Amazing, I’d forgotten all about it! Well, no, not really. I just haven’t posted on it in a while. There’s a batch of recent news regarding Somalia to get through. First up, a large chunk of what used to be Somalia has broken away. It’s been largely peaceful for the last two decades and I guess the people are tired of the shenanigans of the southern region.  As a matter of fact, here’s an article about the peaceful transition from one president to another after elections (which were also peaceful). Crazy, huh? What’s crazier is that his country, Somaliland, isn’t recognized as its own state because basically we’re still backing the supposed central government down in Mogadishu.

Somalia, Puntland, Somaliland

It’s not that I’m making any moral or philosophical arguments about democracy or the right of the people etc, etc. It’s that Somaliland at least appears to be a functional state whereas Somalia is not. It might just be better to work with them to try to restore some semblance of order to the Horn of Africa region. The Shabab don’t like it: An official of the hard-line Shabab militia that controls much of southern Somalia said: “The election is a sham and a dictation of anti-Islamic forces”, which means surely it’s a good thing.

Puntland, on the other hand, still claims a place as part of Somalia proper. And yet it’s run mostly autonomously by a regional administration. Like Somaliland though, it has remained mostly peaceful since the beginning of the conflict following Siad Barre’s downfall and which engulfed the southern part of Somalia.

For a fairly decent history of Somalia, the Somalian Civil War, and for explanations of key players and organizations such as the ICU, Al-Shabaab, and the TFG, read the articles on Wikipedia. It’s not necessary to read everything to understand the articles I’m posting today, but it would be enlightening.

Alright, to move on let me just mention a couple more headlines. First, Al-Shabaab launched a raid against a hotel to kill members of the TFG. This story is not significant for that, but it does illustrate a couple of points. One is that the insurgents are nearly unstoppable, at least in that part of Somalia. The federal forces and AU forces seem incapable of stopping them from doing much of anything. The other point is that in reality, the Shabaab control most of the part of Somalia that isn’t either  Somaliland or Puntland, as I mentioned earlier.

But I’m keeping the update on how things are in Somalia brief. Not much has really changed since Ethiopian forces pulled out after accomplishing what they wanted to do, which was destabilize Somalia. The so-called national government lacks any real power, holds almost none of Somalia, and can barely protect itself in Mogadishu even with the help of African Union peacekeepers.

I’ve covered Somalia (not in a way that I’d call in-depth, but it’s more than most people do) before, and I’m not about to rehash what I said before. But I will restate that it was moronic of the Bush administration to treat the Islamic Courts Union as a hostile entity and support the Ethiopian invasion. Somalia has never had what you could really call a democratic government. Siad Barre was merely a warlord who could wield enough power to keep the others from rebelling. For the first time, it seemed like an indigenous movement towards some kind of order was coalescing. Ethiopia (with our support) shattered that movement. Now, as I’ve stated before, the media has been covering this as if it were a case of Islamic extremists fighting a legitimate government. If anything, the Islamists have more legitimacy than a government that was installed with international approval. Would you want your President put in place by the European Union? Probably not.

Maybe I haven’t stated before, however, that the conflict in Somalia should never have been framed in terms of Islam versus whatever. The religion of the people fighting has never been important. For almost 20 years, Muslims have been fighting and killing each other in Somalia. They also do drugs and drink beer. It’s definitely legitimate to wonder how much of the Islamic movement in Somalia is a reaction to the excesses of those past 20 years. But it’s also legitimate to question whether religion is really a notable factor in this conflict.

To take a parallel (maybe not terribly close, but still instructive), examine the historical motivations for The Crusades. Of many proximal reasons, it can perhaps be best explained by a surplus population and the easy outlet of culturally distinct people to make war against. The wars made economic sense at the time. This is not to say there were not those who went to war for the sake of religion, but definitely that large-scale expeditions would not have occurred simply for the sake of beliefs. Religion definitely served as a justification after the fact.

The current war in its earlier phase was entirely between the clans (and if you really, really care to understand the complex relationships between the clans and subclans as far as who was fighting who, I’ll let you research that) while in this later phase it appears that a new force has entered, namely the Islamic fighters of the Shabab. However, I think that the fact that this organization is Islamic in conception has overshadowed the reality of the situation. It’s true that it broke away from the Islamic Courts Union after the Ethiopian and TFG campaign left that group almost powerless. This tends to give people the idea that there was a monolithic Islamic group to begin with. The truth is that there were already Islamic courts, a custom not unfamiliar in Islamic countries. They only rose to power (such as it was) by deciding that Somalia had had enough of war. Remember that their first targets were the warlords who were still tearing up the country. Warlords who were (and are) Islamic. To finish the history lesson very quickly, the TNG came in. When it looked like there might be peace and compromise, Ethiopia came in and knocked out the ICU.

At exactly that point, this fight became one between a foreign power (and what might be called their puppet government) and the insurgents. Now it’s true that the TFG does have some legitimacy and some power. But it’s also true that there was a sort of power in place already. From any perspective it’s hard to claim that a government that is self-appointed but indigenous is less valid than one that is both self-appointed and foreign. Ethiopia, having backed out of the war after having accomplished what they set out to do, namely destabilize Somalia (despite the claims of some Bush bootlickers) left the country in chaos, and at this point there are still the two warring factions.

Lest the reader not have understood the point already, this was, and is, a conflict in an entirely Muslim nation between nominally Muslim forces. It is a conflict between a home-grown, very primitive form of democratic government vs. an installed regime. Does this sound familiar? As I have in basically all my other posts on Somalia, I must once again criticize western news outlets for a slanted and essentially worthless treatment of this situation.

Make no mistake; I do not sympathize with the fools who go around enforcing their mistaken notion of strict Sharia. But peace might be possible if we were determined to approach it with the interests of the various Somali factions in mind instead of our own. And how could we possibly know what those are if the only way approach this conflict is as part of the War on Terror?