Whether an Islamic militia seizure of Mogadishu, the bloodstained capital of Somalia, heralds an end to the internecine warfare that has ravaged the country for 15 years or presages an escalation of hostilities remains to be seen. We’ll hold our breath.
The Islamic Courts Union claimed this week that its militia had driven out many of the warlords in the secular alliance that had controlled Mogadishu. The development underscores the impotence of an interim government installed in October 2004 after two years of talks sponsored by the United Nations.
The Islamic militia’s success raises concerns because the Islamic Courts Union wants to run Somalia according to Sharia, the Islamic legal code, which could put the country of 9.9 million people under the sway of al-Qaeda ideas. Indeed, the warlords have claimed the Islamist faction are terrorists who want to run Somalia the way the Taliban ran Afghanistan. But Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, claims that “we want to restore peace and stability to Mogadishu. We are ready to meet and talk to anybody and any group for the interest of the people.”
We wonder if a fundamentalist faction can be a vehicle for peace. Certainly, peace is a laudable goal in a country that has seen so much warfare among rival clans as well as political factions.
Somalia, created in 1960 from former Italian and British colonies, became a client state of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and was ruled for 21 years by dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who was ousted in a 1991 coup. What followed was non-stop chaos.
Recent drought and crop failures have worsened the crisis, with more than 400,000 Somalis classified as internally displaced. Another 350,000 are refugees in neighboring countries. About 1.7 million need food aid, according to the United Nations.
Providing humanitarian aid to Somalia is a daunting task: Aid convoys are regularly attacked. (U.S. troops on a relief mission in the early 1990s were withdrawn after 18 were brutally killed in 1993.)
“I think it’s a very bad thing,” Professor Ved Nanda of the International Legal Studies Program at the University of Denver said of the developments. Somalia, like Afghanistan, has become a center for training and indoctrinating Jihadist terrorists, he noted. “For them to have Mogadishu all to themselves is not a very good sign.”
