20 Sep 2006: ISS Today: Somalia - Pyromaniac Diplomacy?

20 September 2006: Somalia - Pyromaniac Diplomacy?

 

The attempt on 18 September on the life of Abdullahi Yusuf, President of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG), and the deaths of some 12 people in the car-bombing and the ensuing actions have rightly drawn condemnation from all quarters. Not surprisingly, various parties immediately presented claims about the provenance of the perpetrators of the outrage, without awaiting even the most perfunctory of investigations. There was also a shameless attempt to link this incident with the murder in Mogadishu the previous day of an Italian nun who had devoted her life to serving the Somali people.

 

Those closest to the President sought to make capital out of these events by alleging that they proved the existence of al-Qaeda operatives allied to the cause of the Islamic courts. For their part the Islamic courts were quick to condemn the shooting of Sister Leonella and her Somali bodyguard, and arrests were swiftly made. Their response to the attempt on Abdullahi Yusuf was to see in it the hand of Ethiopian agents, who were accused of attempting to justify international intervention on behalf of the TFG.

 

Yet President Abdullahi Yusuf faces threats from a number of quarters. His beleaguered TFG is by no means united behind him, and many of its members, including one of the principal warlord ministers of Baidoa, see his closeness to the authorities in Addis Ababa as a threat to the TFG’s attempts to embed its legitimacy among the Somali people as a whole. They also see him as an obstacle to any progress in the talks initiated in Khartoum between the TFG and the Islamic courts, where tentative agreements have been made that have failed to win his support. These seminal negotiations are due to recommence after Ramadan, at the end of October.

 

In the meantime, and driven by Ethiopia, IGAD and the African Union have pressed forward with their plans to deploy a regional peacekeeping force to underpin the TFG, which they continue to insist, against all evidence to the contrary, reflects the true will of the Somali people as a whole. Fortunately for Somalia, neither IGAD nor the AU has the financial means to launch such an expedition and the donor community seems unlikely to back so potentially inflammatory a mission at present. Not only are there more pressing issues of threats to human life in conflict situations on the African continent, but the UN and the EU have reiterated their support for the TFG as a gateway to the recreation of a Somali state, the tone in which they have done so indicating an eagerness to encourage the “moderates” to keep talking.

 

Not to be forgotten in all of this is also that the Transitional Federal Charter, which is the basis for all the internationally recognised institutions of this pseudo-state, includes in its area of claimed authority the self-declared, but relatively effective, state of Somaliland, which has been in existence since 1991. Would any IGAD/AU mission feel constrained to assist the TFG in an attempt to assert authority there too?

 

Given these practical considerations then, why did IGAD and the AU feel the need to make recommendations that were bound to merely aggravate the local situation and give ammunition to those who see advantage in a resumption of large scale hostilities? A few years ago a French author wrote about examples of what translates as “pyromaniac diplomacy”: too many recent regional initiatives on Somalia seem to reflect precisely this tendency.

 

Richard Cornwell, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Pretoria