by Avv. Abdurahman Hosh Jibril
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Asmara Gathering: "If the TFG negotiates with this rebel group, it would set a uniquely immoral precedent by rewarding bad behavior"

For any political agenda to advance beyond its conceptual state, the agenda setters must be united to move the agenda beyond the concept and coalesce into a concretized platform that becomes a basis for implementation. Not so in Asmara and there is no chance that the motley crew that has met in Asmara would ever see eye to eye on many fundamental issues. The Asmara group are in a big tent, and in that tent, you will find radical fundamentalists Muslims who will never settle for anything less than Sharia Law as the basis for a governance model; you will also find in the tent, remnants of the criminal business enterprises of Somalia that hankers back for the good old days of the cannibalistic monopoly of the illegal businesses of Mogadishu and elsewhere, and this group is not interested in governance; rather it is interested in the restoration of the Frontier capitalism under which they flourished and the attendant anarchy of that era. The tent also includes professional peace conference attendees who have been ubiquitously present

A further complication that makes any closing of the gap of the divergent personal, emotional, business, political, and religious interests of these rebels is the fact that a significant number of the leading personalities of the Asmara group are notoriously deficient in the trust department in that they have in the past been known to betray their political colleagues, and also renege on their promises: At least two leading personalities in this group betrayed friends and colleagues both in Arta and also in the TFG; Another is a notorious back stabber even if one does not take his emotional instability into account; The former Speaker, Sharif Hassan does not need any elaboration as he is remembered for betraying the TFG and the Somali public in favor of his criminal business partners in Mogadishu as well as his personal pecuniary interests; Yusuf Dheeg was the Ethiopian spy master inside the cabinet of  the Arta regime in  2001 and his handler was the late Ethiopian Ambassador Abdulmajid; The good Shiekh, Shiekh Sharif Ahmed was on the phone with the Americans and plausibly the Ethiopians in December 2006 while his brainwashed, forcefully conscripted child-soldier Mujahiddiin were being annihilated by the Ethiopian killing machine, a machine he personally provoked to engage in combat. Would one buy a used car from any member of this lot, let alone negotiate with? Not likely!

But even if the Asmara rebels suddenly found a meeting of the mind and converged their disparate interests, they will not advance beyond their Asmara hotels as their project was stillborn from the beginning because Almighty History is not on their side. The Asmara group is operating in a geopolitical barren landscape, if you will, in that it does not have the fortune and benefit of the Cold War which could have easily guaranteed it political and military benefactors to help it fulfill its agendas, if at all it has any discernible agenda. But even if it could find powerful benefactors, the fact remains that the world has changed and this group does not appreciate that fact. The era of liberation movements with legitimate discernable values and causes and with moral clarity is part of history in so far as Africa is concerned and therefore no longer relevant. The last great legitimate African liberation struggle was the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa which gracefully ended with the vindication of Nelson Mandela as an alleged terrorist and his coronation as the first democratically elected leader of that great country. That struggle was genuine, had an unambiguous moral clarity and had also a certain gravitas.

After that great struggle, numerous armed charlatan groups began falsely and perhaps ignorantly using the lingo and rhetoric of liberation while they carried out their brutal fratricidal campaigns and the human and political implications of the mayhem and suffering caused by these wannabe Mandela/Che’ should be a required history course for future African children. Where does one begin?. Charles Taylor of Liberia, Foday Sonkah of Sierra Leone, Laurent Kablia, of Congo, the Warlords of Somalia, The Lords Resistance Army of Uganda etc. Sadly, the most salient feature of the “struggle” of these wannabe revolutionaries was that they all engaged in killing thousands of their country men, women, and children and irresponsibly destroyed the public infrastructure and private properties of their countries and held the populace hostage to the extent that the African victims in these man-made conflicts have since become inured to suffering and accepted it as the “new Normal” in life. They also helped destabilize the respective regions in which they waged their delusional “struggle”.

Against this background, The Asmara group is “clutching sand” (bacaad eey ku dhagganyihiin), to use a Somali idiom. That backdrop should raise a red flag because they have not articulated why it is that they want Power, what would they do with this Power, and how are they different from the cannibalistic African Guerrillas movements mentioned above. Their shrill assertion that Ethiopia is an occupying force in Somalia is not enough as it has fallen on deaf ears since the world community views Ethiopia as engaged in essentially what Nigeria has done in Sierra Leone and Liberia, that is, to contribute to the regional security of the Horn Africa by helping reconstitute a strong Somali state that can secure its borders from international terrorism, piracy, civil wars etc. This pragmatic policy has been a corner stone of IGAD member states ( with the exception perhaps of the rogue state of Eritrea which has recently recused itself from any IGAD deliberations on Somalia) since January 2007. Additionally, the USA Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Madam Jendayi Frazer underscored this point last week when she stated in unequivocal terms that the International community will not let Ethiopia withdraw its support unless replacement peace keeping forces are ready to take over this essential responsibility. Add to this, the fact that the Saudi Kingdom has on September 18, 2007, on principle accepted the Somali Reconciliation Conference held in Mogadishu between July 15 to August 30, 2007 to be a legitimate peace making conference among the Somali clans that warrants diplomatic backing. It also chastised the Asmara rebels as being bereft of any political solution to the Somali conundrum and for being part of the radical Islamist agendas now wreaking social havoc in Muslim and Arabic countries.

President Issias Afeworki: Reduced the Eritrean nation into a police state.

All this do not augur well for the Asmara rebels and that is why they are an abysmal failure and will remain Qurbojoog (exiles) for quite sometime. For that reason, the TFGistas should not negotiate with this group. A die hard Canadian TFGista, Mr. Ismail Gaafow put it succinctly to me the other day when he said, “ If the TFG negotiates with this rebel group, it would set a uniquely immoral precedent by rewarding bad behavior”. I concur with him. Why negotiate with a non-entity that cannot deliver the goods that the TFG wants to trade with, namely, Peace and stability.