Friday, March 29, 2024
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Ukraine and Somalia’s sovereignties and territorial integrities should be equally respected

By Osman Hassan

The USA and UK governments, short of going to war, have imposed, crippling economic sanctions on Russia for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, principles enshrined in the United Charter. Such response would have been laudable if they themselves uphold those principles consistently and not selectively as they do –ignoring them when it suits them, and defending them when it is their adversaries that violate them as is the case now.

While it behoves all who believe in the UN Charter, and in the inalienable rights of all nations, big and small, to condemn the Russian action, yet many non-western peoples are likely to be somewhat ambivalent about the sincerity of the British and the USA’s censorious reactions. Somalis, more than most, have good reason to take the sincerity of their hectoring with a pinch of salt. As it is, the history of both countries, and in particular Britain’s colonial history, is littered with total disregard for other peoples’ territorial integrities, and no more so than the Somali case.

Focusing on the USA, its inbred habit to flout other peoples and nations’ rights and sovereignties is an integral part of USA history. Those traits are immortalised in Senator William Fulbright’s earth-shaking book: “The Arrogance of Power”, published in 1966, at the hight of the Vietnam war, an era when the U.S was driven by missionary seal and delusional belief that they can dictate to other countries as they saw fit how to run their affair.

And so that ingrained arrogance of power, and its toll on other nations, has continued to replay itself as if little has been learnt from the Vietnam era or the wider history of mankind. In recent history, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the replacement of their sovereignty with tutelage, attest to that.

The USA invasion of Iraq will always be remembered for its gratuitous unprovoked manner, a mere baseless suspicion that Iraqi was amassing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), an act not sanctioned by any UN Security Council resolution, an invasion which the International Commission of Jurists (IC) in Geneva saw as constituting the crime of war of aggression. Of course no WMD were found but Iraq bequeathed endless strife and instability.

The USA invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001was aimed to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, who was held responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks in America, and to topple the Taliban rule. Both goals were achieved. But the U.S extended their stay-cum-occupation for another unattainable mission; to westernise the Afghanistan people. The Taliban “demons” they toppled earlier turned the tables on them and #forced  them out of Afghanistan in a manner reminiscent  of their exit from Vietnam. All the USA is doing now  is to avenge collective punishment on the Afghan people and starve them to cover their failure.

The case of Somalia and degraded Sovereignty

When it comes to why Somalia has become a willing submissive USA client State, as it is inarguably, there is a simple answer. Unlike other countries which were forced to become client States through invasion and occupation, in the case of Somalia, the USA simply availed itself of a vacuum – where a traumatised  people, having gone through a devastating clan-based civil war, and destroyed their State in the process, came to care less about the loss of their sovereignty to USA tutelage so long that does not directly constrain their daily lives.

This has been more or less the relationship between Somalia and a self-appointed group of western countries, led by the USA, which manage it at an arm’s length. Some Somalis feel a trusteeship under the aegis of the UN would have been far better since under it there would a roadmap along which Somalia would progress towards its final goal of rehabilitation. That is not the case with Somalia’s relations with its IPs which is open-ended- if they are allowed to have their way – and not bound by any MOU with the federal government.

Despite all this, some might still argue that even if Somalia is a client State of the USA and its western partners, it still retains sovereignty since it is a member of the UN. True, a country’s membership of the UN does confer sovereignty but in the case of Somalia it can only be nominal. For a country to exercise full sovereignty, it must have a fully-fledged functioning State. That is not what Somalia is. That does not mean however that Somalia is a failed State as its detractors would claim for their own self-serving reasons.

Since independence in 1960 until 1991, the Somali State functioned. There is no reason why its collapse should be terminal, a case when it could then be pronounced to have become a failed State. It was bound to bounce back on its feet sooner or later. What has kept it hamstrung all along since then is not that it is moribund but that it is a victim of the combination of internal and external forces, acting separately or in tandem, which want Somalia remain crippled to the extent possible for their own ends.

Government authority ultimately rest on being able to wield force when need be. What keeps Somalia crippled is what its minders have done to it and that is to deny it the necessary military muscle to run a State effectively. If Somalia had the military means denied to it, it would have been able to enforce its authority throughout the country, raise revenue to provide services, defend the country from external and internal enemies and bring to heel those clan authorities that defy its writ. If it had that means, it would have been long ago to return again to what it has been in the past- a fully-functioning State that would have dispense with its current minders.

As it is, a UN arms embargo imposed on Somalia at a time when there was a civil war, which ceased over 30 years ago, is still kept in force for no justifiable reason other than to deny Somalia the means to become a fully-functioning State. The beneficiaries of this denial are neighbouring countries who invade it unimpeded and with impunity, rogue federal states who are unaccountable to the central government, Al Shabaab which is left undefeated, and USA and its partners who continue to run Somalia as their client State. All act in their different ways to hamstring the federal government and hence negate its sovereignty, and to the extent are bedfellows against Somali State.

The result of the denial of arms to Somalia by the UN Security Council, at the behest of western permanent members, who happen also to be members of Somalia´s so-called international partners, is to make Somalia a city State confined to Mogadishu, “policed” or “protected” by foreign troops (AMISOM), in which large parts of the country are no-go areas to the central government, either because they are under Al Shabaab control, or under rogue regional states leaders, like Puntland and Jubaland.

It is a mark of how far the political class has internalized the neo-colonial status of Somalia that they look up to USA- led western countries as the de facto final arbiter of its affairs. How often do we hear them calling on “Beesha Caalamka” (Somalia International partners) to intervene whenever they deem President Farmaajo,  has acted to their dissatisfaction? And how often have we seen the USA, often siding with opposition, sending terse Twitter messages, clearly meant for president Farmaajo, and giving marching orders to the Head of State, as if he was an errant child, to abandon actions he has taken or planning, or else face the music?. They add up to erode and degrade what is left of Somalia´s sovereignty.

This unprecedented disregard for established diplomatic etiquette combined with utter disrespect for the sovereignty of an independent country speaks volumes about their perception of Somalia and who is in charge of it. But that national humiliation has wider ramifications. It emboldens all those, internal and external, who are united by one common goal: the downfall of President Farmaajo (or the State in the case of Al Shabaab) who see him as independent-minded and his replacement by someone more amenable to them. The Silence of the Somali government and public is part of the problem to the extent it further embolden their nemeses. When will all this end? Or is it to be open-ended? What is certain is that the longer this goes on the more it degrades and erodes  what is left of Somalia´s sovereignty if any is left.

The way to regain sovereignty foreclosed

The holding of a democratically elected government, representing the will of the people and accountable to them, was the objective of the one-man-one vote election that could not be held on time for one reason or another. The secession in the north and al-Shabaab´s control of much of the  south among other factors have thwarted the timely holding of a country-wide election. Under the circumstances, Parliament, decreed in April last year that the popular election be held in two years’ time hence.

Needless to say, a one-man-one vote election would have allowed the Somali people to take the destiny of their country into their own hands for the first time since 1969 and usher a Somalia that is its own master, whose sovereignty and territorial integrity respected. Unfortunately, Somalia’s western partners would have none of it, and instead foisted on the nation what is referred to as an indirect election but in reality a process which will be remembered by posterity as the most openly and outrageously corrupt selection process perhaps anywhere in the world.

Almost all who got selected spent huge sums of money, some in the million, to buy their seats. They did not do so for the love of serving their country but to make a fast buck once in parliament as others before them did. With that priority uppermost in their minds, Somalia´s sovereignty and territorial integrity are bound to take second place, assuming they matter to them. The upshot of all this is that Somalia’s next parliament (and government) are likely to be even more obsequious to western tutelage and ambivalent about the country´s sovereignty’s and territorial integrity.

Dismemberment of Somalia now on the cards

If Somalia sovereignty is in tatters under USA and its western partners’ tutelage, no less a disaster is the possible loss of its territorial integrity. Important Republican voices in the Senate and bigwigs in the media, among them the Heritage Foundation, have been orchestrating calls for the recognition of the one-clan secessionist enclave calling itself Somaliland.

What these Americans are cooking up is a quid pro quo deal in which Somaliland gets the recognition it wants and the USA a military base at Berbera, on Somalia’s northern Red Sea coast. It is not as though the USA does not have a base in the Horn of Africa. They have one at Djibouti, a place far more strategic place than Berbera. They only problem is that the Chinese too have a base next to them and that is too much for Washington’s hubris. And rather than put up with that inconvenience, the Americans would rather go and look for a base on the coast of Somalia´s northern coast and rather thanking the host country, Somalia, is to perversely dismember it in favour of a rebel clan. This misguided hubris is a throwback to America’s “arrogance of power” that Senator William Fulbright so masterfully depicted in his eponymous book and saw it as deep rooted in the U.S psyche.

Although the Biden Administration has yet to react publicly to these coordinated snowballing moves, all the same those who are advocating Somaliland’s recognition, in return for a base at Berbera, see their pet project compelling, all the more when overriding Somalia’s territorial integrity would entail no consequence for them as they see it. Somali unionists have every reason to be apprehensive about this possible threat to their territorial integrity given their history of dismemberment by colonial powers, some of them still at it again, though not so stridently and provocatively as the USA (old habits die hard).

President Biden might be, thankfully, more prudent and principled than his predecessor, but this is not a sufficient reassurance. In American political horse-trading, one cannot discount for good the possibility of the President going along with their demand if they return the favour elsewhere. Given this possible scenario, the worst option for unionists, in particular northerners, who are the principal victims, is to wait for that possible eventuality and do nothing proactively before then.

Assuming the Americans, true to their past history, are plunging into this adventure uniformed about Somalia or the realities in the north, they should be reminded that of the five clans in northern Somalia (former British Somaliland), four are unionists, who inhabit roughly 70% of the territory as well around 65% of the Red Sea coastline. Even if Somalia’s federal goverment is to be dismissed as impotent or of no significance, outsiders have still to contend with Somali clans who are warlike and fiercest when they have no government to rely on and fight outsiders on their own to defend their land.

It was one clan in the north, in former British Somaliland, who waged a war of resistance against British colonial rule for 21 years (1900-21) under the banner of the Dervish movement. Only the intervention of the British Royal Air Force for the first time in Africa, and reinforcements coming from as far afield as Aden, India and South Africa turned the tide against the Dervish. And in our own recent history, it was  one clan who gave the USA a bloody nose in Mogadishu and forced them to leave the country (The Battle of Mogadishu, 1993).

History could repeat itself. Like its past mission failures in Somalia or elsewhere, a repeat mission in Somalia, this time to dismember it as a price to get a base, would end in failure for the USA but would also plunge the north into clan civil war reminiscent of that in the South in 1991-3. That could destabilise Somalia once more and even involve neighbours. The USA could end up in failure, getting no base but also antagonise Somalia for the benefit of its adversaries who equally vie Somalia´s strategic 3333 km long coastline, straddling both the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Those who value the close ties between the Somali and American people hope it would not come to this, and that wiser counsels will prevail over those  plotting Somalia’s dismemberment.

Two fittings adages merit to be the end of this article.

From Senator Willian Fulbright, his memorable advice to USA needs to be always born in mind and guide American Actions:
“The majority of the human race is demanding dignity and independence , not the honour of a supine role in an American empire ..” ( emphasis added)
“The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and responsibilities with universal mission” (emphasis added)

And from Winston Churchill:
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” (emphasis added)

Let us hope Washington heeds these aphorisms. Not only that, but also uses its immense clout to persuade the one-clan separatist enclave to give up their secession and take up their place in a federal Somalia where they would be equal to all others, but not more so as they are used in the Somaliland they lord over others. At the end of the day, America has more to gain from a united, peaceful and stable Somalia and conversely have more to lose from one they try to dismember.

Osman Hassan
Email: [email protected]

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Osman Hassan is a seasoned journalist and a former UN staff member. Mr Hassan is also a regular contributor to WardheerNews


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