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My Life as a Diplomat |
May 26, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
By NURUDDIN FARAH
Cape Town
WATCHING from afar, people find it difficult
to understand the intractability of the
conflict in Somalia. The cycle of violence,
almost mysteriously, remains uninterrupted.
Peace breaks out. Victory is declared, as it
was a couple of weeks ago when President
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s Transitional Federal
Government declared its triumph over the
rival Islamic Courts Union and the
clan-based militia fighting alongside it.
And then the violence quickly erupts again.
In Somalia, it has been clan versus clan,
Muslim Somalis versus Christian Ethiopians,
for as long as anyone can remember. A recent
United Nations report asserted that a dozen
or so countries — Egypt, Eritrea and Iran
among them — are engaged in trying to
destabilize Somalia.
Why can’t Somalia arrest its downward
spiral?
Well, let me tell you about my brief time as
an emissary between Somalia’s two main
warring factions; perhaps it might help
explain in concrete — and human — terms why
the conflict has become so difficult to
solve and why the transitional government,
backed by the United States and with the
support of Ethiopia, is probably doomed to
fail.
•
My career as an emissary began last July. A
man in the executive directorate of the
Islamic Courts Union, then in control of
Mogadishu, telephoned me in Cape Town, where
I now live. (I was born and raised in
Somalia.) The man, who shall remain
nameless, asked if I would “carry fire
between the two sides,” as the Somali idiom
has it.
The timing was understandable. Talks between
the Islamists and the government had broken
down; the Islamists were laying siege to
Baidoa, the seat of the government, and
Ethiopia was sending troops to defend the
garrisoned town.
The choice of a mediator, however, wasn’t so
readily apparent. “Why me?” I asked.
“Because the I.C.U. admires your opposition
to Ethiopia, Somalia’s archenemy, and
because of your avowed interest in peace,”
he replied.
And, truth be told, I admired some of what
the Islamists had accomplished. Indeed, they
had done the impossible: in a series of
fierce battles from March to June last year,
they had routed the warlords and pacified
Mogadishu. For the first time in many years,
the city enjoyed peace.
Like many Somalis, though, I also had my
reservations about them. Even though almost
all Somalis are Muslim, very few embrace the
union’s fervent brand of faith: the group
supports Shariah law and it treats the
federal charter, which is secular, with
disdain. Then there was the matter of clan
rivalry, which hinted that devotion might be
masking politics: the top Islamists belonged
to the clans known to be antagonistic to the
president’s clan.
Of course, my feelings about the
transitional government were also
ambivalent. The government came into being
in 2004 after a two-year-long national
reconciliation conference held in exile. I
supported the president’s desire for an
African peacekeeping force to stabilize
Somalia; at the same time, I was fearful
that he was susceptible to pressure from
Ethiopia.
Still, the Islamic Courts Union, as my
interlocutor told me, was holding out a
proposal that just might lead to peace.
According to him, the union was offering to
let the government move to Mogadishu from
Baidoa and to let the president bring with
him a force of 1,000 from his home province,
Puntland.
I felt this was promising. A peace deal
would not just bring stability — it would
reduce the opportunities for foreign
intervention by Ethiopia, which had thwarted
every national and international effort to
bring Somalia’s strife to a peaceful end,
and by the United States, which seemed
inclined to support Christian-run Ethiopia
as a bulwark against the Islamists. (It
didn’t help, of course, that the union’s
defense spokesman had used the red-flag word
“jihad” in his firebrand declamations.)
And so I called the office of President
Yusuf to request a meeting. When I received
a favorable response, I called my Islamist
interlocutor to let him know that I would
accept the mission. Excited at the thought
of doing more than writing about Somalia to
keep it alive, I bought my ticket and left
for Mogadishu.
•
When I arrived in Mogadishu in the last week
of August, the city appeared calm. That’s
not to say that there wasn’t a hint of
unease. Residents felt that they were under
surveillance. And they were. Drones hovered
above the city all night. War, it seemed,
was in the offing.
My first meeting in town was with Sheik
Hassan Dahir Aweys, then the spiritual head
of the Islamic Courts Union; he struck me as
being more reasonable than many others in
the group. In all, I spent three and a half
hours in our first meeting, much of it alone
with him. We were in an office with a huge
escritoire, and we were cramped, sitting
very close to each other, a low table on
which he placed his notebook and I mine and
also our teacups between us, the door left
ajar. He leaned forward to enunciate his
words with the slowness of someone used to
speaking to blockheads. (Perhaps he thought
me a halfwit, come from Cape Town, on a
dubious peace mission; a fool proposing that
he and President Yusuf, his adversary, make
up for the sake of Somalia.)
When I told him what prompted my visit, he
confessed he had no recollection of agreeing
that President Yusuf relocate to Mogadishu
with a force from Puntland. The group’s
position, he reiterated with emphasis, was
that Ethiopia must withdraw its forces from
Somalia before anything else could happen.
He continued: “We control much of the
country and the people are behind us. What
does he control, this president, confined to
Baidoa?”
THIS was not an encouraging beginning.
My subsequent meetings with the Islamists
and their sympathizers were equally
frustrating. There was no discussion of the
peace plan that had brought me back to
Somalia. Instead, the discussions centered
on matters they deemed important: whether
theaters should be open; whether girls could
be permitted to wear jeans or go about
unveiled; whether tea houses should play
music, or young men watch soccer on
television. There was no serious talk of
governance.
What struck me in these conversations was
the presence of Arabic. These men, I
surmised, had received their education in
Sudan, Libya or Kuwait. For the first time
since the Middle Ages, Arabic was the lingua
franca in Mogadishu; Somali was practically
a second language.
After my meeting with the Islamists, I
headed for Baidoa to meet the president.
When we met in his office, across the
courtyard from his residence — he emerged
dressed in gray, his bearing immaculate,
hair groomed with care and face glowing,
after a good night’s sleep. (How, I asked
myself, was this possible in a town with no
modern amenities?)
The president and I sat facing each other,
and his intent stare reminded me that he and
Sheik Aweys come from the same part of the
country; I couldn’t help being mindful that
the two of them had engaged in armed
skirmishes in the early ’90s, soon after the
structural collapse of the state. The sheik
had led an Islamist takeover of Puntland;
the president, opposing him, had won that
round.
The president accepted my offer to open
channels between the two sides. But it was
another message from him that would ring in
my ears: “I know what war is,” he said. “I
have fought in three of them. I won’t attack
Mogadishu, but if the I.C.U. invades Baidoa,
someone will regret it. Tell the sheik this.
From me.”
Back to Mogadishu. I met Sheik Sharif Sheik
Ahmed, the executive director of the union;
also present was the interlocutor who had
called me in the first place. Regrettably,
my interlocutor would allude neither to our
initial conversation, nor to his suggestion
that the transitional government move to
Mogadishu, with guarantees. As we spoke,
officials came and went, some bowing low,
others kneeling in deference to the sheik.
It was clear that I was in the presence of a
power — a power who was unwilling to confirm
that he had knowledge of my interlocutor’s
offer.
I had to wonder. Was the Islamic union
negotiating in bad faith? Had I embarked on
a peace mission that was doomed to fail? Or
did the powers that be in the Islamic union
reject the idea of a rapprochement with the
government and forget to tell me? I chose to
play dumb, and so I provided the sheik’s
secretary with contact information for the
president’s men — as if everything else was
on track.
The following day, I went to meet Sheik
Aweys at his home. I got lost on the way. He
lived in a part of town unfamiliar to me.
With no paved roads, and with the rains
having created ravines with crumbly sides,
and with no street names, the entire area
was virtually impassable. My driver and I
got stuck in the sandy chasms.
After I arrived, the sheik and I talked
amicably, with his 2-year-old son sitting on
his lap. I dared not share with him the
president’s threatening remarks.
Before we parted, he commended me for my
“audacious” attempt to bring the Islamic
union and the transitional government
closer. He suggested not giving up hope,
however, adding that there was bound to be
further need for my involvement once “the
Somali people” routed their enemies, “and
you know who these are,” he grinned. I
offered to return in a few months.
•
I didn’t make it back. Over Christmas,
Ethiopia, perhaps intending to provide a
gift for the festive season to its American
ally, invaded Mogadishu and expelled the
Islamists. With thousands of Ethiopian
troops in the country — and only a few
African Union troops from elsewhere — savage
battles took place in Mogadishu between the
transitional government army (backed by
Ethiopia) and the Islamists, supported by
clan-based militiamen. Hundreds of people
were killed. Now that there has been a lull
in the fighting, it is regrettable that
President Yusuf has both claimed victory and
sworn not to engage in dialogue with the
Islamists. I wonder if his refusal to
negotiate from a point of strength will come
back to haunt him.
Somalis are not religious extremists. But
Islam has a revered place in their hearts
and minds. The religion has cultural
importance — Arabs opened up Somalia for
their faith and their commerce around the
ninth century; Mogadishu was a cosmopolitan
city, where anyone from the Islamic world
felt welcome.
Islam also has political importance. With
the collapse of the Ottomans, the last
Islamic empire, the Europeans — meeting in
Berlin in the late 1800s — worked out a
system by which portions of Somalia went to
Italy, Britain and France. Because Menelik
II, Emperor of Ethiopia, pleaded with his
fellow Christians, claiming that his country
was a Christian island in an Islamic ocean,
Ethiopia was, in time, given a share in the
land grab, the Somali-speaking Ogaden. This
territory has remained the bane of Somalia’s
blighted dealings with Ethiopia.
It could be that Sheik Aweys and his fellow
Islamists are modeling their struggle on the
first Somali to wage an anticolonial war in
the name of Islam against Christian
invaders. Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan fought for
the reinstitution of Somalia’s religious and
national dignity. A letter he wrote to the
British government in the early years of the
20th century spells out his aims: “I want to
protect my own religion. All you can get
from me is war, nothing else. We ask for
Allah’s blessings. Allah is with me as I
write this. If you want war, I am ready; if
you want peace, go away from my country.” So
what can be done?
For starters, the international community
must provide the wherewithal for the African
Union to deploy 6,000 or so troops to keep
the peace — soldiers who are not from
Ethiopia.
But in the end, the only way out of the
current impasse is to resume dialogue
between the two principal parties to the
conflict. I now know from personal
experience how difficult this is. President
Yusuf has said that the Islamists’ claim to
represent a religious constituency does not
sit well with his administration.
At the same time, the exiled Islamists are
endorsing or openly engaging in violence.
Assassinations of political figures,
exploding roadside bombs in which
peacekeepers or innocent bystanders lose
their lives: these must stop.
Both sides must give. Most Somalis believe
that the Islamists deserve a place at the
table; they have been disempowered through
invasion by an occupying force, which must
withdraw, the sooner the better.
Genuine negotiations will not be easy. I
found this out the hard way. But Somalis
must consider the alternative: the violence
will continue and the rest of the world will
continue to use land as a playground for
intervention.
Nuruddin Farah is the author, most
recently, of “Knots,” a novel.
Copyright 2007
The New York
Times Company |
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