allAfrica.com: Somalia: President Yusuf Loses His Grip on Power (Page 1 of 3)

As PINR forecast on September 19, the failures of the two national conferences aimed at devising a political formula for Somalia -- the National Reconciliation Conference (N.R.C.) sponsored by the country's internationally-recognized Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.), and the Somali Congress for Liberation and Reconstitution (S.C.L.R.) organized by the political opposition based in Eritrea -- have led to a continuation of Somalia's spiral into political fragmentation and conflict. As an armed insurgency against the T.F.G. ratcheted up significantly in Somalia's official capital Mogadishu, rifts opened up in the transitional institutions, with conflict surfacing between the T.F.G.'s president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, and its prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi; parliament demanding accountability from Gedi's government; and the arrest of Somalia's chief supreme court justice, Yusuf Ali Harun, followed by the sacking of the public prosecutor who initiated the case by Gedi and the prosecutor's refusal to leave his post.

As the drama of the T.F.G. played out, forces loyal to the self-declared independent republic of Somaliland and the semi-autonomous regional state of Puntland in the north of post-independence Somalia engaged in military conflict in the disputed Sool region. For the first time, Puntland -- President Yusuf's power base -- seemed threatened with losing its integrity, and a war between Somaliland and Puntland became a genuine possibility.

Implosion of the T.F.G.

Determining the present moment of Somalia's political history is the fate of the T.F.G. Unpopular, weak and dependent on an Ethiopian occupation force for survival, the T.F.G. is nonetheless backed by the Western donor powers that sustain it, and the international and regional organizations that follow their lead, as the sole means of achieving stability in Somalia.

In PINR's judgment, the T.F.G. has now become too divided to be the vehicle of a coherent transition to permanent institutions scheduled to be in place for elections in 2009. There are signs that the international community has also reached that judgment, but that it cannot act on it because it has given itself no other option than support of the T.F.G. If the T.F.G. implodes, the external actors will be left without a policy.

With a clan-based structure dominated by clan warlords, the T.F.G. has been weak and divided from its inception in 2004. If there is a central figure in the transitional institutions, it is Yusuf, who is backed by Ethiopia, was the president of Puntland and retains a power base there, has militias from his Majerteen sub-clan at his disposal, and is a crafty political tactician. It is difficult to imagine a T.F.G. with any coherence without Yusuf; the fate of the T.F.G. is synonymous with Yusuf's fate, and he has succeeded thus far in trapping and finessing the external actors.

Yusuf's current embattlement, which has a high probability of breaking his grip on the tenuous power that he exerts, can be understood by putting his position in the context of the political systems of the three other states in the Horn of Africa -- Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti -- all of which share the common formula of a political machine run by a strongman or boss under the cover of a constitution. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and President Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti were all able to lead sectoral movements into control of the state and then to build machines based on their core support and to extend them outside that base to include just enough other political forces to maintain their rule. Successful bosses take care of their bases and avoid marginalizing outside groups sufficiently to provoke effective resistance from them.

At the root of Somalia's condition as a failed state was the absence of a movement that could take over power after the overthrow of dictator Siad Barre in 1991, rendering the emergence of a machine impossible. The successful resistance against Barre was popular, but it was also regional and clan based, and none of its components were strong enough -- as was Zenawi's Tigray People's Liberation Front, for example -- to form the nucleus of a machine. From then on, Somalia devolved into statelessness and power drained to local and regional warlords, despite 14 attempts by external actors to broker power-sharing agreements.

In 2006, after a successful insurrection against Washington-backed warlords in Mogadishu, the Islamic Courts movement quickly gained control of most of Somalia south of Puntland in an effort to create an Islamic state based on Shari'a law. Ethiopia, which is satisfied with a devolved Somalia -- after having fought two wars with irredentist Somali regimes over its ethnic-Somali Ogaden region -- and Washington, which seeks to prevent the emergence of Islamic states, moved to defeat the Courts militarily through an Ethiopian intervention in December 2006, leaving the T.F.G. formally in political control, but in fact powerless to prevent the devolutionary cycle from taking hold once again. Yusuf was in a better position than ever before, but he had no movement -- he had been placed in power by foreign occupiers and donors, and presided over a fragmented clan-based government, not a machine of his own making. Yusuf aspires to be a boss, but he does not have the resources to become one.

Through the period of the rise of the Islamic Courts and the immediate aftermath of the Ethiopian intervention, the T.F.G. executive spoke with one voice, as both Yusuf, representing the Darod clan family, and Gedi, representing the Hawiye clan family, but lacking strong support within it, made common cause first in resisting the Courts and then in attempting to gain a foothold for the transitional institutions and sponsoring the N.R.C., which had been imposed upon them by donor pressure.

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