allAfrica.com: Somalia: Tentative Hope and Little Else (Page 1 of 2)

Across a wide spectrum of political opinion there is a lot of hope for the success of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) but little expectation it will be fulfilled.

Although the Bush Administration has pinned its best hopes for Somalia on the TFG, the words of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer, in a recent interview with AllAfrica, suggested an undercurrent of worry. "We need to support the government as the legitimate government of Somalia," she said, "and we certainly have been trying to do so - understanding that it is still very weak and has a lot of work to do to gain the support of the Somali people broadly."

Ted Dagne, Africa analyst at the Congressional Research Service and an expert on the countries in the Horn of Africa, has a harsher assessment. The TFG has failed miserably, he said in an interview. "In terms of functioning as a government, what have they done? Very little. Did this government get the support of the people? Well, the answer is no," he said.

Dagne noted that the inadequacies of the transitional leadership predated the arrival of the Islamist Courts, the coalition of militia groups that controlled the capital Mogadishu for the past six months. "The agreement [creating the TFG] was signed in October 2004," he said, while the Islamists did not push the warlords out of Mogadishu until June 2006.

According to Dagne, the TFG is made up of people who have continually kept the transitional authority from setting up operations in Mogadishu or functioning in an effective manner.

After its creation, the TFG operated from Kenya and later from the southern Somalian city of Baidoa. They only managed to get to Mogadishu with the backing of Ethiopian troops, Dagne said: "Without the protection of the Ethiopians, the transitional government cannot survive."

Susan Rice, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution who served as assistant secretary of state for Africa during the Clinton administration, says it is hard to be optimistic about Somalia: The transitional administration "is certainly not viable if it doesn't get very swift and meaningful support from the international community," she said. "The Ethiopians can't stay in there very long; they shouldn't stay in there very long [and] our piddling 40 million dollars (pledged by the U.S. for political, humanitarian and peacekeeping assistance) doesn't look like we're very serious yet."

According to Ken Menkhaus, professor of political science at Davidson College, North Carolina and author of Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, outside involvement is essential if peace is to be achieved. "We're hoping that people like Jendayi Frazer, Ethiopia and the European Union will put pressure on the transitional government leadership to sit at the table [with] important powerful constituencies who can play the potential role of spoilers …and hammer out a real power-sharing agreement."

Regional interests and rivalries, along with U.S. concerns about global terrorism, greatly complicate the scenario, often making Somalia seem like a pawn on other chessboards rather than a player in its own game of nation building.

According to Frazer, Ethiopia attacked because militias loyal to the Council of Islamic Courts were escalating attacks on Ethiopian troops who were training TFG soldiers.

That assessment leaves Dagne bemused: "Ethiopia? With the largest armed force in sub-Saharan Africa, with one of Africa's best air forces, compared to an Islamic Courts that came to power just six months earlier with no conventional forces?" Ethiopia's security was not threatened, he said: "The threat was the ouster of the TFG." In any case, he adds, no specific act, no single provocation led to the Ethiopian invasion.

Ethiopia's relationship with TFG President Abdullahi Yusuf is very close. "Ethiopia would ideally like to have a moderate government in Mogadishu that can serve as a strategic partner in security in the region, Menkhaus said, "that is to say a Somali government that made sure it was always asking itself, 'well before we do this we should check with Ethiopia.'"

After becoming interim president in 2004, Yusuf's first foreign visit was to Addis Ababa, where even at that early date he asked for 20,000 troops to back his government, then setting up in Baidoa. Ethiopia began sending troops, claiming they were only there to train TFG forces.

Part of Ethiopia's concern for the kind of government that finally gains legitimacy centers on Somalia's past irredentist history - its old ambition for incorporation of Ethiopia's Ogaden region, northeast Kenya, what is now Somaliland, and part of Djibouti into a "Greater Somalia." The 1977-78 Ethiopia-Somalia war over the Ogaden may have been forgotten by most of the world, but not in Addis Ababa.

Eritrea is an even larger Ethiopian concern. An ally in Mogadishu would enable Ethiopia to pull most of its troops away from the border it shares with Somalia and deploy them to the north, where a resumption of war with Eritrea is considered the real threat.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories