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U.S. seeks a stance on slippery Somalia
Islamic clerics' intent is unclear, but their power is undeniable
- Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 16, 2006
This much is obvious: The United States' attempt to defeat Islamic clerics in Mogadishu has failed. After 15 years of anarchy and incessant war, civilians in and around Somalia's blood-soaked capital are embracing the loose coalition of religious leaders who seek to establish an Islamic state in the Horn of Africa nation.
The rest, experts on Somalia say, is not so clear.
Are the clerics driving the advance across southern Somalia preparing to turn the country into a safe haven for al Qaeda and other international Islamic terrorists? Or are they moderate Muslims seeking to rein in Somalia's warlords, who had carved the nation into dozens of fiefdoms since the last national government collapsed in 1991?
How many Somali civilians actually support them? And what should Washington do now that the Mogadishu warlords it had been backing in a proxy war against the clerics fell under the Islamic militia's advance?
"It's such a fluid situation, it's really hard to say," said Karin von Hippel, a former U.N. expert on Somalia who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A coalition of Islamic clerics called the Islamic Courts Union took control of Mogadishu last week, ending four months of bloody battles against U.S.- and Ethiopia-backed warlords and the 15-year rule of the warlords, who also had fought continually among themselves.
In response, State Department officials hurriedly convened an international Somalia Contact Group with their European counterparts in New York on Thursday to try to form a new policy on Somalia, the land where a disastrous U.S. military operation in 1992-93 forged an image of American defeat, commemorated in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."
But diplomats emerged from a day of meetings reaffirming support for Somalia's ineffectual interim government and insisting on access for international groups to resume delivering aid.
Critics say the U.S. policy of covertly supporting Somali warlords in their fight against the Islamic forces backfired because many Somalis blame the United States for the violence that has engulfed their nation since the American-led intervention.
"What we need to do first is get a better understanding of the situation in the country," John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the Associated Press. "It's premature to frame this in terms of decisions or potential decisions at this point."
The Islamic Courts Union is not monolithic. According to the International Crisis Group and analysts who study Somalia, it is a fragmented alliance of 14 courts -- essentially clan-based Islamic institutions created by tribal clerics to install law and order; each court has its own militia. Most of the clerics appear to be moderate and are focused on restoring order and steering lax Muslims back to what they describe as the true path of Islam. Three of the courts represent radical militant factions. Some of the clerics adhere to the ultra-conservative Sunni Wahhabi Islam, which is practiced by al Qaeda; others practice mystical Sufi Islam, which Wahhabis do not recognize.
How extreme the clerics' rule turns out to be depends on which of these factions emerges as the most powerful leader among the union -- and that, experts say, is hard to discern at this stage.
"They are a very loosely formed coalition of Islamists who have the same basic philosophical ideas, they do want an Islamic state -- but do we know the same kind of Islamic state? We don't really know," said David Shinn, a former State Department coordinator for Somalia in 1993.
Somalia is a failed state that has no police force, no government schools or hospitals. Two northern corners of the 1,000-mile-long country, Somaliland and Puntland, have declared themselves independent. Southern Somalia, in the meantime, has been a launching pad for terrorists, including the ones who attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the more radical members of the Islamic Courts Union have provided refuge for the al Qaeda team that bombed a Kenyan resort and tried to down an Israeli aircraft in Kenya in 2002, say Africa experts and State Department reports.
"(Our) first concern, of course, would be to make sure that Somalia does not become an al Qaeda safe haven, doesn't become a place from which terrorists plot and plan," President Bush said after learning of the Islamic militias' takeover in the capital last week.
"These guys are no doubt harboring people, their agenda is very anti-Western, they've killed Western peace workers," said John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official and an expert on Somalia with the International Crisis Group. "They were able to, in the last five months, to encamp their role within the Islamic Courts Union and their recruitment of militias has increased."
But their standing in the union's hierarchy is unclear, Prendergast said.
"I'm just not sure where these guys will end up" as decision-makers for the union, he said. "There's strong argument being made within this coalition of Islamists that if they put (radical) guys out front, that'll just bring the wrath of the Americans like a ton of bricks."
In a letter they sent to Washington last week, militia leaders said they do not intend to become enemies of the U.S. government. The union's chairman, moderate Mogadishu cleric Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, has dismissed allegations that the courts were harboring international terrorists and invited the United Nations to send an investigative team to Somalia to ensure that no terrorists were hiding there.
"The issue will be whether the more moderate majority (of Islamists) will prevail," Shinn said.
Since they took control of Mogadishu, the courts have banned dancing and popular music, closed down movie theaters showing risque films and banned the capital's 1.2 million residents from watching the soccer World Cup. Such restrictions are reminiscent of the Taliban, the hard-line militia that harbored Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But unlike the Taliban, which ruled in the atmosphere of fear, Islamic courts have gained the trust of moderate Somalis by opening schools and clinics in Mogadishu, von Hippel said.
"Your average Somali is a Muslim, but not an extreme Muslim," she said. "Half of Somalis are nomads, you can't control them. (The rest) have their own mobile phones, Internet access; they have satellite TV. It's hard to imagine that (the courts) are gonna take away all of their privileges."
Shinn agreed. "To suggest that Islam in Somalia is the same as Islam in Afghanistan is a huge mistake," he said.
Many Somalis are "Sufis, and Sufis traditionally balk at strong domination from their Islamic clergy," Shinn said. "At the same time, they want law and order, and if the Islamic courts provide law and order, they might be willing to take more direction from their Islamic leaders."
It is unclear how many armed men the Islamic courts control, and how much territory they want to claim, von Hippel said. It is unlikely, for example, that the courts would be willing to invade Somaliland, or even the more fragmented Puntland. What is clear, however, is that in southern Somalia, there is no single strong authority that could compete with their coalition.
Somalia has a transitional 275-seat parliament and an embryonic government, which consists mainly of warlords and clan leaders. But the parliament -- which was formed in exile in Kenya nearly two years ago and lives off international handouts -- controls virtually nothing in Somalia and has not been able to enter Mogadishu, resigned instead to convening in Baidoa, 150 miles to the west.
The transitional government and the clerics were in unofficial talks until the government asked the African Union on Wednesday to send peacekeeping troops to Somalia to fend off the courts' westward advance -- a request that the African Union did not honor, but that caused the clerics to pull out of the talks.
Instead of finding a way to defeat the union, the Bush administration should "really be supporting this transitional government" and encourage it to invite the clerics into its ranks, von Hippel said.
"You really want to co-opt them, let's bring them into the parliament, let's give them some more seats," she said.
At the same time, any U.S. involvement in Somalia has to be very carefully calculated, warned Omar Jamal, an expatriate Somali and director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn.
"The United States have to be very cautious," said Jamal. "They just failed in backing the warlords. They cannot do the same mistake again."
E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
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