Violence, fear and confusion: welcome
to the Horn of Africa
In Yemen, Somalia and beyond, the lawless, strife-torn
region has provided disturbing evidence that its myriad
problems cannot be ignored – and that the west must see the
connections between them all
10 January, 2010 | Peter Beaumont (The Guardian)
Tracked by Yemeni intelligence officials, it was laden with a quite
different cargo that had been loaded at Hes Bes on Somalia's arid
coastline.
When it was boarded late last year by Yemeni coastguards, the ship's
captain and his crew of 12 were discovered to be ferrying arms into a
country already awash with weapons. About 60 million handguns, at
the last count, arm a population of 21 million people in Yemen. The
arms traffic is hardly one-way. Indeed, Yemeni ships are more often
smuggling arms in the opposite direction, to fuel the terrible conflict in
Mogadishu and south central Somalia.
The capture of the ship was a small event in the scheme of things, but
an illustrative one. The Horn of Africa retains the potential to be one of
the continent's most explosive regions, having suffered some of
Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts during the past century. "The
problem with this region as a whole," says Richard Dowden, director
of the Royal African Society, "is that you cannot talk about Ethiopia
without talking about Eritrea and Somalia. You can't talk about Sudan
without mentioning Egypt." Dowden is convinced too that a failure to
understand the nature of the relationships between the various
neighbours by other countries – not least the US and Britain – has
contributed to the difficulties in the area. With Yemen, just across the
Gulf of Aden, added to the mix, the area's multi-layered security,
economic and political problems appear so interconnected at so many
levels as to seem irresolvable at a local one alone.
This region has left its mark on the international consciousness over the
past two decades for all the wrong reasons: war, famine and massive
displacement of civilian populations.
The most potent images, inevitably, are of disasters that struck
westerners rather than the local populations: the Battle of Mogadishu
that saw dead US servicemen dragged through the city's streets; the
2000 attack on the USS Cole by al-Qaida in the Yemeni port of Aden
that killed 17 American sailors, and the kidnapping of western ships and
tourists by pirates off Somalia's coast. Then there are the connections
to the failed Christmas Day plane-bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,
who is believed to have received training and instruction from al-Qaida
in Yemen.
The profundity of the region's problems has seen it defined as one of
the two anchors of the so-called "arc of crisis" – the locus of religious,
economic and political faultlines which extends in a broad sweep
through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in
India.
Yet the complexity of the relationships between the states that make up
the area remains the least examined and least understood contributor to
that arc.
Last week, it was the turn of the prime minister of Somalia's
beleaguered Transitional Federal Government, Omar Sharmarke, to
dramatise what many see as the shortcomings of western policy
towards the region – a tendency to ignore the potential fallout from and
consequences of external intervention.
Responding to the US offer to help Yemen in its fight against al-Qaida –
and Gordon Brown's move to convene a summit on the issue –
Sharmarke issued a warning. He said the sudden upsurge of interest
after Abdulmutallab was linked to Yemeni-based extremists would only
displace Yemen's problem to Somalia and other parts of Africa.
"Gordon Brown has rushed to call an emergency summit on Yemen,"
said Sharmarke, "but it must be understood that the problem will simply
displace to Somalia unless there is corresponding support here. We call
on Mr Brown to ensure that the summit agreed for the end of this
January considers Somalia and Yemen jointly, and that resources are
deployed immediately to assist our efforts against this scourge.
"Al-Qaida and their affiliates such as al-Shabaab [the Somali Islamist
militia] are simply making sure that whilst Yemen is the subject of
increased western attention and Somalia receives only empty gestures,
they seize the opportunity to secure new supply routes and movement
corridors for a move deeper into Africa."
Western preoccupations have not only been driven by the alleged links
between Abdulmutallab and the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in
Yemen. There are also reports that fighters from Afghanistan have
relocated recently to Somalia and Yemen. Yemen is also home to
thousands of former mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan against the
Soviets.
But while the increased presence of al-Qaida and its proxies in both
Yemen and Somalia are the inevitable focus of concern, there are other
more worrying dynamics at work – all of them with the potential to
cause widespread violence.
Three key externally sponsored peace processes in the region appear to
be either in danger of unravelling, or not worth the paper they are
written on.
The most dangerous situation for now is in Somalia, where relative
stability is confined to the autonomous Puntland and Somaliland
regions. There, the feeble stop-start peace process of the past decade
which created a Transitional National Government – torpedoed by
Ethiopian interference – and then the present Transitional Federal
Government, installed by force with the help of the same state, has
hardly solved the country's problems; in fact it appears to have
exacerbated them.
The involvement of the US in approving Ethiopia's disastrous
intervention encouraged the rise of the brutal al-Shabaab militia, which
has been backed by Ethiopia's enemy Eritrea, and armed with weapons
smuggled from Yemen. It is precisely this competition between
Ethiopia and Eritrea that has been one of the most dangerous conflict
accelerators in the Horn in the past five years. While the political elites
on both sides were once allies in the battle against Ethiopia's Marxist
regime of president Mengistu Haile Mariam – who was toppled in 1991
– the "civil divorce" that subsequently permitted Eritrea's secession
turned into conflict over a border dispute in 1998.
While that war ended in 2000 with the Algiers Agreement – which saw
the two countries agree to binding arbitration over the demarcation of
the border – the mechanisms of arbitration failed when Ethiopia refused
to recognise the new border. The result – driven by a mutual loathing
that has seen policy dictated by the credo of "my enemy's enemy is my
friend" – has been a proxy conflict in Somalia which has seen Eritrea –
a secular state – back the al-Qaida-allied al-Shabaab and Ethiopia, the
Transitional Government.
A final area of risk has been produced by the slow corrosion of the US-
brokered comprehensive peace agreement which ended the second
Sudanese war between the mainly Muslim north and Christian-Animist
south. That agreement began unravelling at the end of 2007. Tensions
have been exacerbated by plans in the south to hold a referendum next
year on full independence – a vote Khartoum has warned could lead to
all-out war.
In the past year alone, according to a report released last week by aid
groups, 2,500 people have been killed in the south and more than
350,000 have fled amid renewed ethnic clashes. Violence flared again
last week when 140 villagers were killed in a cattle raid.
Meanwhile in Yemen, a slow disintegration is taking place of a
government faced with insurgencies in the north and south – the latter
associated by the government with al-Qaida.
Dowden is worried that the same tactics employed in the past by the
west – largely without success – are now being used again without
thought for the lessons of history. "I believe that grave mistakes are
being repeated right now," he said. On the question of Ethiopia and
Somalia, he believes the west's tacit approval of Ethiopia's intervention
to counter the rise of the Islamic Courts Union – one of whose militias
was al-Shabaab – failed to appreciate the enmity between Somalians
and Ethiopians. "It showed an unbelievable lack of knowledge when all
anyone had to do was ask the question: how will the neighbours feel?"
The answer to that question has had baleful consequences for Yemen
and Somalia. Abdul Ghani al-Aryani, an independent political analyst
based in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, is increasingly fearful that the
Yemeni state may struggle to survive. "Thousands of Somali refugees
have been arriving on Yemen's coastline," he said. "It is open to them.
No one knows how many are associated with al-Shabaab and al-Qaida,
but there is evidence that some of them are. We know too that fighters
who were with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan have returned in
recent months to both Somalia and Yemen."
If there are, as al-Aryani suspects, links between al-Qaida groups and
proxies in the two countries, he contends that the mutual destabilisation
has been driven in recent years by the Yemeni government – not least
from the involvement of powerful figures in the arms trade. The same
weapons, it would now appear, that are coming back into Yemen to
supply a separatist Shia conflict in the north and a second insurgency
tied to al-Qaida-linked tribal leaders in the south. Echoing Dowden's
concerns, al-Aryani is concerned that in a country with strong anti-
western feelings, unpopular outside intervention, including US
involvement in an airstrike before Christmas, can only inflame the
problems.
It is a view endorsed by Roger Middleton, who co-ordinates the Horn
of Africa Group at the Chatham House thinktank. Middleton believes
that a combination of ignoring endemic problems – as described by
prime minister Sharmarke – and ill-considered interventions, have
contributed to the dangerous cocktail. "If you look at Somalia, for
instance, the lesson to the international community is if you ignore
these place you do not know what is going to happen. And a policy of
intervention can be dangerous.
"You could argue that the US intervention in the early 1990s fuelled the
growth of warlordism and that the Ethiopian intervention fuelled the
growth of al-Shabaab." But if the problems of the Horn and Yemen are
marked by their similarities they are also distinguished by crucial
differences.
Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, sees a number of common
threads, but warns against "lumping" the region's states together despite
the way in which individual agendas appear to collide. "All the players
have very different public personas and agendas, although many of
them feed each other. Is there a centre? I am not sure."
One thing most analysts do agree on, is the risk. Ginny Hill, who runs
Chatham House's Yemen Forum, believes future instability in Yemen
could expand a lawless zone from northern Kenya, through Somalia
and the Gulf of Aden, to Saudi Arabia. "People are worried about the
transit of Islamist radicals, but the real story is arms. If you can find a
way of tackling the arms trade you could improve governance in
Yemen and reduce the potential for further conflict in Somalia. It also
needs to be recognised that the Gulf of Aden itself is a vector for
instability." The Yemeni coastguards who intercepted dhow 11S2,
stuffed with guns, would doubtless agree.
Courtesy
to the Horn of Africa
In Yemen, Somalia and beyond, the lawless, strife-torn
region has provided disturbing evidence that its myriad
problems cannot be ignored – and that the west must see the
connections between them all
10 January, 2010 | Peter Beaumont (The Guardian)
- It looked like many of the
dhows that sail the Gulf of
Aden, a nameless boat
identifiable only by its
registration number – 11S2.
This dhow, however, was
not carrying fish, or even
engaged in the lethal people
smuggling trade conducted
across these waters.
Tracked by Yemeni intelligence officials, it was laden with a quite
different cargo that had been loaded at Hes Bes on Somalia's arid
coastline.
When it was boarded late last year by Yemeni coastguards, the ship's
captain and his crew of 12 were discovered to be ferrying arms into a
country already awash with weapons. About 60 million handguns, at
the last count, arm a population of 21 million people in Yemen. The
arms traffic is hardly one-way. Indeed, Yemeni ships are more often
smuggling arms in the opposite direction, to fuel the terrible conflict in
Mogadishu and south central Somalia.
The capture of the ship was a small event in the scheme of things, but
an illustrative one. The Horn of Africa retains the potential to be one of
the continent's most explosive regions, having suffered some of
Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts during the past century. "The
problem with this region as a whole," says Richard Dowden, director
of the Royal African Society, "is that you cannot talk about Ethiopia
without talking about Eritrea and Somalia. You can't talk about Sudan
without mentioning Egypt." Dowden is convinced too that a failure to
understand the nature of the relationships between the various
neighbours by other countries – not least the US and Britain – has
contributed to the difficulties in the area. With Yemen, just across the
Gulf of Aden, added to the mix, the area's multi-layered security,
economic and political problems appear so interconnected at so many
levels as to seem irresolvable at a local one alone.
This region has left its mark on the international consciousness over the
past two decades for all the wrong reasons: war, famine and massive
displacement of civilian populations.
The most potent images, inevitably, are of disasters that struck
westerners rather than the local populations: the Battle of Mogadishu
that saw dead US servicemen dragged through the city's streets; the
2000 attack on the USS Cole by al-Qaida in the Yemeni port of Aden
that killed 17 American sailors, and the kidnapping of western ships and
tourists by pirates off Somalia's coast. Then there are the connections
to the failed Christmas Day plane-bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,
who is believed to have received training and instruction from al-Qaida
in Yemen.
The profundity of the region's problems has seen it defined as one of
the two anchors of the so-called "arc of crisis" – the locus of religious,
economic and political faultlines which extends in a broad sweep
through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in
India.
Yet the complexity of the relationships between the states that make up
the area remains the least examined and least understood contributor to
that arc.
Last week, it was the turn of the prime minister of Somalia's
beleaguered Transitional Federal Government, Omar Sharmarke, to
dramatise what many see as the shortcomings of western policy
towards the region – a tendency to ignore the potential fallout from and
consequences of external intervention.
Responding to the US offer to help Yemen in its fight against al-Qaida –
and Gordon Brown's move to convene a summit on the issue –
Sharmarke issued a warning. He said the sudden upsurge of interest
after Abdulmutallab was linked to Yemeni-based extremists would only
displace Yemen's problem to Somalia and other parts of Africa.
"Gordon Brown has rushed to call an emergency summit on Yemen,"
said Sharmarke, "but it must be understood that the problem will simply
displace to Somalia unless there is corresponding support here. We call
on Mr Brown to ensure that the summit agreed for the end of this
January considers Somalia and Yemen jointly, and that resources are
deployed immediately to assist our efforts against this scourge.
"Al-Qaida and their affiliates such as al-Shabaab [the Somali Islamist
militia] are simply making sure that whilst Yemen is the subject of
increased western attention and Somalia receives only empty gestures,
they seize the opportunity to secure new supply routes and movement
corridors for a move deeper into Africa."
Western preoccupations have not only been driven by the alleged links
between Abdulmutallab and the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in
Yemen. There are also reports that fighters from Afghanistan have
relocated recently to Somalia and Yemen. Yemen is also home to
thousands of former mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan against the
Soviets.
But while the increased presence of al-Qaida and its proxies in both
Yemen and Somalia are the inevitable focus of concern, there are other
more worrying dynamics at work – all of them with the potential to
cause widespread violence.
Three key externally sponsored peace processes in the region appear to
be either in danger of unravelling, or not worth the paper they are
written on.
The most dangerous situation for now is in Somalia, where relative
stability is confined to the autonomous Puntland and Somaliland
regions. There, the feeble stop-start peace process of the past decade
which created a Transitional National Government – torpedoed by
Ethiopian interference – and then the present Transitional Federal
Government, installed by force with the help of the same state, has
hardly solved the country's problems; in fact it appears to have
exacerbated them.
The involvement of the US in approving Ethiopia's disastrous
intervention encouraged the rise of the brutal al-Shabaab militia, which
has been backed by Ethiopia's enemy Eritrea, and armed with weapons
smuggled from Yemen. It is precisely this competition between
Ethiopia and Eritrea that has been one of the most dangerous conflict
accelerators in the Horn in the past five years. While the political elites
on both sides were once allies in the battle against Ethiopia's Marxist
regime of president Mengistu Haile Mariam – who was toppled in 1991
– the "civil divorce" that subsequently permitted Eritrea's secession
turned into conflict over a border dispute in 1998.
While that war ended in 2000 with the Algiers Agreement – which saw
the two countries agree to binding arbitration over the demarcation of
the border – the mechanisms of arbitration failed when Ethiopia refused
to recognise the new border. The result – driven by a mutual loathing
that has seen policy dictated by the credo of "my enemy's enemy is my
friend" – has been a proxy conflict in Somalia which has seen Eritrea –
a secular state – back the al-Qaida-allied al-Shabaab and Ethiopia, the
Transitional Government.
A final area of risk has been produced by the slow corrosion of the US-
brokered comprehensive peace agreement which ended the second
Sudanese war between the mainly Muslim north and Christian-Animist
south. That agreement began unravelling at the end of 2007. Tensions
have been exacerbated by plans in the south to hold a referendum next
year on full independence – a vote Khartoum has warned could lead to
all-out war.
In the past year alone, according to a report released last week by aid
groups, 2,500 people have been killed in the south and more than
350,000 have fled amid renewed ethnic clashes. Violence flared again
last week when 140 villagers were killed in a cattle raid.
Meanwhile in Yemen, a slow disintegration is taking place of a
government faced with insurgencies in the north and south – the latter
associated by the government with al-Qaida.
Dowden is worried that the same tactics employed in the past by the
west – largely without success – are now being used again without
thought for the lessons of history. "I believe that grave mistakes are
being repeated right now," he said. On the question of Ethiopia and
Somalia, he believes the west's tacit approval of Ethiopia's intervention
to counter the rise of the Islamic Courts Union – one of whose militias
was al-Shabaab – failed to appreciate the enmity between Somalians
and Ethiopians. "It showed an unbelievable lack of knowledge when all
anyone had to do was ask the question: how will the neighbours feel?"
The answer to that question has had baleful consequences for Yemen
and Somalia. Abdul Ghani al-Aryani, an independent political analyst
based in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, is increasingly fearful that the
Yemeni state may struggle to survive. "Thousands of Somali refugees
have been arriving on Yemen's coastline," he said. "It is open to them.
No one knows how many are associated with al-Shabaab and al-Qaida,
but there is evidence that some of them are. We know too that fighters
who were with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan have returned in
recent months to both Somalia and Yemen."
If there are, as al-Aryani suspects, links between al-Qaida groups and
proxies in the two countries, he contends that the mutual destabilisation
has been driven in recent years by the Yemeni government – not least
from the involvement of powerful figures in the arms trade. The same
weapons, it would now appear, that are coming back into Yemen to
supply a separatist Shia conflict in the north and a second insurgency
tied to al-Qaida-linked tribal leaders in the south. Echoing Dowden's
concerns, al-Aryani is concerned that in a country with strong anti-
western feelings, unpopular outside intervention, including US
involvement in an airstrike before Christmas, can only inflame the
problems.
It is a view endorsed by Roger Middleton, who co-ordinates the Horn
of Africa Group at the Chatham House thinktank. Middleton believes
that a combination of ignoring endemic problems – as described by
prime minister Sharmarke – and ill-considered interventions, have
contributed to the dangerous cocktail. "If you look at Somalia, for
instance, the lesson to the international community is if you ignore
these place you do not know what is going to happen. And a policy of
intervention can be dangerous.
"You could argue that the US intervention in the early 1990s fuelled the
growth of warlordism and that the Ethiopian intervention fuelled the
growth of al-Shabaab." But if the problems of the Horn and Yemen are
marked by their similarities they are also distinguished by crucial
differences.
Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, sees a number of common
threads, but warns against "lumping" the region's states together despite
the way in which individual agendas appear to collide. "All the players
have very different public personas and agendas, although many of
them feed each other. Is there a centre? I am not sure."
One thing most analysts do agree on, is the risk. Ginny Hill, who runs
Chatham House's Yemen Forum, believes future instability in Yemen
could expand a lawless zone from northern Kenya, through Somalia
and the Gulf of Aden, to Saudi Arabia. "People are worried about the
transit of Islamist radicals, but the real story is arms. If you can find a
way of tackling the arms trade you could improve governance in
Yemen and reduce the potential for further conflict in Somalia. It also
needs to be recognised that the Gulf of Aden itself is a vector for
instability." The Yemeni coastguards who intercepted dhow 11S2,
stuffed with guns, would doubtless agree.
Courtesy
| All rights reserved. |
| Ethio Quest News Together We Can Make It! |
 | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  |
Open Letter to the President of
Genocide Watch
23 April, 2009 ( SMNE ) -
"The foundation for a
future case against those
involved, which implicated
those in the highest levels
of Ethiopian government,
is well established....More
Genocide Watch
23 April, 2009 ( SMNE ) -
"The foundation for a
future case against those
involved, which implicated
those in the highest levels
of Ethiopian government,
is well established....More
| Ethiopia: Amnesty International Report 2009 "...Security forces arrested members of the Oromo ethnic group in Addis Ababa and in the Oromo Region towards the end of the...More. |
| Ethio Quest News: For latest Ethiopian News, views, Reviews and More |
| Related Stories |
| The Horn of Africa Wikipedia |
