MORE THAN 400 Somali politicians will today meet in Djibouti, the Horn of Africa’s smallest country, to implement the provisions of a nascent peace deal and select a new president.
The process, to be held under the auspices of the United Nations, has the support of foreign governments who are trying with fresh urgency to bring order to Somalia. The country’s capacity to export instability has been underlined by piracy and the fears of western intelligence agencies about Somali terrorism abroad.
But events this week have highlighted the gap between political talks in Djibouti – one think-tank dismisses it as the “Djibouti bubble” – and the situation on the ground in one of the world’s most violent and destitute countries.
The weakness of Somalia’s western-backed transitional government was underlined on Monday when the politicians meeting in Djibouti voted to expand parliament from 275 seats to 550 to make room for moderate Islamists. At the same time hardline Islamists, who control most of south and central Somalia, captured the town of Baidoa, one of the government’s last strongholds and the site of a former grain warehouse that has served sporadically as a parliament.
“The takeover of Baidoa illustrates the painful disconnect between politics and the reality on the ground,” says Rashid Abdi, a Nairobi-based analyst at the International Crisis Group.
“Djibouti is a dialogue between essentially very weak parties,” he says. “They don’t control many guns or much territory. So the question is, can anything they agree have any impact on the ground?”
Two years ago Ethiopian troops entered Somalia to oust an Islamist alliance that had sidelined the transitional government. Some of the defeated Islamists decamped to Djibouti, where they formed the moderate Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS).
But the radicals remained – led by the al-Shabaab militia, which the US says is tied to al-Qaeda – and launched an insurgency against the government and its Ethiopian backers, centred on Mogadishu, the capital.
When Ethiopia began to withdraw its troops this month, the insurgents refocused on an under-manned force of African Union peacekeepers.
An important step will be taken today – if all goes according to plan – when the expanded parliament will elect a new president. The two leading candidates are Nur Hassan Hussein, the transitional government’s prime minister, and Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, head of the ARS.
The Ethiopian government, an ally of the US, has supported the Djibouti process but expressed concern that it is being hurried.
One analyst in Addis Ababa says it is an important means of redistributing power to the satisfaction of Somalia’s fractious clans.
(– Financial Timesservice)