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by Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Saturday, April 19, 2008
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The SRSG for Somalia Mr. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah | |
It is almost a nightmare to talk about the Somali politics which gyrates within a cycle of evil as it rolls over a landscape of anarchy and destitution with little or virtually no hope (if trends remain unaltered) to escape from ending up in the bottom of a dark ocean. Though some people believe that there could be no darker days in Somali history than the present situation of living under the occupation of a neighboring country, Ethiopia, I still see light at the end of the tunnel. But my flame of hope is often disturbed by winds of uncertainty which gather around intensely to evoke a fear of losing the flame itself but unable to blow it off. Threats never diminish my strength, they only harden my spirits.
Somalia has been burning over the past 17 years but that does not mean that the chaos and strife currently sweeping across Somalia cannot be quelled. There has been more than 20 reconciliation conference at local and international level in which tens of millions of dollars have been spent in each conference. But still that does not mean that we should not give peace a chance one more time. The huge money spent in the previous failed reconciliation conferences could have benefited our people and country had it been directly injected in our economy. The fact that it has been wasted or otherwise not generated the desired results does not necessarily mean that the International community should not support any more conferences or complain that they have been fatigued by previous donations.
There are signs of improvement on the part of the UN to sort out differences through dialogue and understanding rather than at gunpoint. But without the will of the Somalis can there be anything the UN can do in somalia? By plunging itself in a situation where the Somalis themselves are not ready for peace, will be like birthing a baby from a women who is not at all pregnant. In that case, behind the shadow of the UN moves we have to ask ourselves: Are Somali faction groups tired of war and ready to put justice in place or is it justice itself what they are running from? Are they ready to come up with a viable strategy to re-establish police and military forces, relocate the displaced people to their original settlements, bring refugees back home, revitalize the dismantled social services such as schools, hospitals, roads and water points, feed the hungary child and save mothers who bleed to death during child birth, rebuild the tattered history and cultural ethics of our people.
After all will they join hand in hand to wipe out those tears of pain drying in the eyes of Mother Somalia or are they the ones who in the first place made her cry? Will Ould-Abdallah succeed where others failed? Would he succeed to reconcile the opposing Somali groups who have been quite adamant to meet under any circumstances if this or that condition was not met? Can he convince such people to institute an authority that can allow Somalia to have its place of honor and existence in the international set up? From experience we have learned that sidelining or otherwise marginalizing one group will lead to a sudden failure to the outcome of the conference. If at all a conference is presided over, will all parties be inclusive or some group will be left out who would lurk in the dark, waiting for a chance to stab what comes out from the conference?
Before we venture further deep into matters related to the ongoing efforts, let us take a glimpse on similar initiatives of the past and see how they were born and how they died. Way back in 1992 the UN assigned Dr. James Jona, then under secretary of UN chief to undertake a mission aimed at appeasing the USC wings in Mogadishu to stop the war and open corridors of peace for safe delivery of humanitarian supplies. Ali Mahdi Mohamed and General Mohamed Farah Aideed, the two faction leaders then fighting in Mogadishu, were at loggerheads in a fierce battle that saw thousands of innocent people lose their lives. Dr. Jona could not bring the two men together in the same table to sign a peace agreement but outwitted them by getting hold of ceasefire document signed by the two opposing sides. Since the two men had not met in a negotiating table on grounds that each one did not recognize the other´s title, we assume that Dr. Jona made them sign two separate papers which pleased each one when he saw the other was missing from the paper he was signing.
Those days Ali Mahdi Mohamed claimed to be the Somali Interim government of a provisional government set up in Djibouti 1991 while General Aideed who dismissed that claim as null and void styled himself as the chairman of the United Somali Congress USC with a grand following mainly from his clan and from those small clans that felt threatened unless they became allied with a stronger one.
But it was not without a reason to have matters handled in such a delicate way. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were perishing in the tune of hundreds on daily basis due to hunger, disease and starvation. Only those at the scene can understand how blessing it was for Mogadishu inhabitants to see that the agreement has been signed signed and food allowed to come in. For Dr. Jona it was a sigh of relief as he crossed a major hurdle that had put his mission on the balance, but for the starving child it was nothing less than a breath of life. Being a Unicef staff member, I seldom feel haunted or even shocked when I remember the grisly scenes of death to which I was exposed those days. However, the fragile peace brokered by the UN did not last long as inter-caln shooting started in the city while a new wave of conflict flared up in towns and villages outside Mogadishu.
The UN peace intervention did not stop there. In April 1992 Ambassador Mohamed Sahnuni has been appointed as the Special Representative of the Secretary General in Somalia. Amb. Sahnúni came with a broad initiative of bringing all factions within the framework of a national perspective but his efforts were hampered by comments he had made in a Geneva conference on 12 october 1992. He sopke about UN activities in somalia which Butrous Ghali understood as a criticism. The Ambassador said that between January 1991 when Siad Barre regime was toppled to the time war broke out between Mahdi and Aideed (ten months later) there was an opportunity to fill the vacuum which unfortunately did not happen. In hearing these words, Butrous Ghali the then Secretary General of the UN sent a letter to Ambassador Sahnuni, which finally led to a hasty exit of the Ambassador. Again the UN peace efforts died in the middle of nowhere.
In December of the same year 1992, multinational forces led by the US have landed in the beaches of Mogadishu with a clear mission of restoring hope. Ambassador Robert Oakley, a former Ambassador to Somalia, made a historic move to put off the fire that had been raging on in Mogadishu. Unlike Jona, Oakley has succeeded to bring Mahdi and Aideed in the same venue. A meeting was presided at the US embassy in Mogadishu where the two leaders have met as part of mood setting strategy to create an environment conducive to future talks between the two leaders. But the initiative never took off as it was marred by attacks against American positions in Mogadishu when Aideed´s SNA group learned that the Americans have facilitated Gen Morgan and his militia to zoom into, and subsequently seize the port city of Kismayo.
In the early months of 1993 A reconciliation conference has been held in Addis Abeba in which 16 factions agreed to set up a transitional administration for somalia but nothing has materialized out of that meeting. Things went out of hand when UNOSOM started to set up district administrations while other factions have started to do the same in the zones they were controlling. This has brought a disruption of the Addis initiative which later degenerated to an all out confrontation between the Somalis and the UN.
In May 1993 The American led multinational forces have transferred the torch to UNOSOM and immediately new strides towards making peace has been embarked upon. The retired US General Admiral Howe came upon the scene. And again reconciliation efforts went to the rocks like a broken marriage, sparking off a war which ( later dubbed as "Black Hawk Down") between the SNA and the US led UN forces. In the aftermath of this war several UN Special Representatives have been nominated such as Dr. Lasanga kuoyote who presided a reconciliation conference in Nairobi in 1994 . Unfortunately shooting started in Mogadishu well before the reconciliation conference has been concluded .That was yet another UN failure to reconcile the Somalis which marked the demise of a the most expensive intervention experiment in Africa.
The history of the Somali reconciliation efforts took a twist when Dr. David Stevens took charge of the UN office for political affairs. The office has worked within the limits of its mandate by facilitating reconciliation initiatives proposed by Somalis and not imposing on Somalis something that had originated from the UN. A case in point is the Arta conference held in Djibouti in late 1999 to early 2000 which the UN office has provided operational and logistics expenses to ensure that the conference went smoothly and without financial and technical problems. The Djibouti government, the people and the President Dr. Ismail Omer Guelle deserve our gratitude and appreciation for the commendable support they have accorded to their Somali brethren. But the TNG that has been instituted in Djibouti became a hostage for the warlords who refused to take part in the Arta conference. The TNG has later died a sad death, making the Djibouti reconciliation project a new statistic in the Somali reconciliation obituaries, one more tomb in the graveyard of horror. That was another failure, another lost chance, another resource unnecessarily wasted
In mid 2002 a new Reconciliation map has been charted for Somalia with UN assistance. A conference has been convened in Embagathi Kenya which unfortunately did not bear the desired fruits. Though a government has been instituted after a two year deliberations we can still count it as a failure. The Embagathi conference was no more than a new pregnancy which was terminated before the baby was born as the joint IGAD-Warlord parliament, which was set up to represent the core of the state functions in terms of law making, has turned on each other, resulting a broad day light scuffle in a foreign country. The seeds of conflict sown that day, or perhaps before, has led to an ugly gap which continued yawning till the government asked Ethiopia to invade its own county. Now one advice to you Mr.Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah. if you can bring the opposing factions to a negotiating table please do it but if you can’t please leave the fire as it is now. Do not put more fuel.
Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Writer and Film maker
Gävle, Sweden
[email protected]