|
|
Somalia: Africa Insight - Why Talk in Hotels Won't Yield Long Term Peace
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
The Nation (Nairobi)
ANALYSIS
6 September 2007
Posted to the web 7 September 2007
Eliezer Wangulu
Nairobi
The crisis in Somalia has sucked Horn of Africa nations and the U.S. into a vortex of violence that will not end until Somalia evolves and manages its own peace process, writes ELIEZER WANGULU
Towards the end of nineteenth century, Somalia was partitioned between European colonial powers and Ethiopia. The Somali Peninsula, one of the most culturally homogeneous regions of Africa, was divided into British Somaliland, French Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, Ethiopian Somaliland (the Ogaden region), and what is now Kenya's North-Eastern Province.
After the formation of the modern Somali state, which came about as a result of the former British and Italian parts uniting in 1960, Somali leaders became preoccupied with the dream of unifying all areas populated by Somali people into one country to be called the Greater Somalia.
The collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 was followed by a seven-year period of inter and intra clan civil war and banditry throughout the country.
Barre's manipulation of clans had created an atmosphere of mistrust and hostility that gradually weakened traditional and national institutions which were mostly based in Mogadishu. Simply put, when Mogadishu collapsed, as a country, Somalia collapsed as well.
Although unified as a single nation at independence, the south and the north, were, from an institutional point of view, two separate countries. Former colonisers Britain and Italy had left the two regions with separate administrative, legal, and education systems in which affairs were conducted according to different procedures and in different languages.
Police, taxes, and the exchange rates of their respective currencies also differed. Their educated elites had divergent interests, and economic contacts between the two regions were virtually nonexistent.
In 1960, the United Nations created the Consultative Commission for Integration. This was an international board headed by UN official, Paolo Contini, to guide the gradual merger of the new country's legal systems and institutions and to reconcile the differences between them. In 1964, the Consultative Commission for Legislation succeeded this body.
Composed of Somalis, it took up its predecessor's work.
But many southerners believed that, because of experience gained under the Italian trusteeship, theirs was the better prepared of the two regions for self-government. Northern political, administrative and commercial elites were reluctant to recognise that they now had to deal with Mogadishu.
The collapse could also be attributed to certain features of Somali lineage segmentation. The Somali clan organisation is an unstable system, whose main characteristic is ever-shifting allegiances. This segmentation goes down to the household level with the children of a man's two wives sometimes turning against one another on the basis of maternal lines.
Ethnographers state that power, among the Somali, is exercised through temporary coalitions and ephemeral alliances between lineages. A given alliance fragments into competitive units as soon as the situation that necessitated it ceases to exist. In urban settings, for example, where relatively large economic and political stakes are contested, the whole population may be polarised into two opposing camps of clan alliances.
To varying degrees, the poles of power in the politics of independent Somalia generally have tended to gravitate around the Daarood clan and a confederacy of the Hawiye and the Isaaq clan families.
Amidst the interclan violence that was the order of the day in the early 1990s, Somalis naturally sought comfort in Islam to make sense of their national disaster.
The Somali brand of messianic Islamism (others view it as fundamentalism) sprang up to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the state. In the disintegrated Somali world of early 1992, Islamism appeared to be largely confined to Bender Cassim, a coastal town in the Majeerteen country. In this town operated assassins belonging to an underground Islamist movement whose adherents wished to purify the country of "infidel" influence.
|
Recent United States policy on Somalia has only made matters worse in the collapsed state. The Horn of Africa region, which has both suffered attacks by al Qaeda and hosted its agents is a legitimate concern of U.S.
Unholy alliances
According to media analyses, stemming the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies has become such an overwhelming strategic objective for Washington that it has overshadowed U.S. efforts to resolve conflicts and promote good governance. Counterterrorism is now the main policy preoccupation in the Greater Horn, enjoying the same prioritisation as did anticommunism in the Cold War era.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
|
 
|
