Al-Shabab’s killing of African Union peacekeepers in revenge for the assassination of its leader in a US drone strike indicates that no end is in sight in Somalia’s vicious cycle, writes Gamal Nkrumah

A Somali soldier stands near the wreckage of a civilian vehicle destroyed by a suicide car bomb attack in the Lower Shabelle region south of Mogadishu (photo: AP)

Somalia as a failed state is a cart before the horse, as it were. The sprawling East African country, perhaps the only nation state on the continent to have only one religion, Islam, and only one ethnic and linguistic group, Somali, was formed by unifying former separate Italian and British colonies.

The Arab League member state was a predominantly non-Arabic, Somali-speaking nation whose borders were drawn as an artificial political entity created to express a consensus amongst rival and oft-warring tribes.

This fetish for unanimity, for all the tribes spoke Somali, and were devout Muslims, could only have sprung from colonial control and manipulation. Ethnic Somalis in neighbouring Djibouti, where they constitute a third of the population, in Kenya, where they number at least four million, and in Ethiopia, where they have their own autonomous region with five million inhabitants, were excluded from becoming part of Somalia on independence in 1960.

Islam, a pivotal factor in Somali politics, was introduced to Somalia from the 8th Century AD, almost from the very inception of the religion. Geographically, Somalia is extremely close to the Arabian Peninsula. Yet most contemporary Somalis embrace Islam with the fervour of a fresh convert.

Western assumptions about poverty-stricken, predominantly Muslim, potentially rich countries such as Somalia are often too wrapped up in their petty details for easy refutation in the international media. The United States fantasised that if Osama Bin Laden fell, Al-Qaeda would be finished. On both timescale and potential disorder on a regional and even continental scale, policymakers in Washington have time and again been proved conclusively wrong. This has left an indelible mark on the collective national psyche of impoverished nations such as Somalia.

Violence instigated by the Somali-based militant Islamist terrorist movement Al-Shabab, therefore, looks the way it does in the war-torn country and casts the shadow it does precisely because it has persistently been the belief of many Somalis, and not just Al-Shabab sympathisers, that the internationalisation of the Somali civil war was a western plot.

These anti-western sentiments have found fertile ground in Somalia because of a central western mistake in dealing with groups such as Al-Shabab. The west consistently assumes that the major challenge will be military and not social. Western powers do not focus on the battle to win hearts and minds. And as a result, at least 12 people were killed Monday when an Al-Shabab suicide car bomber blasted a convoy of African Union (AU) peacekeepers on the outskirts of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, perhaps in retaliation for the abduction and rape of Somali women by AU troops.

However, Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Abdi-Aziz Abu-Musaab explicitly stated that the attack aimed to avenge the killing of the militant group’s leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. “We have carried out the attack because we knew that the drone that killed Ahmed Abdi Godane and other Al-Shabab commanders, was launched by the US military,” Abu-Musaab declared on the Internet. “We shall continue targeting Americans and AU troops and personnel,” he added.

Abu-Musaad was assassinated by a US drone on 1 September. Both Washington and the Somali government confirmed Godane was dead.

Bin Laden was assassinated by the Americans and yet Al-Qaeda survived him. Likewise, Al-Shabab will undoubtedly remain largely intact long after Godane.

In sum, Somalia’s predicament is that its countless civilian casualties lie at the heart of the conspiracy theory most Somalis uphold, that Al-Shabab was a successful western — or American to be precise — plot that not only ran amok, but likewise ran to its intended conclusion.

The war by proxy, with AU peacekeepers doing America’s dirty business, only exacerbates the suspicion among Somalis that Washington harbours ill intentions towards Somalia.

source: Al Ahram Weekly