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Difficult as it may be to conceive, the already-bad security situation in Somalia deteriorated further over the weekend.
Yet as Islamist militants brought their offensive to the edge of Mogadishu amid fierce fighting and the country’s nominal government reeled from the loss of several of its more effective members, an observer would be forgiven for thinking that the principal actors in this high-stakes drama were recreating the infamous tableau from De vita Caesarum by Suetonius wherein the Roman historian recounts how while fire raged for six days and seven nights, consuming the Eternal City, the Emperor Nero viewed the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and sang a poem about the sack of Troy.
While it might be a gross exaggeration to blame Somalia’s “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) and its international supporters for having set the Horn of Africa ablaze, it would not be unfair to ascribe a not insignificant share of the responsibility for the current burgeoning crisis in the subregion to their ongoing refusal to deal realistically with the situation.
Last Wednesday, Mogadishu police chief Colonel Ali Said Hassan, one of the more effective security officials still loyal to the TFG, was killed amid clashes with Islamist insurgents in the south of the capital city.
The next day, June 18, a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into the Medina Hotel in Beledweyne, some 400 kilometres north of Mogadishu close to the border with Ethiopian.
The blast killed some forty people, including the TFG security minister, Colonel Omar Aden Hashi, and its former ambassador to Ethiopia and to the African Union (AU), Abdikarim Farah Laqanyo.
On Friday, June 19, a TFG parliamentarian, Mohamed Hussein Addow, was captured and executed by al-Shabaab fighters after they took control of his Karan neighbourhood in northern Mogadishu.
Things had gotten so bad by Saturday, June 20, that the head of the TFG’s rump parliament, Sheikh Adan Mohamed Nuur, called for foreign troops to rescue the tottering regime.
Even as the legislator was making his appeal, al-Shabaab and Hisbul al-Islamiyya fighters were operating less than three kilometres away from the Villa Somalia presidential compound in Mogadishu, which is presently protected by some of the 4,300 valiant Ugandan and Burundian troops dispatched over the course of the last two years in the undermanned, ill-supplied, and certainly poorly-conceived African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) peacekeeping force.
Even as it was struggling to maintain control of what little bits of its capital it still holds, the TFG continues the charade of being a sovereign government.
To be fair, the musings of the wannabe admiral are no more or less removed from reality than the painful pretences of Somalia’s neighbours, other countries, international organizations, and members of the media have adopted in lieu of facing up to the reality that the TFG is not a government in any common-sense understanding of the term.
If all of this seems a bit farcical, it is because it seems the surreal has become the ordinary in the international community’s approach to Somalia, even as the situation has gone from bad to worse to worst, presenting the entire Horn of Africa with a security crisis of the first order, spreading instability across a fragile subregion and, raising the spectre that transnational terrorist networks like al-Qaeda will find and exploit the opportunities thus offered.
If the failure of no fewer than fourteen internationally-sponsored attempts at establishing a national government indicates anything, it is the futility of the notion that outsiders can impose a regime on Somalia.
Source: Business Daily