Somalia’s National Peace and Reconciliation Conference took place in Kenya from 2002 to 2004. It was held under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority for Development and largely funded by the European Commission. It was not so much a reconciliation conference or a negotiation between warring factions as a bold attempt at political engineering intended to deal with prolonged state collapse in Somalia.

Regional powers Ethiopia and Kenya, with the backing of European powers, embarked on a process to create a representative central government for Somalia where none had existed for well over a decade.

Background to the Somali peace process State collapse in Somalia had become a fact of life in the region. Ethiopia and Somalia both saw the end of dictatorial rule in 1991. But whereas Ethiopia had picked itself up and reconfigured its political landscape, Somalia’s clanbased political dynamics had consistently worked against the re-establishment of a central government. Somalia was fragmented, but by the late 1990s some of its fragments, notably Somaliland and Puntland in the northwest and northeast of the country respectively, had established their own administrations that fulfilled most of the functions of government. Ethiopia had practical working relationships with both of these administrations.

South Central Somalia was different and remained deeply divided. Politics among the Hawiye clans in that part of the country had degenerated into warlordism, especially in Mogadishu where competing clan factions vied for control of business opportunities. The countervailing trend to the divisions of clan politics was a potent mix of pan-Somali nationalism and political Islamism with the potential to impinge on the large areas of Ethiopia and Kenya inhabited by ethnic Somalis. In the mid-1990s Ethiopia faced challenges from a radical Islamist movement, Al-Ittihad al-Islami, which conducted antigovernment operations in the Ogaden region and was responsible for several bomb attacks in Ethiopian towns.

Ethiopia made common cause with various ‘secular’ warlords, Abdulahi Yusuf chief amongst them, who were opposed to Al-Ittihad for political reasons. After 1998, Eritrea became involved in  supporting warlords oppose to those backed by Ethiopia, notably the Mogadishu warlord Hussein Aideed. In addition to Ethiopian and Eritrean interventions, Somalia’s troubled politics attracted the interest of the Arab world where there was sympathy with Islamist groups and concern about the extent of neighbouring interventions. The Mbgathi peace process was launched in this context and was geared towards the establishment of a power-sharing deal among warlords. The rise of the Islamic Courts Union in Mogadishu in 2006 was to add a new layer of complexity, introducing global issues – international terrorism – to an already troubled scene.

Several Somali reconciliation conferences had taken place before 2002 under the auspices of various national and international actors, often in competition with one another. Djibouti, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and the UN had all had a hand in sponsoring meetings among the warring factions in Somalia but none of these externally mediated conferences had produced any lasting results. The last major conference of this sort had been hosted by Djibouti in 2000. It spawned a Transitional National Government (TNG), headed by President Abdiqasim, which enjoyed early support fromthe business community in Mogadishu but suffered from numerous internal weaknesses.

Abdiqasim lacked recognition from certain Mogadishu warlords who had no interest in seeing the establishment of a government that might (in the long run) restrict their profiteering activities. Several of them had links with Ethiopia. Abdiqasim’s authority was more emphatically rejected in the stable areas of Puntland and Somaliland. Again, these were areas where Ethiopia had established ties with the authorities. The TNG was perceived to be friendly towards the Arab world. Ethiopia soon began to express concern about its Islamist leanings and went about orchestrating opposition to it, working hand in hand with Colonel Abdulahi Yusuf (of Puntland) and other warlords. This helped to ensure that by the end of its three-year mandate the TNG had failed to establish its authority.

Mbgathi outcome

The Transitional Federal Government The IGAD-led peace process was initially conceived as a reconciliation conference between Abdiqasim’s TNG and its Ethiopian-backed opponents, headed by Abdulahi Yusuf. By the end of the long-drawn-out conference there was no trace of the TNG: Somalia was to make a fresh start under a Transitional Federal Government (TFG). A 275- strong transitional parliament, selected by Somali clans in proportion to their numbers in the overall population, had been appointed. However, the fact that all the clans were represented in the new parliament did not mean that the clan representatives in parliament carried any political weight in their localities.

In October 2004 this parliament, sitting in Kenya, elected Colonel Yusuf as President of the TFG. The dominant belief among observers of the process is that Yusuf ’s election was organized by Ethiopia. But there are other possible explanations. The Hawiye warlords who took part in the peace conference were hopelessly divided and fielded two candidates against Yusuf, enabling him to snatch the majority of votes. Ethiopian sources insist that they did not bribe the transitional parliament to select Yusuf. But the common assertion that he was installed by Ethiopia has become part of the orthodoxy by which the legitimacy of the TFG and Yusuf himself is dismissed.

Yusuf needed a leading Mogadishu man, from a Hawiye clan, to ease his acceptance in the capital. His first plan was to select Hussein Aideed, who had been associating with Eritrea. However, he eventually settled on the appointment of Ali Mohamed Gedi as Prime Minister. According to some analysts, this was at Ethiopia’s insistence. Gedi selected a government that was representative of all the clans (including those who had boycotted the conference), and a lengthy government list was approved by parliament in early 2005. All these proceedings took place in Kenya. The external mediators and the backers of the process intended that the TFG would lay the groundwork for creating a federal system of government in Somalia. The framework was provided by the Transitional Federal Charter, drafted and agreed among a large number of faction leaders.

It was to include the re-establishment of political, administrative and security institutions. A new constitution was to be drawn up and elections were to be held for a new government to end the transitional period in 2009. Consequences of establishing the TFG What actually happened in Somalia from late 2004, especially in Mogadishu and in South Central region, could hardly have been further from these intended outcomes. As soon as Abdulahi Yusuf had been inaugurated as President, he went to Addis Ababa and issued an appeal to the African Union to provide 20,000 peacekeepers to help him establish his authority.

This call for external military assistance took many observers by surprise: the underlying premise of the Mbgathi peace process was that the person elected by parliamentarians representative of all the clans would have sufficient support inside the country to negotiate his way into a position of power. Nonetheless, IGAD agreed in January 2005 to authorize the deployment of an IGAD Peace Support Mission to Somalia with the purpose of assisting the TFG to establish peace and security.

The idea of foreign troops coming to Somalia to install a government, above all troops from ‘IGAD’ – which spelt Ethiopia to most Somalis – was profoundly unpopular inside Somalia. The Islamic Courts of Mogadishu specifically rejected the proposal. A fairly large section of the Somali parliament that had elected Yusuf and approved his government also rebelled against the idea. By March 2005 the TFG and the parliament were split into two hostile camps over the issue. The TFG group loyal to Abdulahi Yusuf finally left Nairobi in mid-2005. Unable to secure agreement from the populace to its installation in the capital, the government went first to Jowhar and later settled in Baidoa.

There were no signs of the TFG’s expanding its support base or establishing real authority inside the country. At that stage neither IGAD nor the AU was moving with any obvious speed towards the creation of an intervention force to install it in power. Ethiopia remained a major player in the tangle of Somali politics and the key backer of Yusuf ’s faction of the TFG. Eritrea was also becoming more active in Somali politics, principally as an arena for confronting Ethiopia. In 2005 reports began to surface of Eritrea channelling assistance via Somalia to rebels in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.

Eritrea also started to develop links with anti-Ethiopian militants in Mogadishu who would soon gain prominence as leaders in the Islamic Courts. Some of the dissidents in the TFG were fishing for support from Yemen and others in the Arab world. The United States showed little interest in the TFG project and was establishing links with individual warlords with whom it hoped to make headway against an ill-defined ‘terrorist threat’ believed to exist in Mogadishu. It was the kind of muddle of competing interests that had consigned Abdiqasim’s government to oblivion, and it looked as though the TFG was heading the same way.

The challenge of the Islamic Courts All this was to changewith the rise to power of the Islamic Courts. The Courts had begun to operate in the 1990s, providing law and order within the confines of clan zones, mainly in South Mogadishu. Links grew among them, signalling a slow evolution towards a more coherent Islamist vision of political order. At the end of 2004, just as Yusuf was being elected TFG President in Nairobi, Sheikh Sharif was elected Chairman of all Islamic Courts operating across Hawiye-clan-dominated Mogadishu.

The growing influence of the Islamic Courts began to encroach upon the authority of the ‘secular’ warlords of Mogadishu, who had largely associated themselves with the TFG project. In part this was just another of Mogadishu’s turf-wars. But there was also an ideological and political undercurrent to the rivalry, complicated by the intrusion of regional and global political interests that were to prove deeply destabilizing. During 2005 Mogadishu was hit by a wave of unexplained assassinations and disappearances. Activists in the Islamic Courts claimed that covert CIA operations were targeting their members, including the assassinations of the militia commanders who were the driving force behind the implementation of Court jurisdictions.

In retaliation, exsecurity officers associated with former President Siad Barre’s regime (and the TFG) and ‘secular’ politicians, suspected of complicity with Western intelligence agencies, were targeted and killed. The suspicion of both CIA and Ethiopian involvement forced the Islamic Courts leaders to take a political stand. In early 2006, the long-standing covert operations against the Courts took on a public face, as Hawiye warlords formed a new group called the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT).

As battle-lines became more clearly delineated, simmering tensions – not always directly linked to ideological differences – came to a head. One particular flashpoint was over Mogadishu’s vastly profitable seaport at El Ma’an, where a long-standing business rivalry turned violent and one side invoked the support of the Courts militias. The ensuing defeat of a key warlord associated with CIA handouts emboldened those seeking an alternative to warlordism and precipitated a popular revolt that saw the warlords run out of town and the Islamic Courts assume control.

To the outside world, where shifts in the politics of Mogadishu had gone largely unnoticed, the appearance in mid-2006 of the Islamic Courts as the sole authority in Mogadishu looked like a carefully planned Islamic revolution. This startling development led to hasty (and mostly inaccurate) parallels being drawn with the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the region, opinion became polarized over whether this was a ‘popular’ uprising or a jihadist bid for power, whereas the reality was a rather more prosaic conjuncture of several longestablished dynamics in Southern Somalia. It is still unclear if Islamic radicals dominated the Islamic Courts agenda – as US officials claimed. The organization was not fully ‘tested’ as a political front before its collapse. Most informed observers saw it as a ‘broad mosque’, bringing together people from moderate and extreme wings of political Islam.

Ethiopia was extremely wary of the new developments which promised to take Somalia’s politics in a new direction, one in which Ethiopia’s influence was sure to be greatly diminished. It was particularly dismayed to see Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former Al-Ittihad leader, occupying a prominent position in the Courts leadership. Eritrea’s involvement with key figures in the new administration in Mogadishu would certainly have added to Ethiopia’s concern. It moved quickly to shore up the TFG’s position in Baidoa. The six months during which the Courts ran Mogadishu were marked by an unprecedented improvement in security that allowed free movement in the city for the first time since 1991.

This induced some heartfelt optimism about the prospects for a genuine recovery for Somalia, particularly among the Hawiye population of the South whose experience of misrule and extortion by warlords had been especially acute and protracted. However, serious frictions were beginning to emerge between the ‘moderates’ led by the Chairman of the ‘Executive Council’, Sheikh Sharif, and the ‘radical’ Chairman of the Shura, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. The constituent parts of the Courts movement, including its armed wing al Shabaab, were not particularly integrated with one another. Individuals started making policies and statements without reference to the wider organization. Many of these policies – mostly conservative social policies – were unpopular among the populace and caused serious divisions between leaders of al Shabaab and important officials of the Islamic Courts.

Islamic Courts vs TFG

At the start, the possibility that the Courts and the TFG might be able to come to an accommodation with each other was not excluded. Each possessed something that the other sorely lacked: the TFG had a measure of international recognition and legitimacy; the Islamic Courts had effective control over the capital. Some of the Hawiye members of the TFG and its parliament saw this as a real opportunity and were keen to negotiate. Three sets of talks did take place during the second half of 2006. These were brokered by the Arab League and supported by both Kenya and the Europeans. Ethiopia also had contacts with the Courts during this period. But the opening for reaching an agreement between the two groups proved very small.

US perceptions of a threat fromthe Islamic Courts helped to drive events to an entirely different conclusion. US official views were not wholly aligned at this time. Some parts of the US government disagreed with the idea of Ethiopian intervention and reportedly advised against it. However, the Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa dominant theme in US policy was captured in a single and oft-repeated phrase: to prevent Somalia becoming a haven for international terrorists. In fact, Western intelligence agencies were already convinced that three non-Somali terror suspects responsible for the US Embassy bombings of 1998 were sheltered by elements of the Courts leadership.

This was a matter that the US viewed with deadly seriousness. In mid-December US Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer was to announce that the Islamic Courts were now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals and that the top layer of the Courts comprised extremists and terrorists.36 The Courts were ill equipped to respond to such serious charges, beyond simple denial. Despite their rhetoric, they were seriously divided on the diplomatic position and negotiations with external players, including the TFG and its Ethiopian backers. This disagreement was exacerbated by UN resolution 1725 of December 2006 authorizing the deployment of an AU peacekeeping mission. This heightened tensions and encouraged the military ‘hawks’ (not just al Shabaab) to think there was an international conspiracy against them. It handed the initiative to radical elements of the coalition, among them the chief of the Courts militia who gave the Ethiopians a week’s ultimatum to leave Somalia or face forcible expulsion.

The Ethiopian forces had already moved into Baidoa in August to protect the TFG. They and the TFG militias were ready to respond when clashes began on the front line between the two sides near Baidoa. The asymmetry in numbers and capability between the combined Ethiopian–TFG forces and the loosely integrated Islamist militias became clear, and on 28 December 2006 Ethiopian and TFG forces marched into Mogadishu unopposed. The Courts’ military and administrative presence seemed to collapse. Whatever misgivings it might have had beforehand, the United States evidently supported the intervention. PrimeMinisterMeles has publicly acknowledged that it provided intelligence information at the beginning of the operation. Rather more complicated for Ethiopia was the direct involvement when the United States launched two missile strikes close to the Somalia Kenya border during January.

These supposedly targeted fleeing remnants of the Courts militia. (By most accounts they missed their targets.) Ethiopia was reportedly furious that US action had been launched from an airfield in Eastern Ethiopia without consultation. Ethiopia’s reaction illustrates the complicated interface of regional and global interests. IGAD’s earlier commitment to back the TFG provided valuable diplomatic cover for what amounted to a ‘regime change’ operation by Ethiopia in Mogadishu. As the position of the TFG became more parlous, culminating in the establishment of the Islamists inMogadishu, so IGAD’s rhetorical support for the TFG as the ‘legitimate’ government of Somalia amplified.

The United States – previously agnostic about the viability of the TFG – now added its voice andWestern support grew firmer. The AU redoubled its efforts to provide a ‘peace support mission’ to back the TFG. This materialized in the early months of 2007 as a force of 1,600 Ugandan soldiers, fully funded by the United States. Intended to be the advance guard of a 7,000-strong AMISON (African Union Mission in Somalia) peacekeeping mission, the Ugandans stayed alone in Mogadishu until supplemented by Burundian forces at the very end of the 2007. The arrival of AMISOM, or a UN successor force, became the condition that Ethiopia required to withdraw its troops from Somalia. In the meantime, Ethiopia was to act as guarantor and protector of the TFG.

Resistance to the TFG

Far from bringing peace and government to Somalia, the installation of the TFG provoked a major insurgency and a severe deterioration in security. The population of Mogadishu endured conditions akin to civil war for much of 2007. Major Ethiopian-led security operations in March/April and October/November caused widespread destruction and triggered massive displacement. UN sources estimate that up to 60 per cent of Mogadishu’s 2 million population have fled. The TFG blamed the insurgency on a regrouped and reorganized Islamist threat based on renegade Hawiye clans. However, many Somalis understand it to be a nationalist resistance against Ethiopia’s military presence.

Leading figures of the Islamic Courts remained active, though not all in the same place or reading from the same script. A core group established itself in Asmara and joined forces with other (secular) opponents of the transitional government to form the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS). Their key demand was the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces. But operating fromexile in Asmara made it difficult for them to demonstrate their relevance, and divisions have developed between ARS and the radical elements in the Islamic Courts, especially its militant armed wing – al Shabaab. The Shabaab forces are spearheading the popular resistance to what they call the Ethiopian occupation. Their methods are borrowed from Iraq and show increasing sophistication. Abdulahi Yusuf ’s transitional government has been unable to establish meaningful authority in Mogadishu or elsewhere in the Southern regions where the Courts formerly held sway. In an effort to shore up support, alliances have been struck with warlords from certain Hawiye sub-clans.

But – consistent with their conduct over the last 17 years – none has appeared capable of working to a national agenda. The transitional government’s security institutions remain chronically weak, corrupt and factionalized, practically indistinguishable from clan militias. Government security officials have been living under constant threat of assassination in Mogadishu. Most of the government ministers and members of parliament remain 150 miles away in Baidoa. Under strong pressure from donors, the government organized a reconciliation conference in August but it achieved nothing because the key groups needed for dialogue boycotted the meeting.

By the end of 2007 the TFG bore little resemblance to the entity that had first emerged from the Kenyan talks back in 2004. A group of about 30 parliamentarians hostile to Abdulahi Yusuf had been replaced in 2006. The ailing President was still nominally in charge. But behind this façade a vigorous rearrangement of the pieces had taken place at the behest of external (principally Ethiopian) interests. Prime Minister Gedi, who had signally failed to bring his Hawiye kinsmen on board, had been convinced to resign and his extensive government (representative of all the clans) disbanded. A new PrimeMinister, Nur Adde, had been chosen and had appointed a small and much more technocratic cabinet.

Like Gedi, Nur Adde was from one of the Hawiye clans in Mogadishu, but he spoke an entirely new language of political reconciliation. This included a willingness to speak to Islamists – hitherto dismissed by TFG leaders as ‘terrorists’ – whom he explicitly invited to be part of the process. Nur Adde has stated that his goal is to end the conflict in Mogadishu and create the conditions for Ethiopian forces to leave. His approach has the cautious backing of the Europeans, who are well aware that the TFG needs to make itself more inclusive if it is to survive. The US has signalled its own red line by designating al Shabaab a terrorist organization. Shabaab elements may well not want to be part of settlement with the TFG but distinguishing them from the wider Somali opposition is likely to be difficult. Meanwhile Abdulahi Yusuf is fighting a rearguard action to prevent a settlement that might make him irrelevant.

Ethiopia has not opposed the new approach. In a recent interview, PrimeMinister Meles said the country had been saved from being taken over by ‘the Taliban of Somalia’. However, he said that the new government was likely to be more effective than the previous one and noted, as progress, the fact that the TFG was ‘reaching out to moderate members of the Islamic Courts Union for a commitment to resolve problems by peaceful means’. However, he said Ethiopia would not disengage militarily until AMISOM had achieved a substantial deployment. Opinions of the Mbgathi Peace Process Three years from its inception, the creation of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia seems to have produced the opposite of what its various backers had intended. In Mogadishu and its surroundings it has been a ‘Three years from its inception, the creation of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia seems to have produced the opposite of what its various backers had intended’ conflict-generating rather than a conflict-solving initiative.

It has given rise to foreign military intervention and a related insurgency in Mogadishu, the violence of which has surpassed anything that had been happening among Somali factions for the previous decade. The TFG has had no impact on the self-governing region of Somaliland; it has made little evident difference to Puntland, President Yusuf ’s Abdulahi’s home region, except to weaken security control somewhat as militia from his own Majjerteyn clan were drawn into Mogadishu to defend his position. The Bay and Bakool region – centred on Baidoa – may have derived some benefit from hosting (for the most part) the TFG and its parliament and enjoying the protection of Ethiopian forces.

The question that needs to be asked is how the Mbgathi process produced such a perverse outcome. Were there fundamental design flaws in the process? Was it the leadership? Were crucial opportunities missed? Is it possible to disaggregate such elements as bad timing, bad judgment or just bad luck? Is it possible to imagine a different kind of process that might have produced the desired outcome?

These questions were addressed to a selection of diplomats, officials and analysts during a visit to the region in February 2008. The following sections present a summary of typical responses. Wrong approach: power-sharing instead of reconciliation Somalis are inclined to argue that the approach adopted at Mbgathi was fundamentally flawed. In 2006 Dr Ali Abdirahman Hirsi, reflecting on why Somalia had so robustly resisted the restoration of conventional government and statehood, identified as one of the factors:

Unvarying use of an unhelpful peacemaking technique that literally made efforts of the international community to revive the Somali state an exercise in futility. Dr Hirsi expanded as follows: One obvious reason that admittedly provides only partial explanation for the repeated and ironical failure of the past attempts to revive the fallen Somali state is the uniform application of a flawed methodology in the running of these peace conferences. The repeated use of this faulty procedure, which paid only lip service to the issue of reconciliation, has hastily given birth time and again to illegitimate authorities composed of the same rival warlords, in the event not yet reconciled, that have given rise to Somalia’s continuing political crisis in the first place.

Wrong participants

This observation chimes with a familiar observation by Somalis, offered in the form of a proverb: ‘The offspring of a stolen camel will always be illegitimate.’ This places the blame for the poor outcome of the conference on its ingredients. The first problem was giving pride of place to the warlords. Diplomats involved with the Mbgathi process readily admit that the warlords were given centre stage in the process. Their inclusion was intentional, on the logical grounds that it was the warlords who had conspired against the last effort to create a government (theTNG that came out of the Arta peace process in Djibouti in 2000) and that it was necessary for them to be given a stake in any future government. One of the diplomats associated with the process observed that, with hindsight, they might have overestimated the importance of the warlords and their capacity to deliver any sort of stability.

Even when the Somali peace process opened its doors to civil society participants, there were no apparent criteria for deciding who should be represented. The process of selection became mired in corruption at an early stage and produced a random and unrepresentative array of organizations. One of the facilitators who tried to work with the civil society representatives was bemused by their apparent lack of interest and focus and quickly became exhausted by the process. However, a senior IGAD official maintains that the process produced the intended result: a government for Somalia. Many involved in one way or another with Mbgathi felt that despite some shortcomings around representation and participation, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the methodology employed. They believed that the TFG provided a starting point on the basis – as one put it – that ‘a bad government is better than no government at all’. However, this is not a proposition to which Somalis themselves would readily subscribe.

Flaws in the negotiation process

Kenyan leadership of the process may have contributed to a narrowing of participation, particularly in the early stages of the conference when it sat in Eldoret. As time went on there was an understandable desire to get the numbers down tomanageable proportions and to push for a power-sharing deal among the main movers and shakers. Some external observers were well aware that key stakeholders, particularly the Mogadishu business community and its increasingly important religious leaders, were absent. However, they had no standing to alter the decisions that had been taken on participation. IGAD’s ownership of the process was strongly asserted by its Kenyan Chair (initially Elijah Mwangale, later followed by Bethwel Kiplagat). Many observers believed that Ethiopia was closely involved in directing and shaping the process.

Leadership

Some believe that the TFG might have fared better with different personalities at the top or, as one interlocutor put it, if the transitional parliament had ‘chosen someone with a less disturbing past’. For clan reasons alone Abdulahi Yusuf was always going to have a difficult ride in Mogadishu. Despite his undoubted ambition to lead the country, Yusuf carried with him an unfortunate reputation of working to a very narrow clan agenda to the benefit of his Majjerteyn people in Puntland. His choice of Ali Mohamed Gedi, a previously unknown veterinarian, to win the confidence of the Hawiye clans proved insufficient. Ethiopia continues to be blamed for distributing bribes to the transitional parliament to ensure that Yusuf secured the presidency. However, a senior Ethiopian official insists that they did not interfere with the vote and would have been quite content if one of the other candidates – both of them Hawiye – had succeeded.
This is plausible.

Denial of timely support and assistance from donors Others believe that a tough military man, in the mould of Yusuf, was just what was needed to establish a government in Somalia. For these, the failure of theTFGmust be laid firmly at the door of the international community: first, the US dalliance with the Mogadishu warlords gave them every encouragement not to take the new government seriously; and, second, the European Commission held back the available (large) sums for development and ‘state-building’ assistance, waiting to see whether Yusuf’s government could establish its authority and insisting on evidence of financial accountability. International aid to Somalia has been running at roughly $200 million per annum since 2000.

Wrong emphasis – too much G and not enough T

By mid-2008 the TFG enterprise has substantially evolved from its origins in the Mbgathi peace process. Some Western observers now consider it was a mistake in 2005 to treat the TFG as a working government. Emphasis should have been on the T (of transition) not the G (of government). Under the stewardship of Yusuf and Gedi, the TFG seemed to be digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole in Mogadishu throughout 2007. Firm external pressure was brought to bear to induce Gedi to resign. The conciliatory efforts of the new Prime Minister, Nur Adde, have been endorsed by the UN and have support from Ethiopia, the US and the European Community. It appears to be the beginning of new phase. A political settlement among different political forces within Mogadishu (not excluding Islamists) could provide a local security framework that would enable Ethiopia to withdraw its forces. This could be the starting point for restoring normality inMogadishu and returning to a more plausible approach to restoring government in Somalia.

Unlike the Mbgathi process, its starting point would be the complex realities of power on the ground and the varied set of local governance arrangements that have evolved over the last 17 years without central authority. In the meantime, however, Somalis in South Central Somalia continue to live with the consequences of a major insurgency against Ethiopia’s intervention. The shift towards reconciliation has seen a trickle of internally displaced persons (IDPs) returning to Mogadishu, but large sections of the city remain completely depopulated. Violence continues on a daily basis in Mogadishu with a heavy civilian toll resulting from incidents including mortar attacks on the Bakara market, roadside bombs, attacks on Ethiopian soldiers and on AMISOM forces (including a suicide bomb on 8 April), and the targeting of TFG officials.

The insurgents are increasingly carrying out attacks away from the capital and appear to have a growing presence in Bakool, and in the Lower and Middle Shabelle regions. Regional matters The sad story of the TFG (and the original good intentions behind it) demonstrates that Somalia’s recovery of government is not going to be left to Somalis alone to solve. Ethiopia has become deeply embroiled in Somali politics and has invested too heavily to settle for a quick exit. For public, particularly international, consumption, Ethiopia’s rhetoric is about terrorism and terrorists, but the draining reality of the dispute with Eritrea remains a powerful driver of policy. An ungoverned or badly governed Somalia would be a nuisance to Ethiopia. Islamist politics in Somalia could be a cause for concern, mainly if they were linked to an expansionist programme. But the threat is enormously amplified by the opportunities for destabilization that either or both of these would offer to their adversary in Eritrea.

There are a host of additional stakeholders involved. Kenya, which shares a porous border with Somalia and has its own large Somali population in Northeast province and in Nairobi. Uganda, which has provided the AMISOM forces that remain in Mogadishu, ostensibly to support the TFG. The Gulf states, with a large Somali business community and long-standing economic ties to the country. Egypt, in its perennial quiet contest with Ethiopia. European countries have some interests, not the least of which are concerns about the unending flow of Somali migrants who have fled this difficult environment for the last 17 years. The United States, with its focus on fighting international terrorism, also has Somalia on its radar. The combination of intense regional hostilities and the wide array of other foreign policy interests at play have proved to be major obstacles to a Somali-owned reconciliation process.

By Sally Healy

Horn of Africa Group Report by Chatham House