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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 June 1999 Issue No. 434
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters The marine who made peace
By Gamal NkrumahNo sooner had the dramatic news of the kidnapping of a junior wife of former United States Marine turned Somali warlord Hussein Aidid filtered through last weekend, than it was reported that Aidid's forces overran the port city of Kismayo, some 400km south of Mogadishu.
Aidid, 36, had the unique experience of being sent into his homeland in 1993 as a US marine reservist as part of an American interventionist force which was in due course humbled by his own father's militias. How did Aidid junior come to find himself in such an awkward position? Having moved to California with his mother and siblings as a teenager, Hussein Aidid lived for the next 16 years in America. Were the US authorities really unaware that the young marine they dispatched was himself the son of a powerful Somali warlord?
In 1995, Aidid junior deserted the Marines and returned to settle in Somalia for good. Soon afterwards, his father, Mohamed Farah Aidid, was slain in inter-clan warfare in Mogadishu. Many Somalis suspected that America's Central Intelligence Agency masterminded the older man's downfall.
Under tremendously difficult circumstances, Hussein Aidid proceeded to take on his late father's mantle. The "natural" nature of the succession belied the awesome scale of Aidid junior's task. Many tribal and clan elders doubted the credentials of the man they referred to pejoratively as the "youthful American". But Aidid was to succeed so handsomely, he would soon confound his critics.
First he courted Somalia's Arab neighbours, a policy that tremendously strengthened his hand at home. Then, assured of Arab support, he worked hard to conciliate some of his most powerful enemies within the country. This policy has now paid rich dividends. With help from Egypt and other Arab nations, Aidid pulled off the almost miraculous feat of setting up of a joint administration for the Somali capital Mogadishu in cooperation with his erstwhile rivals Ali Mahdi Mohamed and Mohamed Qanyare Afrah, following the signing of a peace deal in Cairo last August.
Since then, Aidid has moved on to address the needs of his country's economy and try to kickstart infrastructural development. For the first time since the implosion of the Somali state following the overthrow of President Mohamed Siade Barre in 1991, the national currency has been revived, with Aidid commissioning a Canadian company to print $5 million-worth of the Somali shilling.
As Aidid's star rose, so his rivals' waned -- among them some of his newfound allies. Last month fighting broke out in the middle Shabelle River region of central Somalia among Ali Mahdi Mohamed's Agbal clan. This infighting has further strengthened Aidid's hand within the Mogadishu joint administration.
There are, however, pockets of resistance throughout the vast country to what is seen as Aidid's political stranglehold. It is also rumoured that Ethiopia, Washington's keenest ally in the Horn of Africa, is determined to teach the former marine a lesson.
Regional leaders have set up rival administrations in remote enclaves -- invariably ports on the Indian Ocean. Among the most successful of these is Puntland, a self-declared mini-state in northeastern Somalia governed by the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF). The authorities in Puntland have created a 6,000-strong police force which, according to the Mogadishu Times, is made up of former policemen, militiamen and regular Somali soldiers. Petro-dollars from the Gulf are used to fund this exercise, the administration's main source of revenue being customs and taxes on commercial activity in Bosaso port.
This success has encouraged a number of other such mini-states to flex their muscles to try and establish some kind of legitimacy, enforce law and order in their provincial backwaters and replenish their emptied treasuries. The SSDF itself recently captured an Italian-owned ship off the coastal town of Eyl, holding the crew hostage after the latter were convicted by a local SSDF court of illegally fishing in Somali waters.
It is against this backdrop that members of the Rahwenye Resistance Army (RRA) kidnapped Aidid's second wife Fatouma -- who is not to be confused with his US-educated first wife, the daughter of the late Somali warlord General Ali Hashi. The RRA say they snatched Fatouma after overrunning the south-central town of Baidoa and its environs, in retaliation for atrocities committed by Aidid's henchmen. In particular, they accuse rival militiamen loyal to Aidid of having killed over 60 civilians in and around Baidoa. Aidid's top aide, Ahmad Dahir Abdul-Karim, has dismissed the allegations as "propaganda", denying that any such massacre took place.
While some Rahwenye clans have opted to resist Aidid's growing dominance of Somali politics, others have decided to back the winning horse, thus leading to factional fighting among them.
A couple of weeks ago, the Somali newspaper Xog-Ogaal reported that a large arms shipment for Aidid had arrived in the port of Marka, southeastern Somalia, and yet more arms were destined for Kismayo. Moreover, a UN report quoting "diplomatic and political sources" said the shipment included armoured personnel carriers.
These statements chime with the claims of the Ethiopian-backed RRA, which accuses the governments of Yemen and Eritrea of arming Aidid and supplying his Somali National Alliance (SNA) forces with sophisticated weapons and ammunition. The RRA has also accused Egypt and Libya of footing the bill and meeting the shipping expenses. All the countries concerned have denied the allegations.
According to the Somali newspaper Qaran, fighters belonging to one of Ethiopia's most powerful armed opposition groups -- the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) -- are fighting alongside Aidid. Addis Ababa has long accused Aidid of backing the OLF and other militant Islamist groups fomenting trouble in Ethiopia's predominantly Muslim eastern and southern regions. Addis Ababa says several Arab countries are now openly supporting Aidid and the joint administration in Mogadishu, and contriving to cast Ethiopia as the villain of the piece.
Whatever the case may be, it is certainly true that in the absence of any Western investment in the country, Arab money has come to play a decisive role in the economic rehabilitation of Somalia.
Arab backing has been a considerable windfall gain for Aidid. The association of several key opposition groups with Ethiopia, the traditional enemy of Somalia, has tarnished their image in the country and helped alienate them further from the vast majority of the people who are now looking to Aidid and the joint administration for security. And as long as the joint administration holds, it seems it will be capable of providing the Somalis with at least some measure of the peace and security they so desire.
