.
The 17-page report, compiled by Enough, was released amid continuing violence in Somalia that has forced about one million people to flee their homes since December 2006, when US-backed Ethiopian and transitional government forces swept the Islamic Courts Union out of the capital, Mogadishu, and other major cities and towns.
Enough is a group that was launched last year by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group and the Washington-based Centre for American Progress.
The United Nations recently estimated that, barring substantial improvement in the security situation, about 3,5-million Somalis will depend on humanitarian aid by the end of this year.
”The [current] crisis is fundamentally different and fundamentally worse than the situation of the last decade-and-a-half,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, a Horn of Africa specialist at Human Rights Watch, who appeared with Menkhaus at the report’s release at a conference sponsored by at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington on Wednesday.
Albin-Lackey, who has conducted about 80 interviews with Somali refugees in East Africa in the past month, said ongoing violence has added to the insecurity.
The violence includes almost daily artillery bombardments by Ethiopian army and transitional government forces on the one hand and opposition militias on the other, as well as assassinations carried out by both sides.
”People have nowhere to turn for security,” he said, adding that search operations by transitional government forces, while nominally for the purpose of arresting suspected insurgents, have become ”an excuse for murder, rape and looting on an incredibly large scale”.
As a result, he said, Mogadishu has become ”largely depopulated” with about two-thirds of the population — or about 800 000 people — having left their homes there over the past 18 months.
Menkhaus described as an ”important step” toward reconciliation last month’s signing by the transitional government and the opposition Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS) of the ”Djibouti Agreement”. The deal was negotiated last June between moderate leaders of both sides with the help of UN special representative Ahmadou Ould-Abdulla.
However, he warned that hard-liners in both camps could derail it.
The agreement — which has been rejected by the Islamist Shabaab and was only signed by hawkish transitional government leader Adullahi Yusuf under heavy pressure from Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi — calls for a cessation of hostilities, deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, and the subsequent withdrawal of Ethiopian forces.
”The hope is that any agreement that facilitates the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces will open the door for an end to the insurgency,” according to the report.
But the implementation of the agreement faces ”steep challenges”, warned Menkhaus, not least because ”the moderates [who negotiated the accord] don’t control any of the armed groups”. While the Shabaab has already denounced the ARS leaders as ”apostates”, he noted, hard-liners in the transitional government know that they can stay in power ”if and only if the Ethiopians stay”.
Only by reinforcing the moderates can the international community, including the US, enhance the chances for the agreement’s successful implementation and, with it, the chances for reconciliation, according to Menkhaus. But that will require major changes in US and Western policies, which have ”actually worked to strengthen and embolden hard-liners” over the past two years.
In that respect, the US emphasis on counter-terrorism has been particularly destructive, not only in supporting the Ethiopian offensive in December 2006, but, more recently, also in placing the Shabaab on its list of designated terrorist groups. That step isolated opposition moderates from their own coalition and gave the Shabaab ”even more reason to sabotage” ongoing peace talks.
At the same time, Washington has provided ”robust financial and logistical support to armed paramilitaries resisting the command and control of the TFG [transitional government], even though they technically wear a TFG hat”, both to fight the Shabaab and to track down suspected terrorists.
”To the extent that these security forces also deeply oppose … reconciliation efforts with the opposition, the US counter-terrorism partnerships have also undermined peace-building efforts by emboldening spoilers in the government camp”, says the report.
Washington has not been alone in supporting the hard-liners, however. As part of their state-building agenda, other Western donors have also provided direct support to transitional government security forces under the control of the hawks.
Despite the UN’s role as a supposedly neutral broker between the transitional government and the opposition, the UN Development Programme has also provided security assistance to the government.
The Tomahawk missile attack that killed Shabaab leader Aden Hashi Ayro in May — the latest in a series of similar strikes against armed Islamists in Somalia, allegedly tied to al-Qaeda — resulted in a sharp radicalisation in the group, which announced at the time that it would strike US and Western targets, including aid workers, as well as Ethiopian and transitional government forces, compounding an already dramatic humanitarian crisis.
”Somalia today is the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers,” according to Menkhaus. More than 20 humanitarian workers have been killed since January, while about 30 more have been kidnapped.
”The situation in Somalia today exceeds the worst-case scenarios conjured up by regional analysts when they first contemplated the possible impact of an Ethiopian military occupation,” says the report. ”Over the past 18 months, Somalia has descended into terrible levels of displacement and humanitarian need, armed conflict and assassinations, political meltdown, radicalisation and virulent anti-Americanism.”
”We’ve gotten the exact opposite of what we set out to achieve,” Menkhaus noted, including a ”population radically angry at us and very fertile ground for al-Qaeda”.
Jim Lobe’s blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe