Somalia Requires a Comprehensive Political Stalemate

Ethiopia’s current unilateral intervention into Somalia is a timely poignant reminder of the need to create a functional Eastern African political federation that would serve as an obstacle to the continuation of our now perennial conflicts in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa regions.

This invasion was triggered off by parochial national Ethiopian, Somali and Eritrean rivalries. Rivalries that would have been effectively checked by a broader regional political union, which unfortunately, in its absence, are bound to spillover this entire region with disastrous consequences.

Somalia’s condition of statelessness resulting from the misrule of the Said Barre junta has created an arena that fosters regional instability. Unfortunately Ethiopia, under the Meles Zanawi regime, has a vested interest in having either a weak puppet regime in Mogadishu or a stateless Somalia, to the extent that with the blessing of Washington, they supported the emergence of criminal Somali warlords, who held the Somali people at ransom and wreaked havoc on them.

However, the chickens did come home to roost for the Zenawi regime, with the emergence of the Somali Islamic Court Movement. Similar to the Taliban in Afganistan, and indeed drawing experiences from them, they defeated the warlords and established order and sanity in the areas they took over control of. The Islamic Courts created stability that benefited economic activity, one informed by a predictable political regime based on the Islamic Sharia code. This in turn led to their gaining widespread popular support.

And that’s the dilemma that Ethiopia is going to be faced with. For the hand-picked puppet regime that they are currently installing in Mogadishu, headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, lacks the required political support in Somalia. Indeed it would not even last a day, albeit all the support it has from the African Union and Washington, should Addis withdraw its troops.

Though disunited, the Somalis are a highly nationalistic lot when it comes to protecting their identity and country from foreign intrusion. And unless some creative political arrangement is devised, one which accommodates the Islamic Courts and other legitimate Somali political actors, the Zenawi administration is most likely going to be faced with its Waterloo - a protracted Somali guerrilla insurgency that it can ill afford. It will inevitably lose over time, especially since Meles Zenawi embarked on the Somali invasion to divert domestic attention from internal questions of his regime’s legitimacy, and given the high level of opposition the regime faces from large sways of the Amhara and Oromo elite.

The said Somali guerrilla resistance is likely to adopt a jihadist radical Islamic orientation which will unfortunately be internationalist in nature and affect the broader Eastern African region. Already the Al-Qaida leadership was reported to be inciting an insurgency along narrow religious sectarian and nationalist lines.

Uganda’s intervention into Somalia should only be based on a multilateral approach seeking a political stalemate that would create a Somali government of national unity. The current African Union and Ethiopian-backed Abdullai Yusuf administration is too discredited amongst the Somali, and should not be allowed to govern on its own. Time is of the essence and creative diplomacy is called for. Short of this, Ethiopia’s current deceptive victory is mostly likely to cause further instability in Somalia that would directly spill over into Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia itself. It may also trigger off another hot war between Asmara and Addis Ababa.

The medium to long-term solution to these destructive wars lies in the creation of a broad and viable Eastern African political federation. Indeed as events illustrate, this is a necessity, and not luxury, in our region.