I am in Turkey this week, courtesy of the Turkish Cultural Foundation. As it happens, this is an auspicious time to be here. The IMF-World Bank meetings wrap up in Istanbul today. Also, later in the week, the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers will meet in Switzerland to sign the Armenia-Turkey protocol which paves the way for the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two neighboring countries.
...the International Crisis Group warns that something is rotten in the state semi-autonomous region of Puntland.
If its government does not enact meaningful reforms and reach out to all clans, Puntland may break up violently, adding to the chaos in Somalia.
Somalia: The Trouble with Puntland, the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, warns about the rise in insecurity and political tension that the semi-autonomous north-eastern region has been experiencing for three years. At its roots are poor governance and a collapse of the cohesion, particularly within the Harti clan, that led to its creation a decade ago.
"Most of the blame rests squarely with the political leadership", says Daniela Kroslak, Deputy Director of Crisis Group’s Africa Program. "If a wide variety of grievances are not urgently tackled in a comprehensive manner, the consequences could be severe for the whole country and even for the Horn of Africa".
Puntland is most widely known as the onshore haven to many of Somalia's pirates. Piracy, though, the report argues, is "only a dramatic symptom" of Puntland's problems, and I'd add that the instability in Puntland itself is only a "symptom" of the greater chaos in Somalia writ large.
Puntland is probably wishing that it had some of the good reputation of Somalia's more successful semi-autonomous region, Somaliland, which some commentators have argued could provide a model of how to organize the country as a whole.
(image from Wikimedia Commons)
From a good article in Macleans, the Canadian weekly:
"It comes down to this question: can we intervene without doing harm?" says Brownwyn E. Bruton, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you want to deal with it properly, you’re looking at an Iraq-style investment, where 20,000 peacekeepers isn’t going to do it—maybe 40,000, maybe 60,000. You’re talking about building a government and security forces from the ground up. It’s going to be a 10-year effort. And there’s going to be a lot of violence in the short term, as there was in Iraq." [emphasis mine]
And that, in case the bolded parts don't make it clear enough, just ain't gonna happen. The article also makes the very valid point that such a force, wherever it came from, would require a substantial contribution from the United States. And even though the U.S. did recently contribute 168 million very important dollars to the African Union mission in Somalia, a 10-year investment in 60,000 troops would cost, um, a little bit more.
So where to look? The UN?
Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, a former resident of Ottawa and deputy prime minister of Somalia until Sheik Sharif Ahmed’s government was sworn in this year, hopes that the international community will shoulder this burden. In an interview with Maclean’s, he drew comparisons between Somalia and Afghanistan and argued that the international response should be similar. He wants the United Nations to send troops. While some Somalis would reject any international presence, Adan believes most would accept it as necessary. "Somalis are killing each other every day here on the streets, so why wouldn’t they accept anyone who is coming to save them?"
We've previously argued why a UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia would not be a good idea, and the situation remains such that UN deployment would be much more likely to inflame tensions and exacerbate conditions on the ground than to achieve any sort of forced pacification. Adan's logic is misguided (there are in fact no UN peacekeepers, only a small political team, in Afghanistan, his proposed parallel case), but his language is revealing: any UN blue helmets that might deploy in Somalia could not be there to "save" Somalis. Peacekeeping missions, even the ones with mandates to protect civilians, are not rescue missions. That requires a whole different (and more substantial) investment, one that, given Somalia's history, is not likely to be forthcoming.
Does this mean there is no way for the international community to help improve the situation in Somalia? No, but it does mean that we should be candid about what full-scale protection of Somali civilians will entail. We can keep supporting the country's government, conducting anti-terrorism operations, promoting peace processes, and providing vital humanitarian aid, but if we want to talk about making sure that everyday Somali civilians are safe, we'd need to be honest about what that's going to take.