Ethiopian regime Guides Western Triple Failure in SomaliaBy Dr. M. Omar Hashi
BSN
Today, the Hawiye people's armed struggle in Southern and Central Somalia continues to prevail decisively to victory; while for all intents and purposes Ethiopia has lost the war it launched.
America and European superpowers have conceded that the Ethiopian occupation was of limited utility (if at all useful), and now an abysmal and humiliating defeat. Moreover, militarily speaking there is not much the Ethiopian con scri pt army can do to influence events in the Resistance-held South Somalia. The whole Occupation has become "operationally dead" in the face of a growing, popular and more determined protracted insurgency. The useless Ethiopian allied war criminal Darood "TFG" entity has already self-destructed into mutually unintelligible parasitic pieces; whose ugly demise was foretold long before the ongoing defeat of the Ethiopian occupation army.
Therefore, in hindsight the Western powers through their many mistakes have themselves grossly miscalculated on both the resilience of the Hawiye people's Resistance and the Ethiopian mass murderer Meles Zinawi regime's capability to subdue that Resistance; not to mention its erstwhile Darood-TFG collaborators who are fleeing to and from like rats today. Somalia is a systemic and blunt Western miscalculation that has effectively eroded the competency of the US-EU Superpowers in the Third World and on the global stage, specifically in terms of organizational integrity and credibility, all at a time of growing anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world and emerging counterweight military rivals in Russia, China, Venezuela and Iran. In addition, the current US-EU paralysis-cum Ethiopian genocide debacle in Somalia is also a 20 year policy of utter quagmire and blowback!
Consequently, this essay attempts to answer the question asked by so many Somali victims of Ethiopian genocide and non-Somalis alike-in fact the whole world today: Why have the Western powers, who themselves manufactured the decades long Somalia Civil War, been so profoundly unable to resolve that crisis? In other words, why have US-EU policy failed so dramatically when it could have succeeded, especially given that the US-EU started the war and with some intelligible actions ( based on firm understanding of the internal Somali tribal conflict dynamics) could easily resolved it?
Failure #1: Ethiopia and the so called "Hawiye warlords" Miscalculation
Ever since the 1977-78 Ethio-Somali war America and EU powers felt that it was best to leave Ethiopian priorities central in the West's bilateral dealings with the Somali state and people. The reason was Somalia not only won the1977-78 war as related to conflict with Mengistu regime and the Ethiopian army, but the war itself exposed the inherent contradictions in the artificial Ethiopian state itself. Therefore, the Western powers fearful that another major conflagration would result in the further and potentially irrevocable disintegration of the Ethiopian Habesha controlled concentration camp into its constituent ethnic blocs, decided to turn on the Barre dictatorship. However, with the unceremonious demise of the once US-backed brutal clannish dictator Siyad Barre in 1991, the fear of an immediate "Somali state" was quickly removed; put more correctly, the vestiges of an organized Somali national apparatus (even one as violent, corrupt and dysfunctional as Barre's regime) was gone.
Instead what America had and wanted was to deal with the Somali "people" directly, as understood in the disparate and unrelated clans, sub clans and tribes- all mutually antagonistic groupings. Both the US-EU leadership felt that dealing with such clans and tribal factions was a lot more convenient and safe for the post- Mengistu Haile Mariam, Tigrayan-run Ethiopia to rebuild its army than to risk another potential war with a Somalia regional rival; albeit in the form of a US-friendly post-Barre puppet regime in Mogadishu.
However, within the US and EU decision-making bodies there was also some serious doubts cast as to how long Somalia could be kept stateless and whether such a permanent stateless void would help or hinder Ethiopia in the long run.
Agreeing to keep Somalia stateless as option #1, certain military-industrial lobby groups in Washington led by major oil conglomerate ConocoPhillips urged the Bush administration to also try and secure the Somali natural resources by force. The Bush administration as a result decided to undertake a massive $5 billion dollar US-led and UN sanctioned Intervention with the stated aim of turning "Somalia into a quasi trusteeship"- this initiative was dubbed "Operation Restore Hope".
After its bloody failure and the subsequent withdrawal of UN and US forces, the Ethiopian dictator Meles Zinawi fearful of yet another potential popular resurrection of Somali state under the determined Hawiye (especially, since both the remnants of the tribal Barre regime and their foreign backers were kicked out), advised for a new policy shift: the cultivation of an array of uneducated and weak tribal warlords to block the Hawiye and by extension Somalia.
In this scenario, dictator Meles envisioned and was able to recruit an array of criminal warlords (all of whom are currently part of the TFG gang) solely controlled by his Tigrinya minority regime. The stated aim was to sow disunity and forestall Hawiye political and economic advancement.
Unfortunately, Zinawi regime proved to be as stupid as it is genocidal in providing such a direction towards unpopular warlords. Although the US-EU powers dutifully armed and legitimized various Ethiopian controlled warlords- especially through 14 or so sham "peace conferences" run by the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel Arap Moi, the Western powers miscalculated with the warlords. The actual Hawiye people "the clans and groups" on the ground soon realized the nefarious conspiracy of the belligerent Western powers and Ethiopia against their wellbeing in support of the cancerous and destructive warlords.
Instead, the Hawiye people- divided in clans, but all sharing the experience of victimization by both by foreign intervention and domestic tribal war and dictatorship- became ever more determined to continue to carry on with their lives no matter what the West and its Ethiopian puppet plotted. After 1995 internal Hawiye clashes, the people saw the rebuilding of Mogadishu's basic services like water and electricity, then slowly the multitude of towns and populated centers, until finally expanding business links across and beyond subclan and tribal lines.
All of this progress was achieved actually in spite of the dozen or so Ethiopian-controlled warlords and their unscrupulous foreign backers who menace all business and civilization. In fact, the Mogadishu region itself witnessed an unprecedented boom in commerce, private telecommunications, schools, hospitals and the export-import of all manners of goods since 1991- though there was no so called organized governmental authority managing these interactions.
Failure # 2: Ethiopia and the Darood collaborationist "TFG" Miscalculation
The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union was the result of a painstaking process based on cementing fraternal and communal ties between the Hawiye people and business community. Therefore, the Islamic courts started as an indigenous grassroots response to the utter collapse of law and order on the local level caused by the Western-funded and Ethiopian controlled warlord criminals and their Qat militias. By stamping out crime, especially the Ethiopian and Kenyan harvested drug Qat ( and the related lawlessness and insecurity it breeds) as well as creating jobs the ICU in Mogadishu ensured the free flow of goods, services and people-something very remarkable for a city of 2.5 million people without a government!
As a result of the ICU's neighborhood level successes it wasn't long before it morphed it into a popular governance mechanism able to unite the various clans and tribes of Southern Somalia's regions into one functional (credible) national authority. Similarly, the Zinawi dictatorship once again fearful of the "real-time" emergence of an effective Somali national authority in the form of the ICU movement decided to guide the Western policy to yet another miscalculation, this time in trying to impose the clannish TFG warlord entity under the cowardly-dependent Darood warlord Abdullahi Yusuf. Despite his foolish invasion of Somalia in December 2006 and receiving billions of dollars from US-EU powers for the war of occupation-genocide ( in addition to making his decrepit Darood warlord Abdullahi Yusuf be seen as the West's "surrogate ""- dictator Zinawi failed miserably to change the course of history or the ongoing War in Southern Somalia.
Rather than surrendering, the Hawiye people immediately launched an armed Liberation struggle to resist the US and EU-funded Ethiopian occupation-genocide. After more than 2 years and half of the worst atrocities and fighting imaginable in the world, the depleted Ethiopian killing machine has now become so bogged down and demoralized, that it, rather the hardened Hawiye civilians is the one receiving the worst brunt of the fighting!
The US and EU powers today feel humiliated and paralyzed despite trying to lie, deceive and pervert the course of justice to hide the Zinawi regime's war crimes. The invasion of Somalia was miscalculation and everyone in the world knows that the Ethiopians invasion failure was directly micromanaged by the West and is Western made debacle.
In addition, the so called TFG war criminals have become a serious liability for the West to want to immediately rid itself of. That is, the TFG war criminal entity is such a humiliation that the very "living god" of the Darood gangs dictator Meles has felt the need to loudly and publicly distance his regime from warlord Yusuf, ironically blaming the irrelevant coward for Ethiopia's ongoing defeat at the hands of the Hawiye Resistance!
Failure # 3: Ethiopia and the Sheikh Sharif "Djibouti Stooges" Miscalculation
Dictator Zinawi's recent contradictory statements on the so called IGAD Nairobi Conference-which is incidentally purely out of desperation-that if the Sharif Sheikh Ahmed "ARS Djibouti stooges" and the now defunct TFG gang led by war criminal Nur Adde are somehow able to successfully merge into a functional puppet entity Ethiopia might stay on is just another gross miscalculation for the US-EU powers towards regional failure- one which like the past two the West will dreadfully regret.
The reason is the Resistance forces in Somalia cannot be influenced or manipulated by the mere clique of stooges who are unrepresentative and led by so called Sharif Sheikh Ahmed-himself an opportunist who is now utterly disgraced and as a result been summarily removed as Chairman in the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia! Sharif was already isolated by his respective Abgaal subclan warlords, who as a group anyway were useless since the Abgaal clan is disproportionately pro-Ethiopian occupation from the beginning and today only a very small minority is fighting in the Hawiye Resistance movements.
Today, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed ranks even lower than his own fellow sub-clan warlords Nur Adde and Mohamed Dhere in terms of credibility and influence on the ground. By joining the Ethiopian occupation Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has no way out, he is literally finished! Let alone be able to face or disarm the Resistance forces; there is every indication that much like humiliated cowardly warlord Abdullahi Yusuf so called Sheikh Sharif will be as vulnerable and dependent hostage upon the beleaguered Ethiopian occupiers and the doomed African Uganda-Burundi mercenaries.
What's more, practically speaking the US and EU powers know full well the Djibouti charade has become a "real fiasco" with zero impact on the Core of the Resistance movement: the warrior and steadfast Habr Gedir clans, who will undoubtedly never compromise nor forsake their victorious armed struggle today. Consequently, the US-EU powers are engineering their own triple failure if they follow desperate Ethiopian regime to its end!
