- Title: [SW News](Reuters) Warlords Flex Muscles in Somalia
- Posted by/on:[AMJ][Sunday, April 1, 2001]
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| Warlords flex muscles in Somalia |
| Spate of kidnappings show strongmen not
going quietly |
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Spanish aid workers Enric Sarrias (L) and
Elena Grandio arrive in Kenya from Somalia this week after being released from captivity
in the Somali capital.
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By William Maclean
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| NAIROBI, Kenya, March 30 — Somalia’s turbulent
warlords are not going quietly. By seizing a group of foreign aid workers, militia chiefs
sidelined for months by a national reconciliation process have thrust themselves back into
the political limelight in the way they know best — through the barrel of a gun. |
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‘There’s a power struggle going
on and unfortunately we got caught smack in the middle of it.’
— U.N. SOURCE
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A POWERFUL group of clan leaders who have
flourished amid the chaos of civil war are using the incident to send a message that they
still control much of the ruined Horn of Africa country despite the existence of a rival
central government.
“There’s a power struggle going on and
unfortunately we got caught smack in the middle of it,” a U.N. source said, referring
to the capture of the visiting U.N. aid workers on Tuesday.
The abduction, carried out in a hail of gunfire amid
the worst fighting in months, has severely embarrassed the young Transitional National
Government (TNG) in its ambitious bid to extend its authority across a country torn apart
by violence.
“The militia chiefs have used the aid workers to
make a very political point — that they have more control on the ground than the
TNG,” said Moustafa Hassouna, a lecturer in diplomacy at the University of Nairobi. |
“The chiefs felt they had lost legitimacy during the reconciliation process.
Now they want to get back into the game.”
TWO STILL HELD
Nine foreign aid workers were initially
seized with a Somali U.N. staffer. Five of the foreigners and the Somali, were rapidly
freed and two others were in the process of being released on Friday.
But two — both British U.N. security officers
— remain in captivity.
They are believed to be held by Muse Sudi Yalahow, a
member of the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC), a gathering of militia
barons challenging the TNG’s bid to create the first centralized government in a
decade.
The chiefs bitterly resented a high-publicized
reconciliation process brokered in neighboring Djibouti that resulted last year in the
creation of the new administration.
For the militia leaders, the move was a threat to
their control of a patchwork of territory in Mogadishu and elsewhere which flourished in
the decade-long absence of a government.
Now the new cabinet ministers are struggling to
compete with four militias opposed to the new administration and Mogadishu has in effect
been divided into five fiefdoms.
The new administration has also won few friends in
Ethiopia, a landlocked neighbor that sees little to gain in a strong and independent
government in Mogadishu and has regularly played host to meetings of Somali warlords. |
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The government in Addis Ababa is distinctly
nervous of neighboring countries that are overly influenced by Islam and accuses of the
new Somali government of harboring a clutch of Muslim fundamentalists with too much power.
WARLORDS SENSITIVE
The warlords, made sensitive by the
reconciliation effort to any perceived slight to their prestige, also took offence at what
they called the United Nations’ failure to inform them in advance of the visit by the
aid workers that began on Monday.
SRRC leader Hussein Aideed on Thursday criticized
U.N. officials in Kenya, the base for the world body’s work in east Africa, saying
they had failed to follow what he called normal procedure and tell the SRRC leaders of the
impending visit.
“The aid workers were sneaked into Mogadishu,
because they were hoodwinked by Hassan Salad’s group which wanted to show the
international community that they are in control,” Aideed said, referring to
President Abdiqassim Salad Hassan of the transitional government.
In the absence of central government authority, some
clan leaders have adopted the practice of issuing Somali “visas” for aid workers
and others planning visits to Mogadishu at offices they maintain in Nairobi, the Kenyan
capital.
Some international aid officials acknowledged
privately that the creation of the TNG had led them to believe erroneously that a kind of
normality was gradually returning to Somalia.
A U.N. spokeswoman in Nairobi said the world body was
always prepared to talk to all authorities in Somalia to facilitate its work without
becoming embroiled in Somali politics.
“We want to emphasis that our staff went into
Mogadishu on a humanitarian mission,” said U.N. spokeswoman Sonya Laurence Green,
adding that Mogadishu had urgent health problems such as a cholera outbreak and reported
cases of polio. |
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