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by Abdifatah Fandhaal
Friday, October 10, 2008
I have hurriedly written this response after having read the article titled: Why Kenya and Ethiopia ought to annex and divide Somalia by Donald Kipkorir posted to the Daily Nation website on 3rd October 2008 and which has then been circulated to many Somali websites I’ve lately surfed.
For a start, I actually found Kipkorir’s article quite amusing and weird as it was not an intelligently thought piece of writing but rather was marked by author’s deep ignorance of history of Somalia and his brain-washed colonially influenced mindset which is solely based on western imperialist thinking of 18th and 19th Centuries of which Kenya was also a victim and was not apparently at par with the reality of 21st Century Contemporary Global Affairs where America as the sole hegemon can not yield any result in the invasion of Iraq – a sovereign country - she unilaterally attacked in the name of global terrorism but as a result is finding herself in an unforeseen dire financial crisis similar to that of 1929 Wall-Street crash which ultimately led to the Great Depression and where even $900 billion bail-out recently approved to be injected to US economy is not the answer to the problem as already pointed out by many financial analysts across the globe.
The author seems to be in need of some sort of history lesson as he ignorantly argued in his article: since 1960, the country [Somalia] has been a lawless state that is a haven for terrorists and pirates”. Had this been substantiated it would have been a good argument by author but it is one based on prejudice and paranoia and to which no factual analysis or substance was presented whatsoever.
Historically, Somalia got independence on 1st July 1960 three years before Kenya tasted her independence from Britain on 12th Dec 1963. Somalia became the first African country to have democratically held free and fair elections where a new president was smoothly elected whereby Kenya was solely ruled by Jomo Kenyatta since independence until his death in 1978 and taken over by Daniel Arap Moi who, due to international pressure, was politically forced to step down in 2002 and succeeded by Mwai Kibaki whose second term election was bitterly disputed and denounced as “rigged” by his rival, Rail Odinga, and were later agreed as “seriously flawed” by European Union observers.
Having studied my BA of International Business Administration at United States International University (USIU) in Nairobi and being a victim of Somalia civil-war and the inevitable anarchy ensued, I was really shocked to see the international news headlines dominated by the violence and appalling atrocities committed by politically and ethnically-charged Kenyans armed with machetes and arrows being shown on TVs around the world that unleashed two months of political stalemate as a result of the vote-rigging of Kibaki’s re-election in Dec 2007.
The incumbent Kenya president, Kibaki, is a member of Kenya’s largest and probably most powerful ethnic group, Kikuyu, who roughly constitute 22 percent of the population whilst his rival, Odinga, is a member of the Luo, who comprise some 13 percent of the populace and predominantly inhabit in western Kenya. Had it not been the intervention and the pressure of the international community and the UN-sponsored talks in late Feb to mediate a peace accord to which Odinga was silenced by the appointment of the restored position of the Prime Minister, by now Kenya would have followed suit of Somalia and been in ashes.
Frankly speaking, both Kenya and Somali have a lot in common, i.e. deliberately stoked ethnic tensions, feeble democratic traditions and intuitions, power-hungry elites vying for power and scare resources of which authority is used as means of richening and fattening their respective clans.
However, to argue that Somali has been a lawless country since 1960 is truly based on the ignorance and bias of the author whose knowledge of the country in question is only limited to the past 18 years that Somalia has been descended into political unrest due to the civil war that broke out in 1991 as a result of the bad governance, misappropriation of public funds and the dictatorship of the military ruler of 21 years who came to power by coup as with a lot of African leaders.
To come back to the core of Kipkorir’s article which argues that: Kenya is an existential enemy of Arab Countries … [therefore]… annexing Somalia is thus in our strategic interest [for Kenya and Ethiopia] and we must do it now as the financial meltdown continues to take away the attention of the world. And further uses the term a ‘fait accompli’.
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This is the envisaged map of which Somalia would be dismembered and divided between Kenya and Ethiopia along the 4 degrees latitude, each taking all the land below and the above the land according to Donald Kipkorir’s dream.
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As I said earlier, this is not the world of 19th Century where that imperialist mentality of divide and rule could easily be exercised and any imperialist state/power would then need to present a fait accompli to the world or, to one of the superpowers at the time, in the annexation of another sovereign country.
It is regrettably unfortunate for someone like Kipkorir, whose own country had indescribably suffered and gone through long period of devastation and humiliation at the hands of the British colonial rule to suggest that Somalia to be annexed and divided between Kenya and Ethiopia and then a fait accompli to be presented to the World in the cloak of current global financial turmoil, I would, thus, say and advise Kipkorir to apologise to the people of Somalia for the poisonous article and wake up to the current global reality that even the world’s sole super power can not forcefully uproot the local insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan for that matter with the help of NATO military capability and might present on the ground.
Read Kipkorir’s article here:
http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/476952/-/3lvt45/-/index.html
In other words, I’ll ask a question here: Is the author day-dreaming or is he over-estimating Kenyan’s military capability and her current situation? Or that of Ethiopia even if both combined together? It is not a secret that Ethiopia has some 30, 000 troops deployed in Somalia with the consent of the Somali government and parliament and the blessing of the international community plus the direct political and military support of America and could hardly pacify and stabilise a single district of Mogadishu let alone conquer Somalia as a whole.
I would like to quote brief excerpt of speech by American President, Woodrow Wilson, on 8th Jan 1918 – great champion of self-determination and independence of states: “… the day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into the interest of particular governments and likely at some-unlooked-for-moment to upset the peace of the world….”
One year later July 1919 Wilson said after the destructive World War I that German militarists and imperalists had initiated : "For my own part, I am as intolerant of imperialistic designs on the part of other nations as I was of such designs on the part of Germany. The choice is between two ideals; on the one hand, the ideal of democracy, which represents the rights of free peoples and states everywhere to govern themselves, and, the ideal of imperialism which seeks to dominate for force and unjust power, an ideal which is by no means dead and which is earnestly [sought] in many quarters."
I do quote the above just to remind Kipkorir and those who might share the same views if any to rethink that Somalia has been/is going through a process of civil-war and anarchy which many powerful states today such as America (1861-1865) and Spain (1820 – 1823 and 1936-1939) had gone through.
Surely with the help and resources of estimated 1.5 million Somali Diaspora around the globe like Jews did with the rebirth of Israel, Somalia will one day pull through this and stand on feet as a viable, democratic and prosperous state living side by side with her neighbours in peace and security and that would be the interest of the region as a whole and particularly for Kenya and Ethiopia, so now is the right time for both countries or any other state to take the opportunity and help Somalia stabilise and regain her status in the globe.
And finally history will record who has and hasn’t helped Somalia during these harsh times, as the proverb says a friend in need is a friend indeed.
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Abdifatah Fandhaal is a student of International Relations (IR) and Political Studies at London Metropolitan University in London - UK.