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The London Conference was significant, because for the first time it brought together all the international players who have a stake in Somalia, but have been hiding their hand
Last Thursday’s London Somalia Conference has been dismissed as having broken no new ground, and recycling the same tired old rhetoric. Wrong. The big story at the conference was precisely in the photo opportunities, and the actions that the regional players in the region took so that they could look strong on the world stage in London.
The pictures of the London meeting tell the story. The “high table” and front row in the photos was given, in addition to British Prime Minister David Cameron, to the regional power brokers in Somalia. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, the “big boys,” were always together to the right in the front. Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza, was often in a row or two back — by fact of his shyness, not lack of clout on Somalia. And to the left edge, the leader of one of the newer members of Amisom — Djibouti’s President Ismael Omar Guelleh.
In most of the photos, Museveni wears the arrogant bored look of someone who has nothing to prove. It was his moment of vindication.
The June 2011 Somalia Conference in Kampala that extended by one year the life of the Transitional Federal Government, and from which Abdiweli Mohamed Ali emerged as the new prime minister, was definitely more important than the London meet. So was the April 2011 9th Extraordinary Summit of the East African Community heads of state in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, that signalled a shift to a more aggressive posture toward the Al Shabaab militants, and was the first high level group anywhere to suggest that the TFG should get an extension.
Nevertheless, the London Conference was significant, because for the first time it brought together all the international players who have a stake in Somalia, but have been hiding their hand.
Secondly, it was an acknowledgement of an important fact — the African Union through its peace-enforcement force Amisom (comprising Uganda and Burundi forces), Kenya, and Ethiopia, had broken the back of what the world had come to view as an intractable problem. And though, as Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni once said, London represented the continued attempt by the Western powers to grab the glory from a Somalia promise that has been brought about through an “African solution,” it is important that Africa can offer leadership.
At the end of the conference, Oxfam International issued a statement that, while correct in evaluating the outcome in bread and butter terms for the Somalis, curiously failed to note how it would not have happened without the actions by African forces on the ground.
“While we recognise the huge efforts of the UK government to make the conference a success, what we had hoped for was a recognition that 20 years of internationally imposed solutions have failed. However, what we’ve seen once again are externally driven solutions that haven’t worked, aren’t working and will not work.
“We anticipated the conference would offer hope to the millions of people hit by drought and conflict, and support to build a peace process that included a wide section of Somali society. What we got was the rhetoric of Somali inclusion but you cannot go forward with a new constitution and elections in such a troubled country without a wide and inclusive political engagement within Somali society.”
A sarcastic and dismissive report in the New York Times said, “Here on the ground, in scorching-hot Somali villages like Tabda, where people live in twig huts and stagger from shady spot to shady spot to avoid the wrath of the sun, there is laughing disbelief that any conference 4,000 miles away will solve anything.”
On the ground, though, the belligerents were fighting to milk the approaching conference for good headlines, and to position for a good seat at the table in a year or so, when optimists say most parts will “at least be half-stable.”
The Shabaab, who were pushed out of all districts of Mogadishu by the Ugandan and Burundian Amisom troops last year, made a spirited attempt to retake the city with their boldest offensive in months, and a string of terrorist bombs to make it seem ungovernable. President Museveni and Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, not wanting to show up in London with egg on their faces, threw everything they had back at the Shabaab — and prevailed.
The TFG, especially Prime Minister Ali, went into a flurry of activity to show they were on top of the situation. Mr Ali also seems to have been aware that how he played his moment on the stage in London could secure him a future job as Somalia’s CEO. For the first time in 20 years, roads were marked and new street signs put up in Mogadishu. The government and Amisom then put out statements that, together with things like making the beaches safe enough for Mogadishuans to go and frolic for the first time in many years, were evidence that the city had finally returned to normal.
But it was Ethiopia, Kenya, and US President Barack Obama who perhaps played the most interesting game. Having lost face in the 2006 Ethiopian invasion, and having re-entered the fray late after Kenya’s foray in October 2011, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi sought a victorious entry in London. Two days to the start of the conference, Ethiopian troops in Somalia, together with some TFG forces, took the approaches to Baidoa, an Al Shabaab stronghold, and once the base of the TFG parliament.
A few hours before the conference started, the Ethiopians blitzed the city; the Shabaab scattered, and Zenawi had his triumphant headlines of the capture of Baidoa. He could afford to be cocky in London. Kenya did the opposite. It avoided capturing Kismayu port, inviting snide comments about the “snail’s pace” at which its campaign was proceeding. However, the Kenya army had been applying the squeeze on this most precious of Al Shabaab’s prizes, having choked off exports of charcoal to the Middle East and snuffed out the militant’s last source of rich resources, days after it had announced that it had formally joined Al Qaeda.
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