by THOMAS WALKOM
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The great irony of Somalia, an irony accentuated by the ongoing pirate dramas off its coastal waters, is not that the world intervened too little in that failed state. It is that the world, particularly the United States, intervened too much.
Indeed, for those enthusiasts who want Western troops to fight terrorism everywhere – as well as fix all the social ills in far-off places such as Afghanistan or Darfur – Somalia should act as a warning.
Those who mess about in other people's countries very often make matters worse for themselves.
The real messing about in Somalia was not the United Nations' ill-fated military intervention in the early '90s to deliver food aid. That one, while undertaken for noble reasons, was simply a naive gambit that ignored the tribal complexities of the country.
Foreign forces withdrew after a well-publicized 1993 incident in which a mob of alarmingly ungrateful Somalis dragged the bodies of downed U.S. fighters through the streets of the capital.
After the outsiders left, Somalia returned to the clan wars that had been plaguing it since the collapse of its central government in 1991.
Few in the West paid much attention to Somalia after that. But at the grassroots, something was happening. A small group of fighters, disgusted with the chaos, reached back into the country's past to revive two institutions that superseded clan divisions – religion and customary tribal law.
Armed with what was literally a law-and-order platform, this Islamic Courts Union took on the warlords. Its methods of justice, resting on a combination of sharia and tribal law, were brutal but effective. Its popularity grew.
But by then, the world was in the post-9/11 era. Washington, seeing all Islamists as evil, quietly had its Central Intelligence Agency back the increasingly unpopular warlords in the Somali civil war.
Nonetheless, the Islamic Courts Union, led by a cleric named Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, won control of the entire country in 2006, forcing the titular but ineffective, UN-backed government into exile.
As the New York Time would later report, for six months Somalia enjoyed its first full period of peace in 15 years.
Even the increasingly troublesome pirates were brought to heel. In November 2006, Islamist government fighters stormed a hijacked foreign ship, freed its captives and arrested the pirates.
"We will not tolerate anyone creating trouble in our waters," Islamist leader Ahmed announced.
It was too good to last. In early 2007, backed by U.S. air power, Ethiopia invaded to topple Ahmed's Islamic government (and, incidentally, kidnap Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal as an alleged terror supporter).
From that invasion came more civil war, more unrest and more piracy. In 2007, the International Maritime Bureau announced that after years of decline, piracy off the Somali coast was soaring. By 2008, Somali pirates were making the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The Ethiopians pulled out this year. They're sick of Somalia. In the U.S. media, Ahmed, the Islamic cleric that Washington once deposed, is now labelled a moderate. He has just been named president of the (still powerless) UN-backed government.
Meanwhile, civil war still rages. The most powerful anti-government Islamist faction in that war is more brutal and more anti-American that the Islamic Courts Union ever was.
And yes, thanks in large part to the last ill-conceived foreign intervention, piracy is even more of a booming business.
Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.