Let’s talk to the Shabaab, Somalia won’t be pacified by military means

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By MURITHI MUTIGA (mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com)
Posted  Saturday, October 29  2011 at  12:31

Foreign Affairs assistant minister Richard Onyonka has taken a lot of flak for suggesting that the government will talk to the Al-Shabaab with a view to finding a settlement that could end the war in Somalia.

I would say that Mr Onyonka is right and his many critics are wrong. Here is the thing about Al-Shabaab. It is too simplistic to see it only as a “terrorist organisation”.

Its roots have nothing to do with terrorism. The Shabaab was the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, an organisation led by clerics who, fed up with the disorder and anarchy in Somalia, decided to take on the warlords and impose order.

True, they introduced a fairly harsh version of Sharia law, too. But whose business is it to tell the Somali, an overwhelmingly Muslim people, what law should govern their country?

What Somalis liked was the fact that when the Shabaab took power in 2006, for the first time there was peace and order in Mogadishu.

The streets were cleaned regularly and the extortionate warlords were forced to flee. The Shabaab were the main show in town and the masses were generally pleased.

Then the Americans came around and muddled it all up as they often do. The Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 developed a severe allergy for Islamists of any shape or form.

Unhappy with the Islamic courts’ ascendancy in Somalia, the CIA base station in Nairobi began financing con men known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism — a group of warlords - who assured the Americans they would topple the Islamists.

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As the insightful Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group Rashid Abdi told me in a conversation last week, nothing unites Somalis more than foreign intervention in their country.

The result of the American policy was twofold. It led to a rise in popularity of the Shabaab while simultaneously giving Jihadists on the run from American airstrikes in Afghanistan a chance to infiltrate the homegrown Somali Shabaab.

Many warned that the Americans were setting the stage for disaster. If you look up an article published by Newsweek on June 4, 2006, the diplomat in charge of Somalia in the Nairobi embassy Michael Zorick, who was vigorously opposed to the CIA’s approach to Somalia, was transferred to Chad in the diplomatic equivalent of being sent from a posting in Nairobi to the Elemi triangle.

Given that background, Kenya would be wise to approach the Somalia issue in a highly nuanced fashion.

I would say there are two types of Al-Shabaab. There is the Shabaab led by Somali Somalis whose goals are mainly nationalist and which is the group that took power in 2006. Their aim is to capture power in the whole of Somalia and impose Islamic law.

Then there is the second group of Al-Shabaab which is heavily influenced and financed by Jihadis from Afghanistan, Pakistan and even America.

This wing of the Shabaab is very unpopular with Somalis and its aims have nothing to do with Somalia. They are fighting in Al- Qaeda’s cause.

That’s the wing of the Shabaab we must never talk to. We should isolate these two groups and find a way to accommodate the moderates.

Fighting the Shabaab with a blunt mallet only serves to unite them and to rally the Somali people behind them.

I still believe that Kenya is right to try and create a buffer zone around the border and to chase away the militants that were holding territory too close to Kenya for comfort.

But we cannot afford the human and material cost of a long occupation of Somalia. We should engage Al-Shabaab figures such as Sheikh Dahir Aweys and seek to exploit the divisions over strategy among top Shabaab leaders.

The deal should be that Kenya will not meddle in Somalia as long as the Shabaab simply exists to impose order in the territories it controls and as long as it kicks out the foreign Jihadis in its midst.

Let us not be as blockheaded as the Americans who are still stuck in Afghanistan 10 years after the invasion of that country because they refused to talk to the more moderate elements in the Taliban.