Somalia for Somalis! Let them run their country as they please. Easy words to say but difficult to accept when it means beheading people for not praying five times a day, chopping hands of those who steal to stay alive in a country where mere survival is a lifelong ambition; difficult to accept when women are shrouded and denied to breathe fresh air or go about their daily business to feed their children. Difficult to accept when the country’s musical heritage is expunged as Satan’s work, the cinema is banned and the watching of world sports is forbidden, thus depriving the youth of the only source of cultural interaction they have with the outside world.
Today we live in a global world where ideas travel faster than lightening and people and weapons cross borders with utmost ease; where human rights are universal; and where political upheavals in one country reverberate in far off countries. No country stands alone.
This is why the world cannot and should not ignore what the Islamist movement in Somalia does and says. Remember what happened when the world ignored Afghanistan under Taliban. When the world stood aside and watched as they destroyed the historical relics of the Buddha; when they trampled on human rights and herded women into dark rooms. We all have seen the enormous cost of such negligence. Sept. 11 was only the start.
This is why the Somali Islamists’ calling for Jihad against Ethiopia and the United States cannot be ignored. Ethiopia is the only country that has correctly seen the danger coming from the rise of Islamism in Somalia. Some may explain Ethiopia‘s position as muscle flexing aimed at controlling its small neighbor’s ports, the only strategic resources that Somalia owns; but Ethiopia‘s fear of the Islamist movement in Somalia has a historical precedent. The call for Jihad against Christendom, rekindles Ethiopia‘s old memories of the 16th century when Imam Ahmed Gran launched a jihad against Christian Ethiopia with the help of the Ottoman Empire.
The Imam’s army marched through Ethiopia, looting and destroying churches including the Axumite Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion where Ethiopian emperors had been coronated for centuries; Axum, that old kingdom that ruled as far as Yemen and parts of today’s Saudi Arabia. In another attempt to revive the legacy of the Imam, Somalia‘s former dictator Mohammed Siyad Barre also invaded Ethiopia in 1977. Economically drained by long droughts and civil war, the Ethiopian army crumbled before the Soviet trained Somali military while the whole Somali people sang Ololiyaay (burn, burn). It was only the Soviet’s switching of sides when a socialist military junta rose to power in Addis Ababa that saved Ethiopia from a complete collapse.
It is against this background that the Ethiopians quake when they hear the call for Jihad. The radicals of the Islamic Courts have also made no secret of their agenda to export their brand of Islam to Ethiopia; reviving an old dream of the Somalis and neighboring Arab countries to remove what they see as a Christian bastion from the Muslim region while forgetting that Islam owes its existence to Ethiopia. It was Ethiopia where the first Muslim exiles took refuge and found home and justice. The walled town of Harar, with its 99 mosques, thrived for generations under the Ethiopian rule as the most important seat of Islamic learning in the Horn of Africa.
Some may dismiss the Somali Islamists’ rhetoric of exporting their message to Africa and beyond as a political expediency or even a fantasy. But the world has seen the havoc and destruction that the fantasy of one man can cause. Hitler gave us WWII and the holocaust and Osama bin Laden has ignited a world war of unconventional nature. This is why the world should not take lightly the threats coming from another megalomaniac such as Colonel Hassan Dahir Aweys and his gun trotting jihadist brigades.
The question of whether Ethiopia should intervene is irrelevant. No sovereign country in the world would allow a hostile and ideologically driven regime to threaten its existence. Crushing the Islamist militia while it is still in a nebulous stage will be less costly for the Somali people, for Ethiopia, and indeed for the whole world than to let the Islamists march into Ethiopia and wreck havoc to a nation of 70 million and more than 80 ethnic groups. Letting Ethiopia crumble will not only create another Yugoslavia in the heart of Africa but will also deal a devastating blow to the economies of Djibouti, Somaliland and Somalia.
No doubt an Ethiopian invasion would trigger a wave of patriotism among the poor Somali masses whose emotions are inflamed by the Islamists’ call for martyrdom, but to deny the Islamists to run over the Transitional Federal Government, TFG, will be the only way to prevent the jihadist fervor spilling to neighboring countries. The world also needs to strengthen the defenses of the democratically robust breakaway republic of Somaliland and extend generous economic support to it. The UN approved African Peacekeeping force should also be rapidly deployed to the peaceful and autonomous state of Puntland whose resistance to the Islamists will not last long without an external help.
The international community should impose travel and economic sanctions on the UIC until they accept to stop their military onslaught, allow the deployment of AU forces and agree to start serious negotiations with the government under the AU and UN auspices. The UN should also take action against countries supporting the Islamists with arms and cash.
It will be unforgivable to allow a second Taliban to thrive in such a strategic but isolated corner of the world and let it unleash another wave of Al Qaeda martyrs to further saturate the already poisoned atmosphere between Islam and the West. It will also be a dereliction of duty on the part of the international community to watch the Somali people deprived of their basic human rights and do nothing. Yes, by saying this I cannot help but recall the horrendous pictures of the Somalis dragging the dead bodies of the American soldiers in the streets of Mogadishu. A crime that one of the Islamist leaders, Colonel Mohammed Yusuf Indhadde, had the audacity to brag about claiming to be one of the people who did this heinous action. He admitted this publicly while speaking to hundreds of people at the Mogadishu Sports Stadium.
But it is also worth remembering that sound-thinking Somalis watched with admiration as the United States Air Force delived tons of relief supplies to more than 100,000 Somali refugees in camps cut-off by flooding in north-eastern Kenya, thus making the Islamists’ call for jihad ring hollow.
Bashir Goth is the editor of Awdalnews Network. This item was originally published in the Washington Post.