Is Somalia Ready for a Wind of Change?
At least 22 people were killed and over 60 were injured last Thursday, in the latest suicide bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia. The attack, which targeted a medical school graduation at the upscale Shamo Hotel, killed the Ministers of Health Qamar Aden Ali, of Education Ahmed Abdulahi Waayeel, and of Higher Education Ibrahim Hassan Addow, as well as two journalists and several students who had recently completed their medical degrees in a country that has not had an effective central government since the regime of Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
An amateur video of the ceremony, distributed over the web, shows a ceremony like many.[1] The rows of medical students in graduation gowns almost seem not to belong to a country where 22% of children receive primary education and where the humanitarian crisis has grown to proportions that have made it necessary to raise the threshold for what qualifies as “emergency”. A classification that in other countries kicks in when 1% of the population is malnourished, in Somalia is up at 8%. The video continues with the Minister’s speech is cut short by an explosion, and the footage that follows seems more familiar to those that have been following Somalia over its years of struggle: dead and injured bodies scattered around a room, chaos. If last week’s attack in Mogadishu is only the last of too many like it, perhaps because it killed students on their graduation day, taking away doctors from a population that so desperately needs them, this particular attack seems to have had a deeper impact on the Somali people. Al Shabab, the group deemed responsible for this attack and others before, has denied any responsibility in the bombing, in what many believe is a belated realization this may just be the last straw for Somalia.
As Somalis take to the streets in Mogadishu, today, protesting Al Shabab’s use of violence,[2] members of the Somali diaspora in the Maryland suburbs of Washington share their reactions and thoughts on the state of their country.
“What happened last week gives many of us Somalis a wake-up call,” said Yusuf Aden, a Somali man in the United States since 1982, who knows the families of some of the victims. “This is a big tragedy, it touched everybody’s heart in Somalia.”
Slain Minister of Higher Education Ibrahim Hassan Addow had been working at the American University in Washington and was well known in the community. Adenre calls his words at his last meeting with Somali residents of the greater D.C. area, before he returned to Somalia in 2000. “He said, my mission is to go back to Somalia and start schools. And today he died while giving a speech. Can you imagine? Those kids that were there, graduating, were the same kids he put through school.”
Aden thinks this attack is likely to mark a turning point. “This is the end of Al Shabab,” he said.
“Before we had government people getting killed, or military people, but this is different,” he said. “In Somalia you may see that if you and I argue, I may take a gun and shoot you, but to come to a ceremony that was filled with graduates, especially medical students who have been working in the refugee camps…This is an outside group coming inside the country.”
Ahmed Elmi, chairman of the Maryland-based Somali American Community Association,[3] agrees. As he speaks, two Somali women in the room learn basic computer skills on laptops the organization makes available to local immigrants. SACA also offers English classes and professional training as well as mentorship programs for Somali families and children.
“Killing students, the future of the country, is not a practice of Somali people,” Elmi said. “Homegrown insurgency like Al Shabab is not a Somali practice, it clearly shows a pattern of transnational terrorism.” Elmi thinks that Al Shabab may not have foreseen the impact this attack had on Somali people, and is now retracting. “The reason they’re saying we didn’t do this is that they worry they’ll lose support,” Elmi said, explaining this attack will both erase whatever popularity Al Shabab still enjoys in Somalia and it will cause tighter repression of the insurgent movement by neighboring countries – like Kenya, – worried that the violence might spread into their borders, as it has in the past. “They say, we are not responsible but this has the smell, taste, shape of Al Shabab,” Elmi added. “There’s no other group that’s done such things. I think they worry of major repercussions.”
The Al Shabab movement – in Arabic, “The Youth” – originally developed as the young, militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a coalition of Sharia Courts which controlled Somalia until 2006, when it was ousted by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion and replaced by the interim Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Since the foreign-led dissolution of the ICU, under whose government, according to Elmi, Somalia saw the first glimpse of political stability in decades, some former members have either been recruited into the transitional government – as is the case, for instance, of current Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Others have joined the increasingly extremist Al Shabab movement. Al Shabab, which is funded and trained by similar groups in Saudi Arabia and Iran though some Somalis believe that funding is faltering, recruits jihadists to fight against what it claims are the enemies of Islam in Somalia, namely the current government, Ethiopia, the United States and peacekeeping troops of the African Union, a 5,000-troop army made up primarily of Ugandans and Burundians watches over Mogadishu. Al Shabab sees the troops as an “infidel” occupation force, the Somali government deems them too small to have an impact and has repeatedly asked for more and most Somalis see them as a largely ineffective presence that is using resources that would be better put in Somali hands.
“Next week, the Ugandan president is supposed to visit Somalia,” saidAden. “But who is he visiting, his own troops, who are making $ 3,000 a month from United Nations money? They just sit there, they don’t even go one inch out of their compound.” Aden said many Somalis feel that instead than paying inefficient peacekeeping forces, whose mandate is limited to the protection of a few transit areas, the Somali people should be trained and paid as a police force, to maintain order. “Every penny that the international community gives to the government goes to these troops. People are asking, what’s in it for us? Let them go,” Aden said. “You could have 10,000 Somalis that can eliminate the entire Al Shabab movement, for half the cost, overnight.”
Al Shabab’s violent means are highly unpopular in Somalia and Thursday’s attack is bound to further damage support for the movement. Moreover, Al Shabab calls for a much more radical interpretation of Islam than is customary in Somalia, a moderate country where religion has been traditionally “relaxed,” Somalis say. While nearly all Somalis are Muslim, Al Shabab’s more radical practices – as the recent ban on bras because “un-Islamic” – are rejected by most, who see the movement as foreign to Somali culture.
But on the grounds, Al Shabab is also one of the many factions and clans that contend control of Somalia’s regions, which for the most part are outside the reach of the central government.
“My mother lives in Afmadow, a town which has recently come under the control of Al Shabab,” said Ahmed Sharif, a 27-year old Somali, who arrived in the United States in 1996, after having spent three years in a refugee camp in Kenya. Sharif lived in Minnesota, home to some 80,000 Somalis, the largest community in the country, and is now pursuing a PhD in anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center. “I asked her if there’s any difference now that Al Shabab took over, but she said no, they don’t bother us.” UNHCR, however, reports hundreds have fled the southern town since Al Shabab took over last November 21.[4]
“I believe that once people are in power, it forces them to become more moderate,” Sharif said. He does not support Al Shabab but is concerned with the trend to condemn radical Islamic groups, so pushing them to become more extreme than they already are. “Right now Al Shabab comes out with all these radical statements but I think if they took power the reality of government would force them to be more moderate. When you refuse them power it only makes them more radical, it legitimates them and makes them more attractive.”
That Al Shabab may become more attractive to some is a legitimate concern. After the disastrous US involvement in the Battle of Mogadishu of 1993 – “Black Hawk Down” in the American memory – US administrations became increasingly reluctant to intervene militarily in Africa to the point that Somalia is largely thought to have been the reason for the Clinton administration’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later. The Bush administration’s global campaign for a “war on terror,” however, has changed things, and after a decade of American disinterest in Somalia’s succession of government failures, the United States chose to intervene by supporting Ethiopian military action against the Islamic Courts Union, in 2006. The operation successfully removed the courts from power, but incidentally led to the radicalization of Al Shabab and a surge in anti-Ethiopian and anti-American sentiment.[5] It also inadvertently touched the Somali diaspora in the United States, as a couple dozens Somali-American youths reported missing by their families in Minnesota, some as young as 17, were later found to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Shabab.[6]
Sharif, who had known some of these young men from his days in Minneapolis, said the 2006 US-backed invasion of Somalia stirred nationalistic feelings in many teenagers raised in the United States, some who had never even been to Somalia or spoke any Somali. “The reason why all of them went back was Ethiopia, it was a patriotic thing,” he said, adding however that tensions between Somalis and Ethiopians don’t carry over to the diaspora, as many make a distinction between the Ethiopian government and the people. “But once they go back, the people that are fighting the Ethiopians are the Islamists, so these are the people they join, and of course the US says, if you join them, you are automatically a terrorist.”
“What this did to people like me, a community leader, is to have a heightened awareness,” Elmi commented on the same issue. “It happened in Minneapolis, it could happen here. We have to be connected to our young people.” Elmi, however, stressed that this issue seems to have stricken the American imagination more than it has touched the Somali and Somali-American communities, to whom Somalia’s enormous humanitarian crisis is the most important issue at the moment.
“This is like the issue of pirates,” Elmi said, adding that at a briefing he recently held for US congressmen where he had intended to present his organization’s latest initiative – a humanitarian and refugee awareness campaign[7] – his interlocutors kept shifting the focus of the conversation to issues of insurgency. “I went there to talk about humanitarian issues and about how can we do something about it, but the conversation went to pirates; the humanitarian question gets lost when these things come up,” Elmi said. “Yes, there are young men who left the country and fought in Somalia, a handful of them, but if you ask Somali-Americans about the issues they have and ask them where this issue ranks, it is not even going to make the top 10. And if you go to Somalia, and ask people there where the issue of pirates ranks, it may not even make the top 20.”
Over eighteen years of conflict and the lack of a central government have left 3.2 million Somalis, about 45% of the entire population, suffering hunger and malnutrition, an infant mortality that is twice the world average (142/1,000 versus 68/1,000), and 250,000 refugees on the Kenyan border alone, plus countless internally displaced fleeing the cities every day. “I have seen the situation in Darfur, Uganda, Congo, but the humanitarian crisis in Somalia is the worst in Africa,” Oxfam Humanitarian Coordination Hassan Noor said recently.[8] “The humanitarian situation in Somalia is the worst since the early ‘90s,” World Health Organization Assistant Director-General for Health Action in Crises Eric Laroche said last week.[9] Many aid workers think this is the worst crisis in the world.[10] Piracy may appeal to the Western imagination and media, but it is not exactly the first thought in the minds of Somalis.
Ending violence and securing government stability, on the other hand, are the priorities. If last Thursday’s bombing is likely to deal a heavy blow to Al Shabab’s already scarce popularity in Somalia, it is also not going to favor President Sharif Ahmed’s government, which in January 2009 followed the very unpopular Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed at the TFG. While at the beginning, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a former ICU member and secondary school teacher gave hope to many in Somalia and abroad, his government soon turned out to be too weak.
“I used to think this guy has some chance, he comes from the community,” said Sharif, the Somali graduate student. He said a lot of people originally supported the government, though some felt Sheikh Sharif had “sold out” to the United States, which had previously been responsible for the ousting of his own ICU. Since then, however, the government has not proved able to stabilize the country and bring an end to the violence. “Now we all know how weak the government is,” Sharif concluded, saying that if it cannot even protect its own ministers, the Somali government is certainly not in a position to protect the country.
Yusuf Aden, who predicts this attack will bring to an end of Al Shabab’s influence, also thinks it will mark the end of Sheikh Ahmed’s government, which is supposed to serve for a two-year mandate. “The government’s deadline was this week: when big things like these happen there is no more confidence,” Adensaid. “There’s already talk about who will replace them.” Aden said this government was the best we had so far – though Elmi suggested the ICU had been more efficient – but argued that the very international powers that put the government in place are now backing out, a consideration shared by some policy experts as well.[11] “Even Hillary Clinton said that if you cannot deliver safety and security for Mogadishu then we cannot support you anymore,” Aden said. “If you cannot do anything it’s time for you to go, we need somebody that can do something.”
“The current government has no power,” Elmi concludes, joining what seems to have become a universally held realization among Somalis. “The militias are two blocks away from them, I don’t even know how they stay there.”
Less unanimous is the prediction of what is to come next, though all seem to agree that the solution to Somalia’s problems needs to be a Somali one. “Foreign intervention is always bad,” said Sharif, saying that Somalis acknowledge and condemn foreign responsibilities, but generally “blame themselves” for the state of their country. “Change has to come from the people themselves.”
“Maybe all foreigners should get their hands off Somalia,” Elmi said. “Except for when there’s human rights abuses which then becomes everyone’s business.”
“Somalis are capable of bringing their country together, he added. “In the ‘90sSomaliadidn’t have a functional government yet its economy was better than that about 18 other countries in Africa that had stable governments,” he said also pointing out to the current phenomenon of Somali regional development, which is occurring independently from the government. “For example, if you want to get electricity in your house, it takes seven days to get it in Somalia, whereas if you go to Kenya or Ethiopia you have to wait over two months.”
“Somalis have to realize that lack of governance is bad for everybody,” he added. “If you have the power today you won’t have that power for very long; if you victimize today you will be a victim tomorrow.”
“Somalis’ number one enemy is the Somalis, them not coming together for a common goal,” he concluded. “Foreign interference done in bad faith is not helping, but what is the Somalis’ common goal? That question has not been answered and the only people that can answer that question are the Somali people and the Somali Republic.”
Quoting Khalif Hired, the Vice Chairman of the Somali American Community Association, who quickly dropped by the group’s weekly round table, Elmi said, “Unless the Somalis talk to each other, ain’t nothing gonna happen.”