By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein

From May 21-23, the international coalition supporting Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) held the latest of its series of conferences on the country’s persistent conflicts, in Istanbul under the sponsorship of the United Nations and Turkey.

Titled “The Political, Security and Reconstruction Conference for Somalia,” the gathering was attended by representatives from 55 states and 12 international organizations. The outcome of the conference, which was stated in its “Istanbul Declaration”  issued on May 22, marked a continuation of the coalition’s position towards Somalia and engendered only perfunctory interest in international, regional, and local media, which noted that it had produced no new substantive commitments. The absence of substance, however, is of interest from an analytical standpoint, raising the question of why the coalition has reaffirmed a position that has allowed southern and central Somalia to enter a state of frozen warfare between the T.F.G. and its domestic allies of convenience, and the revolutionary Islamist opposition to the T.F.G. that controls at least 80 percent of Somalia’s southern and central regions.

The following analysis is an effort to explain the coalition’s strategic position, which for a broad spectrum of Somali opinion, appears, at best, to be counter-productive and, at worst, destructive, and seems to be incomprehensible.

The Declaration and its Absences
 
The Istanbul Declaration indicates a position of denial that is symptomatic of deferral and hesitation to take any decisive action on the part of the international coalition; it reveals, through its absences,  a disconnect between what is transpiring on the ground in southern and central Somalia, and the coalition’s reading of the situation.

Having expressed “its full support to President Sh. Sharif Ahmed and the Transitional Federal Institutions,”  and having called upon donors and the T.F.G. to make good on commitments made in previous conferences, “the Conference placed particular emphasis on the urgency for the Transitional Federal Government to address its considerable political, economic and security challenges.”

The disconnection between aspiration and operation opens up here. With only a few districts of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu under its control and even that being dependent on the protective armor of an African Union peacekeeping mission (AMISOM), the T.F.G. is in no position to address any challenges. It does not have the military resources necessary to break through its encirclement by the Islamists in Mogadishu; it does not have the funds to provide services to the population, much less to undertake reconstruction and development projects, and the aid that it receives is siphoned off to its self-dealing officials; and, as the conference met, the T.F.G. was torn by a constitutional crisis that left its institutions non-functional. By calling upon donors to honor their previous pledges, the participants in the conference were urging themselves to do what they have refused to do. The conference was demanding of the T.F.G. actions that it could not perform because in great part the conference’s participants had starved the T.F.G. of the resources that it would need to fulfill their requirements. During the conference, the Islamist movements made territorial gains in Mogadishu and came within one-half of a kilometer from the presidential palace, forcing AMISOM armor into the streets to contain them.

The disconnect grows wider as the Declaration proceeds to “welcome the progress” made by the T.F.G. by its “continued outreach and political reconciliation with those outside the peace process” initiated by the Djibouti agreement of 2009, citing agreements by the T.F.G. with the Sufi movement Ahlu Sunna wal-Jama’a (A.S.W.J.) in March 2010 and the Puntland regional state in northeast Somalia in August 2009 and April 2010; and urging Puntland to maintain its “political cooperation with the T.F.G.” The Declaration failed to mention that the March agreement had caused a split within A.S.W.J. and had been one of the major factors responsible for the T.F.G.’s constitutional crisis because it involved power sharing that would have deprived some T.F.G. officials of their positions. The agreement with A.S.W.J. has yet to be implemented and on May 24 A.S.W.J. announced that it would not integrate its militias into the T.F.G.’s security forces. The Declaration also elides the fact that the T.F.G. almost immediately reneged on its August 2009 agreement with Puntland, and that the April 2010 agreement was forced on Puntland by the active members of the international coalition and was restricted to anti-piracy cooperation, leaving out political integration, which had been the heart of the August 2009 accord. Since the August 2009 agreement, Puntland has diminished its political cooperation with the T.F.G. due to the T.F.G.’s behavior and the condoning of it by the international coalition.

The proximate cause of the disconnect between the streets and the conference table is the international coalition’s unwillingness or inability (a combination of both is most likely) to acknowledge its part in and take some responsibility for the weakness and divisions in the T.F.G. The coalition’s members seek to fulfill their own and often conflicting interests in Somalia. They come together to coordinate as best they can in attempts to shape Somalia’s political landscape, united on the goals of suppressing revolutionary transnationalist Islamism and piracy, but they are committed to those goals with varying degrees of dedication, because other interests interfere. They are the ones who engineered the original T.F.G. and its post-Djibouti successor. They are the ones who hold the T.F.G.’s purse strings tightly and bankroll AMISOM. They are the ones who reneged on their promise to institute a U.N. peacekeeping mission, leaving AMISOM with the thankless mandate that restricts it to defending the T.F.G.’s perimeter. To admit their responsibility for the T.F.G. would mean a painful admission of failure and the need to formulate a more coherent strategy.

Of the international coalition’s failures, the most important and serious is its ineffective political strategy, which is to retain the original clan-based T.F.G., populated by warlords and self-serving clan politicians; and then, having grafted on to it conciliatory Islamist factions opposed to the revolutionary Islamists, expand it to include even more factions. Already severely factionalized, the T.F.G. was a cracked and sinking foundation on which to build durable institutions. Adding Sh. Sharif’s wing of the Islamic Courts movement to the T.F.G. by doubling the latter’s size immediately opened up a new division between the old guard and the new guard – no reconciliation had been effected before the merger was consummated, and each side pressed for advantage, crippling the institutions to the point of their collapse as the Istanbul conference met. Local analyst Ali Abdullahi commented precisely on the T.F.G.’s situation in an interview with Voice of America’s Peter Clottey: “We have a power struggle that has boiled down to a constitutional crisis. Whenever you have a power struggle, the insurgents become more powerful.”

Building haphazardly on a defective foundation, the big players in the international coalition –  the U.S., Western European powers, the U.N., the African Union, Kenya, and Ethiopia – helped to precipitate the constitutional crisis, in which Sh. Sharif dismissed the T.F.G.’s prime minister and then reinstated him, leaving in the process the transitional parliament without a speaker, by engineering the March 2010 agreement with A.S.W.J. that required power sharing with A.S.W.J. without further expanding the T.F.G.  A fight to gain and hold positions, which had become a scarce resource, resulted. Implementation of the agreement is stalled, perhaps permanently. The attempt to implant A.S.W.J. into the T.F.G. was, again made prior to factional reconciliation, insuring more divisive conflict. The group of actively involved players that speak in the name of the international coalition has pursued the strategy of agglomerating contending factions into a factionalized T.F.G. without proper – or any – preparation, setting the stage for further factionalization.  A government that is formed in such a way cannot be expected to be strong, rendering inadequate military and financial support to it subsidiary concerns.

The international coalition is responsible for what the T.F.G. has become. It will not admit responsibility; therefore, it goes into denial.

The remainder of the Declaration is mostly comprised of directives to the T.F.G. and Somali stakeholders that they cannot fulfill, such as establishing a unified command and control structure for nominally T.F.G. military forces and allied militias, and setting up a partnership between the T.F.G., business interests, civil society organizations, women, the Diaspora and the international community for economic development. Neither of those directives can be fulfilled given the T.F.G.’s weakness and lack of credibility, not to mention broader divisions in Somali society. The resolve of the international coalition to partner with the T.F.G. on economic development and reconstructed was indicated when the conference rejected the one concrete proposal made to the participants by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which was for a “business Compact” between the “international community,” the T.F.G., and business interests. The Declaration simply “looks forward to further consideration of a business Compact for Somalia.”

In summary, the Declaration tells the T.F.G. that it “must discharge its responsibilities to assure safe access to vulnerable populations, deliver basic services, manage public resources wisely and ensure a just distribution of resources, introduce anti-corruption measures, develop and support the private sector, and build the capacity of its financial institutions.” On its side, the “international community should continue its support to the Somali people.” That the T.F.G. “must” and the international community “should” speaks volumes itself. If the members of the international coalition do not do what they say they “should” do, the T.F.G. will have no chance at all, however small, to do what it “must” do, even in the best of circumstances – and the T.F.G. is in the worst of circumstances.

Having given the T.F.G. its marching orders, the Conference thanked AMISOM for its contribution to “lasting peace and stability in Somalia,” and acknowledged the contributions of “Somalia’s neighbors in promoting peace, security and development in Somalia.” One can leave those expressions without extensive comment: AMISOM is part of the conflict and fires artillery rounds into civilian neighborhoods where the revolutionary Islamists are positioned; Ethiopia is making incursions over its border with Somalia and backing warlord and clan militias there; and Kenya is trying to create a security zone for its own protection on its border with Somalia.

The Declaration ends with a section titled “The Transitional Federal Government reaffirmed,” in which the conference repeats its marching orders to the T.F.G., adding that the T.F.G. should “seek innovative ways to engage with the Somali people to draft the Somali Federal Constitution,” and to “take ownership of the tasks necessary to facilitate the full implementation of the transitional arrangement.” On May 21, when the conference began, the chair of the transitional parliament’s Committee on the Constitution announced that the committee had “halted its work,” because the constitutional crisis had put its legality in question, and due to its “concerns that the international community might interfere in our work.”

The final words of the Declaration proclaim that the conference made “a significant contribution to the efforts towards achieving peace, security and development in Somalia.”

Diagnosis of the Disconnect

Why does the international coalition pursue a counter-productive and destructive strategy in Somalia?

Beyond a reluctance to admit failure and deeper than the coalition’s own internal divisions is an underlying dilemma faced by the coalition’s major players – the donor powers (U.S., European Union, and Western European states). Having created a flawed T.F.G., they are hesitant to provide it with sufficient support in any form. They will not do the intensive diplomatic work necessary for political integration; they will not release the funds for security and reconstruction, because they fear that they will be wasted or diverted to the revolutionary Islamists; and they will not install a U.N. peacekeeping mission or expand AMISOM’s mandate, because their political engineering is defective and they do not want to be responsible for politically and economically reconstituting a Somalia in which the revolutionary Islamists have been defeated. Therefore they persist in deferring decisive action; they have staked their bets on the T.F.G. and have no appetite for starting afresh with another constitutional conference or, at the extreme, making Somalia a trust territory. On the other hand, they are not willing to leave Somali factions alone to sort things out for themselves, because they fear a revolutionary Islamist takeover of the entire country. As a result, they remain in place, because no other option is consistent with their perceived interests.

At the bottom of the dilemma and the consequent hesitancy is the fact that Somalia is not at the top of the list of the donor powers’ priorities. Washington is trying to unwind wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, adjust its relations with the BRIC countries, deal with domestic political opposition that seeks to undermine the Obama administration, and manage a financial and fiscal crisis among other pressing issues. The European powers are also constrained to cope with the financial crisis and have more important international interests – relations with Russia, for example – than Somalia. Washington, in particular, is over-extended in its global commitments. As a result the donor powers end up taking half measures. They do not leave Somalia alone, but they do not genuinely help it; and they rely on proxies, particularly on Ethiopia, which is far more important to them than the T.F.G. or Somalia, and which has its own interests – particularly in practicing a divide-and-rule strategy in Somalia -that are not always consistent with those of the donor powers.

The international coalition has no special attachment to the T.F.G.; the transitional government is merely an imperfect stopgap, as is AMISOM; they are temporary repairs that have become permanent fixtures by default. The members of the international coalition are likely to remain in their present strategic position for as long as they can possibly hold it – their perceived interests are not convergent with the interests of the Somali people.

Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University in Chicago   weinstem@purdue.edu

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