Reports
that the forces of ‘transitional president’
Abdullahi Yusuf and his Ethiopian allies
by I.M. Lewis.
Monday, April 16,
2007
|
NOT ARRESTED YET! |
Reports that
the forces of ‘transitional president’ Abdullahi
Yusuf and his Ethiopian allies
have committed war crimes against
civilians in the course of trying to subdue the
citizens of Mogadishu is no surprise. Much more
surprising, and morally satisfying, is the news that
the European ministers and officials, who have so
vociferously and uncritically supported Abdillahi in
his bid to represent himself as Somali President,
may also be implicated in these charges. Whatever
the judicial position, the European Union is
certainly morally guilty of doing its upmost to prop
up the essentially otiose transitional federal
government, whose only significant political action
since its formation has been to get the Ethiopians
to try to force their authority on Somalia. What is
particularly astonishing, and in my view
inexcusable, is the imperialistic behaviour of the
European politicians and bureacrats in completely
ignoring Somali public opinion and its overwhelming
rejection of Col. Abdillahi and his followers.
There
are many causal strands in the present conflagration
of violence in Mogadishu, but the most obvious and
the most regrettable is the external recognition
that Abdillahi has been given by people who clearly
have closed their minds to his lack of support
within Somalia. One could say that it is only
ignorance, but I am afraid that it is worse than
that, it is wilful ignorance on the part of those
whose democratic values seem not to be applied to
the Horn of Africa. There is certainly no lack of
ignorance within Somalia on how Abdillahi was
appointed transitional president with massive
Ethiopian support and how, with Ethiopian prompting,
he chose as prime minister their candidate, a
connection of Prime Minister Meles himself. These
links to Addis Ababa underlie the Ethiopian
invasion. Another obvious link is,of course, the
loosely organised Islamic Courts whose
unwisely bellicose threats to
Ethiopia, were provoked by Abdillahi’s reliance on
the Ethiopians. Thus, in Somali ears the uninformed
chorus of EU approval appeared to embrace the
supporting role of the Ethiopians and to attack the
Islamists. It only remained for the Americans (for
whom the Ethiopians acted locally) to enter the
fray, inevitably against the Islamic Courts a tiny
minority of whose leaders were actually extremists.
The
Americans, of course, are equally ignorant of the
really amazing achievements of the Islamists’ brief
months in power in southern Somalia.The Courts, with
their mostly humble and poorly educated local
leaders, did more to restore order and social
progress there than the US has done in Iraq in four
years. Nevertheless, the suspected connexions of a
minority of the Courts’ leaders played into the
hands of Abdillahi who, not for the first time,
portrayed his enemies as Muslim terrorists. He still
does this, of course, and fails to distinguish those
who actually fit the description and those who are
simply local citizens who consider that he has no
legitimacy. As a former separatist guerilla leader,
like his Ethiopian friend Meles, he might be
expected to easily recognise birds of the same
feather. However, he protests suspiciously loudly
and in his claims, to be fighting Islamist
terrorists includes in the same rubric non-Islamist
tribal militias representing the ordinary citizens
of Mogadishu. After the terrible atrocities which
have been comitted in his name these local people
will never forgive him. Abdillahi thus has no chance
of ever ruling Mogadishu—except under the kind of
dictatorial oppression that his ignominious
predecessor General Mohamed Siyad Barre practised
with American and Italian support.
Is
this what the European Union wants? God knows what
the Americans might want: the obscene results of
their imperialist adventures in other parts of the
Islamic world give little cause for optimism
I.M. Lewis
