05/07/15 – Abdi Ismail Samatar – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next is Abdi Ismaili Samatar, a professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and a research fellow at the University of Pretoria.
He's also the president of the African Studies Association.
He's got this important article at aljazeera.com.
It's called The Nairobi Massacre and the Genealogy of the Tragedy.
Welcome to the show, Abdi.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Pleasure to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
And happy to have someone who's fluent in this subject of the recent war and going back a decade in Somalia.
So we've got about basically two ten-minute segments.
So is it okay if we start with, I don't know, 2005, I guess, if you want, or in fact maybe even the intervention leading up to the declaration of the Islamic Courts Union and then the Ethiopian invasion in response, and then we can get to more current subject matter.
Sure, that's fine with me.
Sure.
Okay, so go ahead.
So take us back to, I guess, if you want, the dawn of the war on terrorism or whenever you think is apt.
You know, I think the place to begin is 1991 when the country's government collapsed, and they never had a government covering the entire territory since 1991.
There are factional leaders here and there.
There are regimes here and there, but not a sort of a government that controls its territory fully and that's accountable to its people.
The failure of that government or the collapse of that government was induced by two forces, local forces, Somalis themselves, and certain elements of the political elite in that country who wanted to use the state or the government for their own ends rather than for serving the interest of the population.
And the second force was the rivalry between what was then the Soviet Union and the United States.
And so the Cold War put a lot of weaponry into that country, first by the Soviets and then by us later on.
And so the people began to realize that nobody was serving their interests and began to move against the regime, and the regime brutalized people and killed hundreds of thousands of people for several years.
Then the country collapses, and then warlords, as we know them, took over the country.
And because some of the warlords were using food as a weapon against hapless people, they caused a famine that killed 300,000 people.
In 1992, President George Bush Sr. couldn't, I guess, stomach the brutality of these warlords and send, I think, over 20,000 American forces to open up the roads so that food aid can get to sort of hungry people.
The project narrowly defined to get the food to the people was successful and averted what could have been even a worse catastrophe.
But what our government and the military we had on the ground did not do is to help Somalis who were interested to put their country back together and produce a government that was accountable to its population.
Then we had the Black Hawk down, and we withdrew from that.
And then for up to about 1997, we didn't pay much attention to the country.
And then, of course, in 1997-98, our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed by terrorists from Al-Qaeda.
Some of those terrorists were said to have passed through Somalia to get to Kenya and Tanzania.
Then our attention began to change, and we began to focus on this.
To make a long story short, the warlords who ran people's lives through tyranny, brutalizing, raping, maiming, killing, and whatnot, for almost a decade and a half, were chased out of town in Mogadishu in 2006 by a group called the Union of Islamic Hordes.
This was a ramshackle of a group of Islamic people who were not warlords themselves, who were not fanatics themselves, who were not radicals themselves, but who were pained by the plight of their people.
And so once they chased the warlords out of town, the country became peaceful all over again without any intervention from outside.
Unfortunately, Junior President George W. Bush was convinced by the Ethiopian government that these Union of Islamic Hordes were a cover for terrorists.
And it's that which then began what we see today as the tyranny of al-Shabaab, both in Somalia and in Kenya, which led to the massacre in Garissa three weeks ago, where 145 students in a university were massacred by terrorists.
All right, now I definitely want to get back to that in just a minute, but if we could rewind just a little bit there.
I've read before, but is it right that preceding the creation of the Islamic Courts Union, that really right after September 11th, at least in 2002, 2003, that the Americans started paying off the warlords who were including Adid's son, the bad guy from the Blackhawk Down episode, and hiring these secularist seeming warlords as long as they were promising to hunt down Islamists for us.
And that was what really led to the solidification of the Islamic Courts Union against the warlords in the first place.
I think the way I learned it was, as you said, that the locals had diminished the power of the warlords already.
But then when the Americans came and started backing the warlords, that was when the real fight broke out.
And that was really what led to the creation of the ICU in the first place against the warlords.
And then that became the excuse for the next intervention.
Oh no, now we've got to get rid of the Islamic Courts Union.
Is that correct?
I think that's an excellent reading of what transpired.
All right, good.
Well, I'm glad we're straight on that.
So then it's Christmas 2006.
Take us to what happened then.
Well, then our government tacitly gave the green light for the Ethiopians to move in against the Union of Islamic Courts, which they did.
It was logistical support from Britain and the United States, particularly satellite imagery of where Somali troops were at.
Ethiopians captured Mogadishu, displaced about a million people from December 2006 through 2008.
Bombed Mogadishu like there was no tomorrow and destroyed much of whatever infrastructure of the country existed at that point in time.
And then the Union of Islamic Courts dispersed and Somali people began to support the resistance movement against the Ethiopians.
And the toughest group in that resistance movement, what was then called the Youth Wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, or what we know today as Al-Shabaab.
And the Somalis supported Al-Shabaab because they were the only ones who could stand up against the Ethiopians and ultimately push them out of the country.
So, in other words, Al-Shabaab is basically, in reality, what the Americans pretended to be fighting when they hired the Ethiopians to invade in 2006.
That's correct, but Al-Shabaab was not a terrorist organization from our vantage point when the Ethiopians invaded.
We designated Al-Shabaab as a terrorist organization in the spring of 2008.
And what they originally were fighting was to get rid of the Ethiopians in their country.
And how long was it before they declared their allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri?
I think it was just about that time.
They did that declaration just before we declared them as a terrorist organization.
But after the invasion by the Ethiopians?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
There was no affiliation as far as we can tell.
In fact, the young man who was the head of Al-Shabaab, although he was trained in Afghanistan, he had no religious training whatsoever and made no claims about that.
I personally met him when I was in Mogadishu in 2006, and I was astonished by his sort of lack of knowledge about Islam itself.
And then isn't it the case that after they – oh man, you know what, we don't have time for this.
We'll get back to this on the other side of the break because it's too big of a question to ask there.
But I guess here's what we could talk about would be the fact that they seem like – they were smeared as being, if not al-Qaeda, at least the Taliban because they were closing movie theaters and stuff like that.
So it seemed like they didn't even have the amount of power required to be a truly authoritarian government, the ICU, before the invasion, I mean.
No, I think that you are right.
I think they were sufficient enough to chase the warlords and liberate the population from the terror of the warlords.
Over time, they could very well have become sort of an authoritarian regime.
But Ethiopia is an authoritarian regime, and we are able to provide them with military and material support.
The question is not whether it's an authoritarian or not.
I'm sorry.
We've got to stop.
We'll be right back, everybody.
It's Abdi Samatar, Al Jazeera.com.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Abdi Samatar.
He's a professor at the University of Minnesota.
He wrote this thing for aljazeera.com, the Nairobi Massacre and the genealogy of the tragedy.
Of course, it's the American empire's fault, the strongest power in the history of the world picking on the weakest, smallest, most helpless country in the history of the world here, basically, what it seems to shake out to.
Now, I'm sorry.
At the point we were interrupted at the break, you were saying, yeah, they didn't have the Islamic Court's union that Bush intervened to overthrow in 06.
They didn't have enough actual raw power to enforce any kind of authoritarianism.
They might have been some kind of Taliban light if they had even had the opportunity to be, but they never really had the strength to even be that.
And then I think you were in the middle of saying when I interrupted you – sorry about that – something along the lines of even if they were, then what?
Talk, right?
Instead of bombing them?
Yeah.
So, I mean, the Ethiopians bombed them.
And then our government, with the help of the Europeans, installed a new regime, a new government, a new president in Mogadishu.
The head of that government was the former leader of the Union of Islamic Courts, who have now become a tent coat, going against all comrades, if you like.
And then al-Shabaab then went literally belly up and went crazy and began to do the kind of stuff that we now associate with them, suicide bombings, attacking people, civilians, and others alike.
And so we had a hand, if you like, in the making of what we know today as the terrorist group al-Shabaab, which has killed those students, which firebombed the shopping mall Westgate in Nairobi, has done numerous other things in Uganda, and so on and so forth.
All of this tells us that if we are not deliberate enough and thoughtful enough about our strategy in that part of the world, or any part of the world, and are very serious about accountability and democratic governments by the local populations, this is the sort of thing that will come back at us and haunt us.
To the point where al-Shabaab has been recruiting from Minnesota, we are told.
ISIS is recruiting from Minnesota, we are told.
But we have to know, rather than just engaging in a firefight, how is our policy intelligent enough to ensure that there is a win-win situation for the local people and for our interests?
If there is no such a win-win situation, then you will have people like al-Shabaab and ISIS and others.
Well, how strong is al-Shabaab now?
Because we're skipping ahead quite a few years here.
No, al-Shabaab has been sort of forced out of all the major towns and cities in Somalia, but they can almost sit anywhere at their own choice and at their time.
So they can become lethal in the sense of going into a university, rounding up the students, and then brutally massacring them.
They can sort of walk into a shopping mall and do the same sort of thing.
Well, what if all the foreign troops under the African Union, or the Burundians and the Ethiopians, and I know in your article you say the Kenyans are still there.
Are they all still there?
And then what if they left?
They are all still there, and we, the American government and the European Union, provide resources and support them fully to the tune of several hundred million dollars a year.
We pay very little attention to Somali security forces, and my sort of basic understanding is that we can sort of train and mobilize 20,000 Somali security forces at a fraction of the cost that the African Union force costs today to our taxpayers, and still get a much more effective security force that's accountable to its people, Somalis that is, and that will literally drive al-Shabaab to the sea.
We are not doing that, and the recent visit by our Secretary of State, Mr. Kerry, to Somalia was a window dressing to a problem that nobody seems to want to address.
Now, I mean, is there actually a chance that the government that's been created by the Americans and their cohorts to rule Somalia, the quote-unquote government, that that same state could end up healing the rifts and representing the people, as you say?
Or, you know, maybe a better solution would be for America and its puppet powers to just back off and let the Somalis work it out themselves rather than help them figure it out?
Well, I think Somalis will need help from outside world, but the kind of help they need has to be genuine help.
And Somalis, you know, there are a large number of Somalis in the United States who are happy here.
Somalis see questions of democracy and development as something they are deeply committed and interested in, so they are going to need help to recover from this war.
But the regime in Mogadishu is as corrupt as you can get.
Transparency International ranked them number one in the world as the most corrupt regime in the world.
You can't expect that kind of a regime to deliver goods and services and leadership for its own population.
We have to move this one out and help Somalis select and elect a government that reflects their hopes and dreams.
The day we do something to that effect, then the Somalis will have to walk the talk themselves.
Then I think we can find partners in that part of the world who respect themselves and respect their people and who are willing to legitimately work with the international community on a mutual basis rather than subservient basis.
Well, now, very importantly, you write in your article that the Kenyan forces, and particularly in the town of Kismayo on the shore there, that they are really creating their own little fiefdom there with their own warlord that they're supporting, and they refuse to work with the government in Mogadishu.
It sounds like there might be a lot of good reason why they wouldn't want to work with the government in Mogadishu, but it doesn't sound like it's the good reasons or the reasons why that they won't.
It sounds like they're breaking off their own little mini-state.
That's correct.
The Ethiopians are doing the same thing elsewhere.
Kenya is one of the most corrupt states in the African continent.
Nigeria leads that score after Somalia, but Kenya is high, high on the rank of some of the most corrupt regimes in the world by Transparency International.
They are not interested in helping Somalis put their Humpty Dumpty back together.
They are interested to use that region, which they occupy now, as a buffer zone, but also as a wedge to influence what becomes of Somalia in the future.
This is what the Somali people completely reject and don't like.
Al-Shabaab is using that as a pretext for doing its own cruel deeds.
War is the health of fighters everywhere, I guess.
All right, well, listen, we're all out of time.
I'm actually keeping a little bit over time here, but thanks very much for coming on the show.
It was great to talk to you.
It was a pleasure, sir.
Everybody, that is Abdi Samatar.
He is a professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and a research fellow at the University of Pretoria and a member of the African Academy of Sciences.
You can find him here at aljazeera.com, the Nairobi masker and the genealogy of the tragedy.
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