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| Last Updated: Nov 30, 2009 - 2:47:40 AM |
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''The Failure of 'Reconciliation' and 'Reconstitution' Opens Up a Political Vacuum in Somalia''
25 Sep 25, 2007 - 7:19:53 PM
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ith the closing on August 30 of Somalia's National Reconciliation
Conference (N.R.C.), which was sponsored by the country's
internationally-backed Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G) and
failed to produce substantive and enforceable agreements; and the
conclusion on September 12 of the Somali Congress for Liberation and
Reconstitution (S.C.L.R.), which brought together the country's
political oppositions and narrowed its focus to the single aim of
removing Ethiopian occupying forces, a political vacuum has opened up
in Somalia.
The
two conferences were the only political events on the horizon that
carried any prospects for the movement of Somalia toward political
integration and the reversal of the devolutionary cycle into which the
country has fallen. Their failures to engage the form of a future
political order in Somalia, the disposition of political forces within
such an order, and the way toward power-sharing has shown that neither
the T.F.G., which initiated the N.R.C. at the urging of Western donor
powers, nor the opposition is united enough within itself to provide
Somalia with a credible political formula and is much less disposed to
compromise with its rival. With no other major political initiatives in
the offing at a national level, PINR expects fragmentation to persist
in Somalia as power devolves to regional, local, clan and sectoral
centers and solidarities. The signs of political evolution in Somalia
that PINR noted in its August 20 report have for the most part been
erased and have been replaced by the possibility of violent
polarization within a devolutionary context.
The Failure of "Reconciliation"
As
PINR has noted, the N.R.C. was compromised from its inception.
Originally pressed upon the T.F.G. by external actors as an instrument
for political reconciliation with its non-violent political opposition,
the T.F.G.'s president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed -- in a move to preserve
the power of the transitional executive -- transformed the conference
into a meeting to resolve disputes among the country's clans,
effectively avoiding engagement with political issues and finessing the
donor powers, which acquiesced in his counter-initiative.
After
two weeks of discussions on clan-related issues, which resulted in
commitments to a cease-fire, disarmament and restoration of property
stolen in clan conflicts, the N.R.C.'s chair, Ali Mahdi Mohamed,
abruptly announced on August 1 that the clan phase of the conference
had ended successfully and that its political phase would now begin.
Mahdi's action, which was greeted with skepticism by many delegates and
observers, came in response to pressure from donors who were holding
their purse strings tightly.
The political phase of the N.R.C.
effectively ended on August 9, when rancorous debate over the issue of
natural resource distribution led to the adjournment of the conference.
Members of the Hawiye clan family attending the conference also asked
for an adjournment in order to mount an effort that proved unsuccessful
to persuade Hawiye factions that had boycotted the N.R.C. to
participate.
When the N.R.C. reopened on August 19, the majority
of delegates signed a document reaffirming their August 1 agreement
without providing enforcement mechanisms for the cease-fire or
disarmament, and devolving property restitution to an arbitration
committee.
On August 22, political debate on the definition of
religious extremism, which had not been resolved in early August, was
revived and once again reached no conclusion, with some delegates
arguing that there was no "religious war" in Somalia and others
contending that the killing of civilians and suicide bombings are
"un-Islamic." On the same day, Somalia's ambassador to Kenya, Mohamed
Abdi Nur, announced that the N.R.C. would end on August 31, stating
that the T.F.G. would provide a plan for "all Somalis belonging to the
different segments of society regardless of their political
orientations and shades of opinion." On August 29, Mahdi announced that
the N.R.C. would conclude the next day, angering many delegates who
believed that matters of concern to their clans had not been adequately
addressed.
The closure of the N.R.C., which had run its
projected 45 days, was due in greatest part to unwillingness of donors
to provide more funds and also to fears of the T.F.G. executive that
the conference might get out of control addressing political issues.
Mahdi, who had recently returned from Nairobi where he had been meeting
with donors, told the N.R.C. on August 29 that he blamed opposition
groups that had boycotted the N.R.C. for making donors reluctant to
fund the conference adequately, adding that he had persuaded the donors
-- the European Union, United States and United Nations -- at least to
pay the promised stipends of the delegates.
At the closing
ceremonies, Mahdi said that reconciliation would "continue at the
regional and village level," and Yusuf assured that he was "ready to
hand power over to whomever is elected by the people" in projected 2009
elections for a permanent government. Delegates were divided on the
outcome of the N.R.C., with some stressing that it was a victory for
2,000 representatives from all the regions of Somalia to have met at
all, and others saying that the conference amounted to no more than a
paid vacation for provincial elders that -- as clan leader Ali Hassan
Barrow from the Hiraan region put it in a closing speech -- left the
delegates with "nothing in hand."
Representatives of donor
powers, regional states and regional organizations -- the U.N., African
Union (A.U.) and Arab League (A.L.), China, Norway, Ethiopia and Egypt
-- attended the closing ceremony. The U.N.'s special representative for
Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, spoke for them, calling on the T.F.G.
to "reach out to all opposition groups inside and outside Somalia," and
on the international community to support the T.F.G.'s efforts to
extend its authority, and to support the under-manned and under-funded
A.U. peacekeeping mission (AMISOM) in Somalia -- a simple repetition of
the position the donor powers had taken before the N.R.C. was convened.
The
most telling point was made by a Western diplomat speaking to Agence
France-Presse on condition of anonymity: "We know that this conference
has gone nowhere. The problem is blind confidence in the T.F.G. We all
wanted to support it and we did; it did not rise to the occasion, so we
need a different approach now." What such an approach might be remains
at best unclear with the T.F.G. walking away from the conference with
no obligations but to disarm clan militias and integrate their members
into its forces, which it is not likely to accomplish despite general
agreement on those goals at the N.R.C.
The N.R.C. met in
Somalia's official capital Mogadishu against a backdrop of an escalated
insurgency at the same levels that PINR noted in its August 20 report.
Ethiopian and T.F.G. forces were generally able to protect the
conference, although a leading delegate from the Hawiye clan was
assassinated on August 19, and two delegates from Puntland were wounded
in one of the several attacks on hotels housing delegates. The jihadist
Youth Mujahideen Movement (Y.M.M.) took credit for more of the attacks
than it had previously done, and they persisted in the face of a
security crackdown and a flight of residents from the neighborhoods
most affected by violence to areas immediately south of Mogadishu,
where they took refuge in squalid and unhealthy refugee camps.
Inter-clan violence also continued, notably in the central Hiraan and
Galguduud regions, casting doubt on the credibility of the cease-fire
agreement at the N.R.C.
On September 17, Yusuf was in Saudi
Arabia, where he and some former delegates to the N.R.C. signed the
pact that had been agreed upon at the conference. The ceremony, which
was attended by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, was not a new step
forward in reconciliation, but a symbolic event aimed at showing Arab
support for Yusuf's version of reconciliation. Yusuf also took the
opportunity to call for a U.N. peacekeeping mission that would include
both Arab and African contingents. There were reports that Washington
had urged Riyadh to support the T.F.G. in order to isolate its domestic
opposition. The opposition quickly announced its rejection of the pact.
Having
achieved no substantive reconciliation, the N.R.C. also does not appear
to have strengthened Yusuf's power base. The T.F.G. remains a weak
protagonist in Somalia's tangled conflicts, and it has probably lost
some of the "blind confidence" of the donor powers in it.
The Failure of "Reconstitution"
The
political alternative to the N.R.C. was the S.C.L.R. held by the
T.F.G.'s political oppositions in Asmara from September 6 through
September 12. PINR had previously noted tendencies toward coalescence
in the opposition that might have made it a credible movement that
could pressure the T.F.G. into power-sharing negotiations, but that
possibility was not realized in the face of divisions among the
opposition's components -- the Islamic Courts Council (I.C.C.), which
controlled most of southern Somalia before an Ethiopian intervention
ousted it in December 2006; dissident members of the transitional
parliament favoring an accord with the I.C.C.; significant portions of
the Somali diaspora; nationalists; and dissident clan warlords, notably
the former T.F.G. deputy prime minister and defense minister, Hussein
Farah Aideed.
Originally planned as a vehicle to form a national
political opposition, the S.C.L.R. was narrowed down -- as a result of
the inability of the opposition factions to agree on a common political
formula -- only to address the aim of removing Ethiopian occupation
forces from Somalia. The I.C.C. remained insistent on a Somalia ruled
by Shari'a law; the "Free Parliament" and the diaspora groups favored a
wider power-sharing agreement involving the T.F.G.; and the
nationalists, who backed out of participating, favored a strong
non-theocratic state transcending clan divisions. Their diverse aims
and support bases made it impossible for the oppositions to engage
political issues, leaving them with a common commitment to resist a
foreign occupation.
Signs that the S.C.L.R. would falter came on
August 28 when the spokesman for the Hawiye sub-clans that had
boycotted the N.R.C., Ahmed Diriye, announced that the anti-T.F.G.
Hawiye elders would not go to Asmara, although they continued to
denounce the N.R.C. as a ploy to gain international support. On
September 1, Diriye reiterated the elders' refusal to participate in
the S.C.L.R., saying that they had been invited and promised flights to
Asmara, but would not attend because the conference had been "mobilized
by people with special interests and has no relationship with Hawiye
tradition and unity clans."
In the absence of the Hawiye, the
S.C.L.R. lacked a base of deeper organized social support, which
weakened its credibility, even as simply a resistance to the Ethiopian
occupation.
Scheduled to open on September 1, S.C.L.R. was
delayed on August 31, when Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, ex-speaker of
Somalia's transitional parliament and leader of the Free Parliament,
announced that sessions would begin on September 6 because of
"technical reasons" and the failure of all the delegates to arrive --
the same reasons given by N.R.C. organizers when that conference was
delayed. Reuters reported that disagreements over the agenda had also
held up the conference.
Hassan made it clear that the conference
would be "short" and would not be "political," adding that "we expect
that the Somali people have realized how to get out of the difficulty
and will touch on where the difficulties are" -- presumably referring
to the Ethiopian occupation. Already on August 25, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh
Ahmed, leader of the I.C.C.'s political wing, had adopted an
unaccustomed militant line, saying that the Ethiopians "will be pushed
out of Somalia by force and we will take back our freedom by force."
The
S.C.L.R. opened on September 6 and the diversity of the opposition was
evident at its outset, centering on the interpretation of the term
"reconstitution."
As a designation of the positive aim of the
conference, "reconstitution" was chosen in deliberate contrast to
"reconciliation," which, for the T.F.G., meant the settling of clan
disputes within the framework of the transitional institutions and
their present officials. The opposition groups were agreed on the
principle that a future political formula for Somalia would
"reconstitute" a national state transcending clan, and one of their few
positive accomplishments was to repudiate the clan-representation
formula on which the T.F.G. is based. Nationalism and promotion of a
strong sovereign state united the opposition rhetorically, but beyond
that consensus collapsed.
The divisions among the opposition
groups hinged on the question of whether "reconstitution" meant
determining a political formula for a future Somali state or simply
forming an alliance aimed at "liberating" the country from Ethiopian
occupation. That the latter was the most that could be expected was
signaled by the withdrawal of the nationalists before the proceedings
began.
The nationalists' pull out was based on their judgment
that the conference would be dominated by the I.C.C. and would not
consider their case for building a single national movement, rather
than an alliance of convenience. They complained that there would be no
attempt to forge a "post-liberation vision," a point also made by
Aideed, who called for a "common agenda, platform and vision," aiming
at a consensus including Somalis who disapproved of the S.C.L.R. The
nationalists now plan to form a Nationalist Movement for Salvation and
Revival of Somalia to resist the occupation and mobilize the population
to create a strong national state.
With the maximum definition
of reconstitution shunted aside, the conference became a tug of war
between its three major elements -- the I.C.C., which held fast to its
formula of a Somali Islamic state, and the diaspora groups and the Free
Parliament faction, which favored a democratic formula for Somalia and
were willing to accept power-sharing negotiations within the T.F.G.
institutions if the Ethiopians withdrew from Somalia.
Confronted
with the I.C.C. as the major grouping among the approximately 400 delegates, the other factions were placed in the position of attempting
to resist its takeover of the opposition. The
Los Angeles Times
reported on September 15 that non-Islamist delegates had walked out of
a session in a dispute over the issue of whether to include the term
"jihad" in the proposed charter for the alliance, and had later
succeeded in keeping the reference out in favor of the more general
term "struggle." On September 14, Garowe Online reported that disputes
had broken out over the institutional structure of the alliance -- a
Central Committee to function as a legislature and an Executive
Committee. Originally the Central Committee was to have 151 members
with 68 apportioned to the I.C.C., but its size was later increased to
191 with 76 apportioned to the I.C.C. to dilute its influence by
including "intellectuals" and representatives of civil-society
organizations.Read Full Report
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