By Antoaneta Becker
June 9, 2011
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"
BEIJING - Jasmine blossoms' fall from grace in the Chinese flower industry is not the only blow Chinese businesses have suffered as a result of the North African and Middle Eastern democratic uprisings this spring. China is evaluating the impact of the Jasmine revolution on its overseas investment and outward business expansion strategy.
Africa - once considered the lab for Chinese companies' reach outside - is being relegated into a destination with too many risk factors. Safer political destinations and countries closer to home are likely to benefit from the shift.
The readjustment has been in the works for some time but the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have made those subtle shifts more pronounced.
"North Africa's unrest and Libya's situation in particular are testing China's "go out" strategy," says Wang Jinyan, research fellow at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. "This will have a definite impact on the future direction of our overseas investment."
According to press reports, China's Ministry of Commerce new five-year plan, which is being finalized at the moment, makes Asia and the new emerging economies the centerpiece of the country's "go out" investment strategy.
"The political risk aside, investment in Africa is no longer what it used to be," the Economic Observer quoted an unnamed official from the ministry in May. "Opening a mine there is not so easy any more, now you need to take into account the environment, local employment and benefits to local economy."
By contrast, Asia is perceived as a mature market full of economic potential and fewer political risks.
Determining the direction of China's future investment remains a full-time occupation of analysts the world over. Flush with cash from years of exports-driven economic expansion and sitting on top of the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, China has been on a shopping spree of late for commodities, oil, energy and agricultural land.
A study released in May by the Asia Society in New York forecast that by 2020 China's overseas direct investment could reach US$2 trillion. Last year the United States' foreign investment amounted to $300 billion.
The financial crisis of 2008 has provided Chinese companies with impetus and opportunities to channel some of their money into most remote corners of the world, snapping minerals, securing oil fields and acquiring stakes in major companies.
But before spreading their wings further afield many companies, including major state oil firms like Petro China, have used Africa as their testing ground. Entering as contractors to build railways, roads and telecommunications, Chinese companies now boast a sizeable presence on the continent. By the end of 2010, some 2,000 Chinese companies operated in Africa with an accumulated investment of $32 billion.
Last year, China became Africa's largest trading partner, and its march into the continent seemed unstoppable. Not surprisingly, this has been met with criticisms by some that China is acting as a neo-colonizer, stripping Africa of its rich resources.
But the Arab spring has cast doubts over this relentless expansion. The figures of China's economic losses suffered during the civilian unrest in North Africa and Libyan conflict are beginning to emerge, giving officials cause to pause.
In Libya where China's involvement is quite recent, the losses suffered and the cost of repatriating some 36,000 Chinese employees is set to surpass $3 billion. Since 2007, Libya had contracted some 50 engineering projects to Chinese companies, including several image projects to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1969 revolution.
Although China's role as a contractor has limited its exposure to direct losses in the unrest, some Chinese assets like Sinopec refineries in Libya were raided and destroyed. Experts say that on the whole Beijing has been left to deal with a messy aftermath of compensation claims, third party debts and the re-employment of all returned workers.
And Libya's fallout is only one piece in the big picture of Arab revolutions that have derailed Chinese business interests.
At a working conference in Shanghai in May, Sinosure, China's official export credit insurance agency, revealed that in the first three months of 2011 its reported loss claims from North Africa and the Middle East have risen by 167% over the same period of last year.
According to figures from the Ministry of Commerce, new Chinese contracts in North African countries in the first quarter have dropped dramatically, by 70.8% in Algeria and by 46.9% in Libya over the same period of last year.
The civil unrest and safety concerns have made the Chinese even more invisible in Africa, adding fuel to accusations that Chinese contractors are isolating themselves from the local population behind high walls, and remain aloof to local grievances.
But even as Beijing takes a closer look at its investments in Africa, China's involvement there is far from over.
"You may not see the Chinese but you can see the stadiums and the roads and everything they have built," says Lawrence Brahm, a Beijing-based political columnist. "The jury on their role in Africa's development is out. I still think that the great game between China and the West will be played out in Africa."
(Inter Press Service)
Showing posts with label African Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African Union. Show all posts
Friday, June 17, 2011
China's Scramble For The African Union
By Derek Henry Flood
June 9, 2011
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"
ADDIS ABABA - In the thin air of Ethiopia's low-slung, mostly ramshackle capital, a glittering tower complex is erupting from a warren of corrugated tin roof shacks that many locals call home.
The China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) is building a massive new complex in an expansion of the African Union's (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Africa's "capital" akin, in theory, to Brussels being the capital or Europe.
Though the CSCEC describes its efforts there as "aiding" the African Union, make no mistake, it is building the facility wholesale.
Stern-faced Chinese foreman command ever-smiling Ethiopian laborers who are working round the clock to finish the project at breakneck speed for its planned January 2012 inauguration. Jean Ping, a half Chinese-half Gabonese former diplomat for the late Gabonese big man Omar Bongo, addressed the Chinese delegation at the fourth annual China-Africa Strategic Dialogue held in Addis on May 4 led by Zhai Jun, China's vice minister for foreign affairs. Ping described China as the AU's "good and reliable partner".
In anticipation of a hoped-for visit to Addis Ababa by President Hu Jintao for the new AU's debut, Ping stated: "We cannot thank China and it's leaders enough for it ..."
In an interview with Xinhua, China's state news agency, early on in the construction, Zeng Huacheng China's "special representative" on the grounds of East Africa's most noteworthy construction site, described the project as "a perfect embodiment of the friendship between China and Africa, as well as a major milestone marking the new Sino-African strategic partnership".
As China scours the continent for resources virtually unchallenged, this "gift" to the people of Africa will certainly come with strings attached. In a recent meeting with a high-ranking CSCEC official, Erastus Mwencha, a seasoned Kenyan diplomat who holds the deputy chair of the African Union Commission that oversees the project, hailed it in a recent press statement as a "permanent signature on African soil".
When Asia Times Online visited the present AU headquarters hugging hilly Roosevelt Street, a representative of its Conflict Management Division lamented the depth of Chinese involvement both in Ethiopia and across the entire region. Africa's sudden anti-democratic partner is engaged in a slew of road rehabilitation and construction endeavors in many parts of the country.
When looking at maps of their vast nation with many of its roads in rural areas in a devastated condition, Ethiopians refer to "Italian asphalt". Following the 1928 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship and Arbitration, Italian colonialists, who partially encircled the Ethiopian empire from their footholds in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, sought to cement their Africa Orientale Italiana, first economically and then by an outright military invasion aimed at creating a new Roman empire centered on the export of Italy's particular brand of fascism.
Benito Mussolini's colonial administration built a network of now decrepit roads during Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's exile period that have been fit to rot ever since. They connected the once remote Addis to Asmara and Mogadishu, two cities from which modern Addis is cut off due to extreme hostility and perennial instability.
China is now renovating many of these roads for the first time since the period of Italian fascist occupation and many Ethiopians are grateful for it. The Chinese are able to implement projects overnight that the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Mele Zenawi has been unable to do 20 years after the fall of the Marxist junta he dedicated his life to defeating.
Save for the five years of Italian occupation, Ethiopia has always prided itself on its fierce independence and the preservation of its ancient, lettered history and language, the only intact civilization of its kind in all of Africa. Yet Ethiopia's 20th-century rulers from monarchs to Marxists, did next to nothing to develop their nation's physical infrastructure.
Current ruler Meles Zenawi, a former Tigrayan guerilla leader, has given Beijing a free hand to rush around with a plethora of massive development projects that will eventually give the Chinese fantastic leverage over this vast, diverse and immensely impoverished land. In official Chinese jargon related to its overwhelming economic embrace of the AU, it employs transparent terms like "friendship", "brotherhood" and "partnership" to describe this incredibly paternalistic seeming relationship.
A local man running a cramped concession shack adjacent to the CSCEC's sprawling operation said that Ethiopians and other Africans had little choice but to accept the rapid Chinese entente into their societies because "the price was right ... free".
Desperate to emancipate themselves from poverty and dilapidation without the luxury of worrying about future considerations when Beijing begins make less brotherly-like demands for natural resources, many Ethiopians were resigned to this adrenalin injection of Chinese progress into their relatively moribund economy.
When asked whether this influx of foreign workers had an immediate economic benefit in the neighborhoods surrounding the construction, vendors said that their Chinese guests had almost no immediate interaction with Ethiopians other than those picked to work under their immediate direction.
Perhaps the finished product will have the desired economic impact local businesses pined for? Or perhaps their makeshift stores will be deemed eyesores and bulldozed in the name of progress, making the surrounding area more appealing to visiting dignitaries of the "dictators' club", as some of the pan-African body's critics harshly deem the AU.
On a second visit to the AU site, Asia Times Online was accosted by guards from a local security contracting firm after taking photos from the vantage of a public street of Chinese officials going to and from the site's personnel gate.
A scrum ensued with more guards involving themselves with a crowd of passersby beginning to congregate out of curiosity. Speaking neither Amharic nor Mandarin, things quickly spiraled out of control. A CSCEC official with an uneven buzz cut and chinos stormed out onto the street, angrily furrowing his hardened brow, putting himself at the center of the fray.
Crossing his forearms upright to form an "X", ie "no" and disapprovingly shouting "photo", the official tried to explain to a massive Ethiopian security man how to erase the memory card on a professional DLSR camera. Simply refusing to needlessly surrender the images, I had the neck strap wrapped around my wrist for dear life as the tug of war continued.
Trying in vain to insist that the precious photos had been deleted in the scuffle, this correspondent was subsequently dragged through a temporary steel door spray painted with the CSCEC's Chinese-language logo. Once inside the buzzing site to which no outsider had seen, sans photographing, I was frog-marched past a group of chain-smoking men looking at an out of place Westerner traipsing through their secret world with suspicion.
The zone was one of almost total Chinese self-sufficiency, thereby putting the imported East Asian workers in a less exotic context. Pick-up trucks carted in stacks of mattresses and box springs to provide shelter for newly arriving workers needing accommodation. While the Chinese government would surely describe this scenario as another "harmonious" entry in its ever-deepening relationship with Africa, the project appeared to be an effort of exclusion and commanded efficiency. It was the Chinese who were clearly in charge.
I had been curious as to what kind of service economy had sprung up in the wake of the all-male Chinese arrival. Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport was bustling with all manner of Chinese engineers and laborers. The in-flight magazine for Ethiopian Airlines boasted of its increases in traffic to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and now Hangzhou.
The CSCEC men, however, lived a self-contained life for the duration of the project, leaving only to procure foodstuffs or eat at a touristy theme restaurant on a loose weekend evening. Otherwise, they live on the grounds of the new AU headquarters as backhoes and cranes ground along day and night.
Chinese workers in knockoff tracksuits obliviously brushed by ethnic-Somali women in brilliant colored hijabs who performed domestic duties on-site. Chinese vehicle operators blazed across the grounds while gaunt Ethiopian workers in ill-fitting hardhats clung to the sides of the trundling heavy machinery. Eventually, we reached a cluster of neatly arranged trailers that served as the logistical and technical hub for the entire linguistically awkward arrangement.
While China has been involved in apolitical infrastructure and resource exploration projects in many of the African continent's disparate corners, including many parts of the Horn region, China's entrance into African politics at the supra-national level is certainly noteworthy.
Much to the dismay of human-rights workers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Beijing's resource diplomacy has been mostly devoid of interfering in the internal political dynamics of wildly dysfunctional states from Sudan to Zimbabwe and Algeria to Angola.
The AU is the successor body to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), whose post-war mandate was steeped in the anti-colonialism prevalent in the mid-Cold War era. The history of supra-nationalism had much to do with ridding the African continent of the then remaining minority ruled governments and shoring up individual states' newfound sovereignty backed by rhetoric of pan-African solidarity.
Following the April 1974 "Carnation Revolution" coup in Lisbon, Portugal, that effectively brought an end to European colonialism in Africa by mid-1975, a core component of the OAU's anti-colonial raison d'etre had been eroded. As the Portuguese evacuated from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, the last European maritime empire had crumbled.
Only South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) continued to exist as white-ruled pariah states. Despite the official end of British, French, Spanish, Belgian and Portuguese colonial administrations throughout Africa, all of these European powers, greatly weakened in the aftermath of World War II, continued to maintain heavily one-sided transactional and extraction-based relationships with their former colonies. A blatant example is the recurring instability in Cote d'Ivoire that has Paris very publicly ferrying out its large expatriate population at great expense from time to time when that country convulses in fits of anarchy.
For its part, the AU welcomes this style of Asian economic intervention with open arms. China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, distinctly lacks the colonial baggage that still taints European-African relations. Non-European interlocutors are nothing especially new in Ethiopia.
During the dreadful years of Marxist-inspired Derg rule led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Soviet and Cuban advisors had been aplenty, sometimes on both sides of a conflict with regard to Eritrea and the Somali Ogaden region. According to Africa historian Martin Meredith, in 1984, Mengistu enlisted the North Koreans to festoon his capital in Eurasian-Marxist chic to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his overthrow of Hailie Selassie.
One of China's greatest assets to the AU and its various and sundry constituent member states is precisely that it has no such baggage ... yet. On April 24, 2007, a huge contingent from the ethnic Somali irredentist group known as the Ogaden Liberation Front (ONLF) attacked a Chinese-run oil installation operated by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, also known as Sinopec.
The ONLF claimed it had warned Beijing and Addis Ababa equally of encroaching on the territory it wished to control. Aside from killing dozens of Ethiopians, between seven and nine Chinese workers were killed in the assault. A London-based ONLF spokesman told the BBC at the time, "We have warned the Chinese government and the Ethiopian government that ... they don't have a right to drill there."
Beginning principally during the Maoist period, China has been involved in the Horn of Africa region and other parts of the continent in the arms trade and the dispensation of agricultural and other technical expertise. China's traditional history of quietism in African affairs comes into question as the new AU begins to near completion.
Beijing will no longer have the luxury of not appearing overt in its involvement in Africa. China describes Sino-African relations with terms like "peaceful coexistence" and "mutual respect", while simultaneously failing to resist taking jabs at Western Europe's oft abhorrent historical interactions there, an aspect that certain Sino-Africa literature seems to relish.
The Forum on Cooperation between China and Africa (FOCAC), established in 2000 and occurring every three years, provides a mechanism for China's ever-increasing involvement in Africa, including charitable and development work. The inking of multi-billion dollar schemes at the FOCAC summits all go in one direction: from Beijing to various African states.
African resources inevitably flow in the reverse. The Chinese Communist Party claims its stated position of non-interference in African politics is a paramount prism through which Sino-African relations are conducted. Yet China's AU gambit is its entry into the internal dynamics of the continent's writ regardless whether it perceives it so or not.
The so-called Beijing Consensus iterates the raw primacy of necessary economic development over the human-rights-oriented or reform-driven foreign policy espoused in many Western capitals as of late. From the Chinese point of view, these rather condescending policies are an infringement on the sovereignty of Third World nation-states.
Many Ethiopians are willing to entertain the shock of sudden Chinese investment in their ancient country, but decry that many of the Chinese projects have so far had a negligible impact on the lives of ordinary people.
Ethiopia and wider Africa are not simply venues for Chinese foreign direct investment and loans. They have become emigration destinations for enterprising Chinese farmers and businessmen. With one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, hovering around US$1,000 per person per annum, just north of Afghanistan and Somalia, some Ethiopians are already resentful that China is employing so many of its own nationals on infrastructure projects when so many local residents are desperate for work.
China's "harmonious" economic adventurism in Africa may yet require more refining if it is to be a lasting partner in one of the poorest, most unstable regions in the world.
Undoubtedly, the upper echelon of African politicos are thrilled with the prestige project throttling upward in downtown Addis Ababa at no up-front cost to them. For the next generation of African leaders, the indebtedness bequeathed by default with such hasty deal-making may stunt internal development further. This will happen as resources already committed for export to Asia possibly deprive struggling societies of natural resources from the start that could be used to develop local and regional economies if finally harnessed properly and the "resource curse" thrown off.
China's "permanent signature in Africa" may indeed herald a new, less regrettable era in African history, albeit without a stated democratization stipulation wished for in the cash-strapped West. How this era will develop and who will guide this development remains to be seen. One thing is certain: China is in Africa to stay.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
June 9, 2011
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"
ADDIS ABABA - In the thin air of Ethiopia's low-slung, mostly ramshackle capital, a glittering tower complex is erupting from a warren of corrugated tin roof shacks that many locals call home.
The China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) is building a massive new complex in an expansion of the African Union's (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Africa's "capital" akin, in theory, to Brussels being the capital or Europe.
Though the CSCEC describes its efforts there as "aiding" the African Union, make no mistake, it is building the facility wholesale.
Stern-faced Chinese foreman command ever-smiling Ethiopian laborers who are working round the clock to finish the project at breakneck speed for its planned January 2012 inauguration. Jean Ping, a half Chinese-half Gabonese former diplomat for the late Gabonese big man Omar Bongo, addressed the Chinese delegation at the fourth annual China-Africa Strategic Dialogue held in Addis on May 4 led by Zhai Jun, China's vice minister for foreign affairs. Ping described China as the AU's "good and reliable partner".
In anticipation of a hoped-for visit to Addis Ababa by President Hu Jintao for the new AU's debut, Ping stated: "We cannot thank China and it's leaders enough for it ..."
In an interview with Xinhua, China's state news agency, early on in the construction, Zeng Huacheng China's "special representative" on the grounds of East Africa's most noteworthy construction site, described the project as "a perfect embodiment of the friendship between China and Africa, as well as a major milestone marking the new Sino-African strategic partnership".
As China scours the continent for resources virtually unchallenged, this "gift" to the people of Africa will certainly come with strings attached. In a recent meeting with a high-ranking CSCEC official, Erastus Mwencha, a seasoned Kenyan diplomat who holds the deputy chair of the African Union Commission that oversees the project, hailed it in a recent press statement as a "permanent signature on African soil".
When Asia Times Online visited the present AU headquarters hugging hilly Roosevelt Street, a representative of its Conflict Management Division lamented the depth of Chinese involvement both in Ethiopia and across the entire region. Africa's sudden anti-democratic partner is engaged in a slew of road rehabilitation and construction endeavors in many parts of the country.
When looking at maps of their vast nation with many of its roads in rural areas in a devastated condition, Ethiopians refer to "Italian asphalt". Following the 1928 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship and Arbitration, Italian colonialists, who partially encircled the Ethiopian empire from their footholds in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, sought to cement their Africa Orientale Italiana, first economically and then by an outright military invasion aimed at creating a new Roman empire centered on the export of Italy's particular brand of fascism.
Benito Mussolini's colonial administration built a network of now decrepit roads during Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's exile period that have been fit to rot ever since. They connected the once remote Addis to Asmara and Mogadishu, two cities from which modern Addis is cut off due to extreme hostility and perennial instability.
China is now renovating many of these roads for the first time since the period of Italian fascist occupation and many Ethiopians are grateful for it. The Chinese are able to implement projects overnight that the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Mele Zenawi has been unable to do 20 years after the fall of the Marxist junta he dedicated his life to defeating.
Save for the five years of Italian occupation, Ethiopia has always prided itself on its fierce independence and the preservation of its ancient, lettered history and language, the only intact civilization of its kind in all of Africa. Yet Ethiopia's 20th-century rulers from monarchs to Marxists, did next to nothing to develop their nation's physical infrastructure.
Current ruler Meles Zenawi, a former Tigrayan guerilla leader, has given Beijing a free hand to rush around with a plethora of massive development projects that will eventually give the Chinese fantastic leverage over this vast, diverse and immensely impoverished land. In official Chinese jargon related to its overwhelming economic embrace of the AU, it employs transparent terms like "friendship", "brotherhood" and "partnership" to describe this incredibly paternalistic seeming relationship.
A local man running a cramped concession shack adjacent to the CSCEC's sprawling operation said that Ethiopians and other Africans had little choice but to accept the rapid Chinese entente into their societies because "the price was right ... free".
Desperate to emancipate themselves from poverty and dilapidation without the luxury of worrying about future considerations when Beijing begins make less brotherly-like demands for natural resources, many Ethiopians were resigned to this adrenalin injection of Chinese progress into their relatively moribund economy.
When asked whether this influx of foreign workers had an immediate economic benefit in the neighborhoods surrounding the construction, vendors said that their Chinese guests had almost no immediate interaction with Ethiopians other than those picked to work under their immediate direction.
Perhaps the finished product will have the desired economic impact local businesses pined for? Or perhaps their makeshift stores will be deemed eyesores and bulldozed in the name of progress, making the surrounding area more appealing to visiting dignitaries of the "dictators' club", as some of the pan-African body's critics harshly deem the AU.
On a second visit to the AU site, Asia Times Online was accosted by guards from a local security contracting firm after taking photos from the vantage of a public street of Chinese officials going to and from the site's personnel gate.
A scrum ensued with more guards involving themselves with a crowd of passersby beginning to congregate out of curiosity. Speaking neither Amharic nor Mandarin, things quickly spiraled out of control. A CSCEC official with an uneven buzz cut and chinos stormed out onto the street, angrily furrowing his hardened brow, putting himself at the center of the fray.
Crossing his forearms upright to form an "X", ie "no" and disapprovingly shouting "photo", the official tried to explain to a massive Ethiopian security man how to erase the memory card on a professional DLSR camera. Simply refusing to needlessly surrender the images, I had the neck strap wrapped around my wrist for dear life as the tug of war continued.
Trying in vain to insist that the precious photos had been deleted in the scuffle, this correspondent was subsequently dragged through a temporary steel door spray painted with the CSCEC's Chinese-language logo. Once inside the buzzing site to which no outsider had seen, sans photographing, I was frog-marched past a group of chain-smoking men looking at an out of place Westerner traipsing through their secret world with suspicion.
The zone was one of almost total Chinese self-sufficiency, thereby putting the imported East Asian workers in a less exotic context. Pick-up trucks carted in stacks of mattresses and box springs to provide shelter for newly arriving workers needing accommodation. While the Chinese government would surely describe this scenario as another "harmonious" entry in its ever-deepening relationship with Africa, the project appeared to be an effort of exclusion and commanded efficiency. It was the Chinese who were clearly in charge.
I had been curious as to what kind of service economy had sprung up in the wake of the all-male Chinese arrival. Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport was bustling with all manner of Chinese engineers and laborers. The in-flight magazine for Ethiopian Airlines boasted of its increases in traffic to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and now Hangzhou.
The CSCEC men, however, lived a self-contained life for the duration of the project, leaving only to procure foodstuffs or eat at a touristy theme restaurant on a loose weekend evening. Otherwise, they live on the grounds of the new AU headquarters as backhoes and cranes ground along day and night.
Chinese workers in knockoff tracksuits obliviously brushed by ethnic-Somali women in brilliant colored hijabs who performed domestic duties on-site. Chinese vehicle operators blazed across the grounds while gaunt Ethiopian workers in ill-fitting hardhats clung to the sides of the trundling heavy machinery. Eventually, we reached a cluster of neatly arranged trailers that served as the logistical and technical hub for the entire linguistically awkward arrangement.
were worth an eventual resource of diplomacy-driven quid pro quo, he shrugged, "What choice do we have? We are a poor country." In the back of one such trailer, an English-speaking Ethiopian engineer ordered the guards in stern Amharic to let this correspondent go, explaining that Ethiopia was a sovereign country and its Chinese guests had no right to delegate the apprehension of a visiting third-country national observing from a public street.
Exiting the gate after this "misunderstanding" and hopping into the closest taxi, the driver sped off towards the city center. Looking at the AU tower in his cracked side view mirror emerging rather incongruously from a divot in his city's hilly topography, he reflected, "It [the new AU building] is what Africa can afford. The Chinese, they work fast ... and cheap." When asked if such deals
Exiting the gate after this "misunderstanding" and hopping into the closest taxi, the driver sped off towards the city center. Looking at the AU tower in his cracked side view mirror emerging rather incongruously from a divot in his city's hilly topography, he reflected, "It [the new AU building] is what Africa can afford. The Chinese, they work fast ... and cheap." When asked if such deals
While China has been involved in apolitical infrastructure and resource exploration projects in many of the African continent's disparate corners, including many parts of the Horn region, China's entrance into African politics at the supra-national level is certainly noteworthy.
Much to the dismay of human-rights workers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Beijing's resource diplomacy has been mostly devoid of interfering in the internal political dynamics of wildly dysfunctional states from Sudan to Zimbabwe and Algeria to Angola.
The AU is the successor body to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), whose post-war mandate was steeped in the anti-colonialism prevalent in the mid-Cold War era. The history of supra-nationalism had much to do with ridding the African continent of the then remaining minority ruled governments and shoring up individual states' newfound sovereignty backed by rhetoric of pan-African solidarity.
Following the April 1974 "Carnation Revolution" coup in Lisbon, Portugal, that effectively brought an end to European colonialism in Africa by mid-1975, a core component of the OAU's anti-colonial raison d'etre had been eroded. As the Portuguese evacuated from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, the last European maritime empire had crumbled.
Only South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) continued to exist as white-ruled pariah states. Despite the official end of British, French, Spanish, Belgian and Portuguese colonial administrations throughout Africa, all of these European powers, greatly weakened in the aftermath of World War II, continued to maintain heavily one-sided transactional and extraction-based relationships with their former colonies. A blatant example is the recurring instability in Cote d'Ivoire that has Paris very publicly ferrying out its large expatriate population at great expense from time to time when that country convulses in fits of anarchy.
For its part, the AU welcomes this style of Asian economic intervention with open arms. China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, distinctly lacks the colonial baggage that still taints European-African relations. Non-European interlocutors are nothing especially new in Ethiopia.
During the dreadful years of Marxist-inspired Derg rule led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Soviet and Cuban advisors had been aplenty, sometimes on both sides of a conflict with regard to Eritrea and the Somali Ogaden region. According to Africa historian Martin Meredith, in 1984, Mengistu enlisted the North Koreans to festoon his capital in Eurasian-Marxist chic to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his overthrow of Hailie Selassie.
One of China's greatest assets to the AU and its various and sundry constituent member states is precisely that it has no such baggage ... yet. On April 24, 2007, a huge contingent from the ethnic Somali irredentist group known as the Ogaden Liberation Front (ONLF) attacked a Chinese-run oil installation operated by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, also known as Sinopec.
The ONLF claimed it had warned Beijing and Addis Ababa equally of encroaching on the territory it wished to control. Aside from killing dozens of Ethiopians, between seven and nine Chinese workers were killed in the assault. A London-based ONLF spokesman told the BBC at the time, "We have warned the Chinese government and the Ethiopian government that ... they don't have a right to drill there."
Beginning principally during the Maoist period, China has been involved in the Horn of Africa region and other parts of the continent in the arms trade and the dispensation of agricultural and other technical expertise. China's traditional history of quietism in African affairs comes into question as the new AU begins to near completion.
Beijing will no longer have the luxury of not appearing overt in its involvement in Africa. China describes Sino-African relations with terms like "peaceful coexistence" and "mutual respect", while simultaneously failing to resist taking jabs at Western Europe's oft abhorrent historical interactions there, an aspect that certain Sino-Africa literature seems to relish.
The Forum on Cooperation between China and Africa (FOCAC), established in 2000 and occurring every three years, provides a mechanism for China's ever-increasing involvement in Africa, including charitable and development work. The inking of multi-billion dollar schemes at the FOCAC summits all go in one direction: from Beijing to various African states.
African resources inevitably flow in the reverse. The Chinese Communist Party claims its stated position of non-interference in African politics is a paramount prism through which Sino-African relations are conducted. Yet China's AU gambit is its entry into the internal dynamics of the continent's writ regardless whether it perceives it so or not.
The so-called Beijing Consensus iterates the raw primacy of necessary economic development over the human-rights-oriented or reform-driven foreign policy espoused in many Western capitals as of late. From the Chinese point of view, these rather condescending policies are an infringement on the sovereignty of Third World nation-states.
Many Ethiopians are willing to entertain the shock of sudden Chinese investment in their ancient country, but decry that many of the Chinese projects have so far had a negligible impact on the lives of ordinary people.
Ethiopia and wider Africa are not simply venues for Chinese foreign direct investment and loans. They have become emigration destinations for enterprising Chinese farmers and businessmen. With one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, hovering around US$1,000 per person per annum, just north of Afghanistan and Somalia, some Ethiopians are already resentful that China is employing so many of its own nationals on infrastructure projects when so many local residents are desperate for work.
China's "harmonious" economic adventurism in Africa may yet require more refining if it is to be a lasting partner in one of the poorest, most unstable regions in the world.
Undoubtedly, the upper echelon of African politicos are thrilled with the prestige project throttling upward in downtown Addis Ababa at no up-front cost to them. For the next generation of African leaders, the indebtedness bequeathed by default with such hasty deal-making may stunt internal development further. This will happen as resources already committed for export to Asia possibly deprive struggling societies of natural resources from the start that could be used to develop local and regional economies if finally harnessed properly and the "resource curse" thrown off.
China's "permanent signature in Africa" may indeed herald a new, less regrettable era in African history, albeit without a stated democratization stipulation wished for in the cash-strapped West. How this era will develop and who will guide this development remains to be seen. One thing is certain: China is in Africa to stay.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Sudan: Storm Over the Nile
By Eric Margolis
Courtesy Of "Lew Rockwell"
Egypt, eternally sensitive about who controls the Nile’s life-giving waters, is deeply worried about Sudan’s future and fears a new regime in the south may begin diverting the river’s waters.
Courtesy Of "Lew Rockwell"
Sudan is about to face a dangerous political storm that may tear asunder that vast nation and send tremors across Africa.
A referendum is scheduled on 9 January in which southern Sudan’s eight million inhabitants may vote to separate from the 34 million citizens of northern Sudan and create their own new nation – South Sudan. The United States has been quietly playing the key role in engineering the breakup of Sudan.
Many of modern Africa’s borders are artificial: they were drawn by European colonial powers heedless of the continent’s tribal, linguistic or economic geography.
Any changes in these borders are likely to unleash dangerous tensions, even demands for secession across the continent.
One of Africa’s strongest taboos has been that borders inherited from the colonial era are immutable. A break-up of Sudan, Africa’s largest nation, will bring into question the continent’s entire geopolitical architecture.
Sudan extends from the Arab world and the sub-Saharan Sahel into the heart of black Africa; it was cobbled together by the British Empire to safeguard the Nile, Egypt’s sole source of water, and to provide agricultural lands.
Within Sudan is a dizzying collection of almost 600 often feuding tribes speaking 400 different languages spread over a vast area: northern, Arabic-speaking Muslims and Nubians; ferocious Beja from the Red Sea Coast ("Fuzzy-Wuzzies" to the British); wild Bagarra nomads from Darfur; and Stone Age tribes from the upper Nile.
Anyone who thinks Sudan’s problems are something new would do well to go back and study Britain’s epic 19th-century wars to conquer Sudan, and the historic uprising and resistance of its Islamic leader, the Mahdi. One cannot understand modern Darfur without referring to its tribal conflicts of the 1880’s.*
It is remarkable that Sudan has held together for so long. A low-intensity civil war has raged for 60 years between Muslim northerners and non-Muslim southerners in which two million are said to have perished. Muslims make up 75% of Sudanese; animists (traditional African faiths) account for about 20%, and southern Christians some 5%. Islamic law has been applied in the north, but rejected by most non-Muslim southerners.
Southern Sudan’s Christian secessionist movement has long been advised and financed by British and US Christian missionaries who saw the region’s tribes as fertile ground for conversion. Western "humanitarian" aid groups have played a key role in fostering the south Sudan independence movement.
American Evangelical groups, including so-called "Christian Zionists," who are fiercely anti-Islamic, have been playing an important role in promoting southern Sudan’s secessionist movement. Since evangelicals now constitute a key Republican constituency, the party has been quick to adopt the cause of south Sudanese secession.
South Sudan has been rent for decades by local conflicts between its three main pastoral Nilotic tribes, the Dinka, Shilluk and Nuer, who routinely launch raids on one another for cattle and women. Their feuds are likely to carry over into a new south Sudanese state.
Sudan has also suffered another confusing conflict in the remote western regions of Darfur and Kordofan between nomadic and farming peoples. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted Sudan’s strongman, Gen. Omar el-Bashir, for war crimes in Darfur’s murky tribal war that has become a cause célèbre in the West.
Just how much Gen. Bashir’s regime is responsible for alleged mass killings in Darfur’s tribal mêlée remain uncertain. But Sudan is on the US black list as a terrorist supporter and under US sanctions. Independent-minded Sudan, branded a "rogue state" by Washington, has long been targeted for "regime change." The US media and evangelical Christian groups have demonized Sudan and Gen. Bashir, and branded him a dangerous Islamist.
Hysteria in North America over Darfur is exceeded only by the public’s total lack of knowledge about this remote, complex region that is deceptively – and quite wrongly – portrayed by media as a simplistic morality struggle between wicked Muslims and helpless black farmers.
Israel has been very active in arming and supporting the South Sudan SPLA guerilla movement, and will assume an even more influential role if southern Sudan goes independent.
Israel has been involved in Sudan since the 1950’s. Israel successfully bribed the late Sudanese dictator, Jaffar al-Numiery, to allow Ethiopian Falasha Jews to fly to Israel from Sudan.
Sizeable deposits of oil were discovered in Sudan over the past decade. They are mostly located in south Sudan but the Khartoum government controls the export pipeline which runs north to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. China has become a major customer of Sudanese oil. Washington intends to elbow the Chinese out of Sudan if the south breaks away.
Control of global oil plays a primary role on US foreign and military policy. As a result, the US has become ever more deeply involved in Sudan’s affairs. Washington has been discreetly working with southern Sudan to create a government, financial system, police, and army. South Sudanese officials are being trained in the US. The number of US diplomats and intelligence officers in Sudan has tripled.
A break-up of Sudan may have an immediate effect on other unstable neighbors, like Somalia, Chad, and the Republic of Congo. Ethiopia, itself an unstable amalgam, may get more deeply involved in the region.
Egypt, eternally sensitive about who controls the Nile’s life-giving waters, is deeply worried about Sudan’s future and fears a new regime in the south may begin diverting the river’s waters.Just at a time when the US is increasingly active in Djibouti, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, it finds itself deeply involved in engineering the break-up of Sudan.
All this may be a bridge too far for the already over-stretched US military, intelligence services, and State Department, not to mention the empty US Treasury that now runs on borrowed money.
*Anyone interested in 19th-Century Sudan should read Khartoum by Michael Asher, an ex-SAS officer and old Sudan hand. A brilliant, stirring recounting of the Dervish uprising, “Chinese” Gordon, and Imperial Britain’s river wars up the Nile to Khartoum.
January 4, 2011
Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2011 Eric Margolis
Recently by Eric Margolis: The Dear Leader Calls for Holy War
Sunday, August 08, 2010
The Militarization Of The African Continent
African Unity (AU)
By James Gundun
July 31, 2010
Courtesy Of "Global Research"
Global Research Articles by James Gundun
By James Gundun
July 31, 2010
Courtesy Of "Global Research"
It’s hard to pinpoint what just happened at the African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda. More troops are on their way to Somalia - 4,000 in total from Uganda, Guinea, and Djibouti with potentially 1,300 from Burundi - which would bring the total AU force to roughly 11,000. As to what they can do, here the waters begin to muddy.
The official line is that Washington, working through the United Nations’ command of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), rejected an AU call to expand its mandate from peace-keeping to “peace-making.” Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, informed reporters that Augustine Mahiga, the UN special representative for Somalia, rejected the doctrine of allowing UN peacekeeping troops to attack al-Shabab.
Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), desperate at it is, has welcomed the incoming assistance, but houses public reservations of unintentionally buoying al-Shabab. Vetoing the AU indicates that America and the UN harbor similar doubts.
But reading between the lines purifies the waters in the near future - and a deadly long-term outlook begins to emerge. Carson said that Washington believes the current AU mandate allows for soldiers to “defend themselves” and protect TFG installations like the presidential palace and military bases. Carson insists, "It was Ambassador Mahiga's view that the mandate that currently exists is sufficiently broad enough to provide the AMISOM forces with the capacity to do the job that is required.”
Meaning the mandate already approves of offensive capabilities, as revealed by escalating battles in Mogadishu following the Kampala bombings.
Not only are offensive missions pushing into al-Shabab territory, Uganda’s personal trigger to retaliate has surely quickened after Kampala. And a new mandate will become increasingly necessary as the fighting intensifies, one that may authorize total warfare and is already being drafted. Yves Sorokobi, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told Al Jazeera that the current mandate is "sufficiently strong,” but also hinted at a wider conflict to come.
"After the summit in Kampala, the AU will make a certain number of recommendations on how the mandate can be strengthened and on that basis there will be - here at the Security Council - a review of what's doable [and] what's not doable. This will depend on the analysis that the AU will deliver to us. If on that basis we believe that there's reasonable ground to fear that the situation might get out of hand, and that the peacekeeping force needs to be given preemptive military options, I am pretty confident that the Security Council will support that idea.”
Given that the UN rejected an expanded mandate under US direction, a future green-light will similarly come from Washington.
Somalia generally appears as one of two objects: a war to intervene in or a war to flee from. Many oppose military escalation to what is considered an intractable conflict, believing that the war will further destabilize and either require unfeasible resources or infect all of East Africa. The only practical hope is an international system to oversee the vast network of military and, more importantly, non-military operations necessary in Somalia.
From afar the AU’s summit, in concert with the UN and America, may appear organized. This is normal because it’s the image Washington seeks to create. Carson has exhausted himself in distancing US policy from the AU’s actions, repeating the legitimacy of an international response to nearly every African media outlet. But while he’s chosen the right words, US actions bear the opposite pattern. No sooner had a failed US-supported Ethiopian invasion ended did the West begin funneling more weapons directly into the TFG.
Sound strategy in a way, as the West cannot afford for Somalia to become al-Qaeda's lawless hideout.
Yet as the TFG grew weaker and weaker (and US arms flowed to al-Shabab through the black market), America found itself needing a way to insert ground troops without US flags on their shoulders. The AU is the only realistic option and Kampala has been predictably exploited by a fierce US push for more troops. Washington then used the AU to portray internationalism, a crucial element of counterinsurgency, but internationalism alone doesn’t produce viable COIN. Military is still a main ingredient and the battle itself has become overshadowed by US-AU cooperation.
An international flavor is concealing what remains essentially conventional warfare, offering an smooth road towards disaster.
Holes in Somalia’s counterinsurgency are found at the most basic levels. Proper “clear, hold, and build” COIN is troop and time intensive, yet the AU has still failed to deploy a decisive force. Expanding from 6,000 to 11,000 increases the force ratio by almost 100%, but 6,000 troops were so meager that they skew this advantage. Not including Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia houses roughly three million people within 125,000 square miles. Two times the AU troops increases the ratio of troops to civilians from 1/500 to 1/275, far below the preferred ratios of 1/10 or 1/20. The space one troop occupies improves from 20 to 10 square miles, still not close to one per square mile.
Meanwhile the ratio between AU and al-Shabab troops boosts from 1/1 to 2/1, a relatively insignificant margin in counterinsurgency. NATO and Afghan soldiers hold an 8/1 ratio against the Taliban, spurning great wonder as to how they’re gaining in strength, let alone surviving. Such is the unconventional nature of guerrilla warfare.
11,000 or 20,000 AU troops will almost certainly prove indecisive, resulting in further military stalemate and suffering for average Somalis. Time is another factor seemingly disregarded; Somalia needs multiple decades of constant lifting. And al-Shabab’s own force may increase if Somalia becomes a premier jihad. Were one to even begin reaching a realistic force level for Somalia, 40,000 brings the troop-to-civilian ratio down to 1/75 and produces an 8/1 ratio against al-Shabab. This force would be divided among Mogadishu and al-Shabab’s strongholds in Kismayo and Beledweyne, with the rest dispersed throughout the countryside to harass al-Shabab’s counteroffensive. And they would need to stay beyond five or 10 years.
Though this many troops may create the very backlash against their deployment, it’s still possible for the AU to expand beyond 20,000. But the only way this will happen - other than a large-scale terrorist attack - is if Somalia begins to demonstrate indisputable signs of progress, and the chances appear low.
As of this moment only trace elements of counterinsurgency can be found in the AU/US strategy. Already surging more troops to prop up a weak and unpopular government, the very idea of reacting on the offensive indicates a conventional response shrouded in an international COIN wrapper. Carson was recently asked pointblank, “The option being pursued in Somalia now is a military one. Why don’t you encourage Muslim religious leaders in the region to pursue another course of action?”
His response: “With respect to Somalia, I would characterize the efforts there in very different ways; it is not a military solution under way but AMISOM’s efforts to stabilize the situation in favor of a political process that was agreed to in Djibouti, an agreement which is under assault by the al-Shabaab, the Hizbul Islam and other violent extremist groups.”
This is exactly the problem - using internationalism to vouch for a weak government and create the false impression of counterinsurgency.
Meanwhile Carson has become a shield for Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Himself fending off a 2005 article in which he insinuated Museveni is a dictator, Obama’s reformed position is also attracting scrutiny. Andrew M. Mwenda writes in The Independent, “when he came to power, US President Barack Obama showed a cold attitude to Museveni; quietly despising him for clinging to power and presiding over a corrupt system. Now, with Ugandans paying with blood for American geo-strategic interests in this region, Museveni is indispensable to Obama's plans for this region.”
More definitively, Carson has become a denial spokesman for the AU when it comes to civilian casualties, showing total disregard for counterinsurgency. He’s argued numerous times since Kampala, "I think that some of the tactics employed by al-Shabab are responsible for some of the civilian casualties that have been reported in the press. Al-Shabab moves in and out of market areas, in and out of civilian residential areas...”
Though governments instinctively place the blame on insurgents for operating in civilian environments, counterinsurgency proves the opposite on the ground. US officials in Afghanistan admit the onus is on coalition troops to prevent civilian casualties even when baited by Taliban forces, yet discount the same theory in Somalia. Carson and AU officials are bent on denying indiscriminate shelling, but they never actually deny the casualties. Only the blame. This may play in America and Uganda, but Somalis feel somewhat different when an AU shell lands on their house and no one from the TFG ever arrives.
Foreign governments simply don’t want to fight the war being presented, but they cannot bend Somalia’s counterinsurgency into conventional warfare.
The West and the AU occupy an admittedly tough situation: how to balance the need to respond with the need to de-escalate. The regional and international community justifiably fears that no response will embolden al-Shabab, to the point where the TFG may prematurely collapse. But this fear of non-action has translated into strict offense and retaliation, mentally anchoring the West and Africa to conventional warfare when counterinsurgencies are better waged by not firing.
Thomas Hammes, a career US Marine, recounts in The Sling and the Stone that Marines made great beat cops in Mogadishu during 1992, canvassing the city and getting to know the people. Offensive actions were limited and the city returned to a semblance of normalcy. The UN then did what many military analysts warned against when it took over control of the city - it withdrew into bases and rely on superior firepower. UN forces lost control of authority in and information from the streets, leading to inevitable retreat.
Currently, there’s no talk of using additional troops to saturate Mogadishu so that the AU may intimately connect with Somalis and begin real counterinsurgency. All that’s heard are war-cries to attack al-Shabab.
While the positive effects of Washington and the AU’s expanding policy have yet to be seen, the negative consequences are already beginning to manifest. Civilian casualty reports in the media have tainted and thus limited AU troops during the entire process. And while many analysts predict that al-Shabab would fragment if left to its own devices, a conclusion far from certain, more accepted is that foreign forces unite Somalia’s various militias. Rather than stem the insurgency virus, it quickly internalized in Puntland.
"Sheikh Mohamed Saiid Atom has been recruiting Islamists in those hilly areas since 2005," said resident Hussein Ali of the now famous al-Shabab spinoff. "He has indoctrinated the youth using three means: a huge amount of money from the sales of weapons, sharia law and convincing his clan they have little political influence on Puntland's administration.”
Now Atom, who believes “we are part and parcel of al Shabaab,” has decided to throw his full weight into the war. Both al-Shabab and Atom would later deny working together as insurgents sometimes do, one more sign of collaboration.
Elsewhere Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, chief of Hizbul Islam, has apparently switched back to al-Shabab’s side. Aweys, who has feuded with al-Shabab since 2009, entered negotiations with the TFG last month after half of Hizbul-Islam reverted to al-Shabab. Lately he’s been renegotiating with al-Shabab too, announcing the other day that “their discussions were continuing in good form.” Aweys subsequently attacked government forces near the presidential palace.
Conversely the Sunni militia Ahlu Sunna, once allied with the government and al-Shabab’s only non-state enemy, has been a non-factor in recent weeks. Having split from the government in June and demanded international mediation, it has given no indication of repairing the damage.
Without an immediate emphasis on counterinsurgency and non-military operations, al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage may not be far off when he predicts, "We are telling the African populations not to get duped by the mirage peddled by your leaders. Let your sons not be annihilated in Mogadishu. Those who are pushing your leaders such as the U.S. and Europe and the like are in agony in areas they invaded. All they want is for you to share with their people the loss, mourning and cries."
The official line is that Washington, working through the United Nations’ command of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), rejected an AU call to expand its mandate from peace-keeping to “peace-making.” Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, informed reporters that Augustine Mahiga, the UN special representative for Somalia, rejected the doctrine of allowing UN peacekeeping troops to attack al-Shabab.
Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), desperate at it is, has welcomed the incoming assistance, but houses public reservations of unintentionally buoying al-Shabab. Vetoing the AU indicates that America and the UN harbor similar doubts.
But reading between the lines purifies the waters in the near future - and a deadly long-term outlook begins to emerge. Carson said that Washington believes the current AU mandate allows for soldiers to “defend themselves” and protect TFG installations like the presidential palace and military bases. Carson insists, "It was Ambassador Mahiga's view that the mandate that currently exists is sufficiently broad enough to provide the AMISOM forces with the capacity to do the job that is required.”
Meaning the mandate already approves of offensive capabilities, as revealed by escalating battles in Mogadishu following the Kampala bombings.
Not only are offensive missions pushing into al-Shabab territory, Uganda’s personal trigger to retaliate has surely quickened after Kampala. And a new mandate will become increasingly necessary as the fighting intensifies, one that may authorize total warfare and is already being drafted. Yves Sorokobi, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told Al Jazeera that the current mandate is "sufficiently strong,” but also hinted at a wider conflict to come.
"After the summit in Kampala, the AU will make a certain number of recommendations on how the mandate can be strengthened and on that basis there will be - here at the Security Council - a review of what's doable [and] what's not doable. This will depend on the analysis that the AU will deliver to us. If on that basis we believe that there's reasonable ground to fear that the situation might get out of hand, and that the peacekeeping force needs to be given preemptive military options, I am pretty confident that the Security Council will support that idea.”
Given that the UN rejected an expanded mandate under US direction, a future green-light will similarly come from Washington.
Somalia generally appears as one of two objects: a war to intervene in or a war to flee from. Many oppose military escalation to what is considered an intractable conflict, believing that the war will further destabilize and either require unfeasible resources or infect all of East Africa. The only practical hope is an international system to oversee the vast network of military and, more importantly, non-military operations necessary in Somalia.
From afar the AU’s summit, in concert with the UN and America, may appear organized. This is normal because it’s the image Washington seeks to create. Carson has exhausted himself in distancing US policy from the AU’s actions, repeating the legitimacy of an international response to nearly every African media outlet. But while he’s chosen the right words, US actions bear the opposite pattern. No sooner had a failed US-supported Ethiopian invasion ended did the West begin funneling more weapons directly into the TFG.
Sound strategy in a way, as the West cannot afford for Somalia to become al-Qaeda's lawless hideout.
Yet as the TFG grew weaker and weaker (and US arms flowed to al-Shabab through the black market), America found itself needing a way to insert ground troops without US flags on their shoulders. The AU is the only realistic option and Kampala has been predictably exploited by a fierce US push for more troops. Washington then used the AU to portray internationalism, a crucial element of counterinsurgency, but internationalism alone doesn’t produce viable COIN. Military is still a main ingredient and the battle itself has become overshadowed by US-AU cooperation.
An international flavor is concealing what remains essentially conventional warfare, offering an smooth road towards disaster.
Holes in Somalia’s counterinsurgency are found at the most basic levels. Proper “clear, hold, and build” COIN is troop and time intensive, yet the AU has still failed to deploy a decisive force. Expanding from 6,000 to 11,000 increases the force ratio by almost 100%, but 6,000 troops were so meager that they skew this advantage. Not including Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia houses roughly three million people within 125,000 square miles. Two times the AU troops increases the ratio of troops to civilians from 1/500 to 1/275, far below the preferred ratios of 1/10 or 1/20. The space one troop occupies improves from 20 to 10 square miles, still not close to one per square mile.
Meanwhile the ratio between AU and al-Shabab troops boosts from 1/1 to 2/1, a relatively insignificant margin in counterinsurgency. NATO and Afghan soldiers hold an 8/1 ratio against the Taliban, spurning great wonder as to how they’re gaining in strength, let alone surviving. Such is the unconventional nature of guerrilla warfare.
11,000 or 20,000 AU troops will almost certainly prove indecisive, resulting in further military stalemate and suffering for average Somalis. Time is another factor seemingly disregarded; Somalia needs multiple decades of constant lifting. And al-Shabab’s own force may increase if Somalia becomes a premier jihad. Were one to even begin reaching a realistic force level for Somalia, 40,000 brings the troop-to-civilian ratio down to 1/75 and produces an 8/1 ratio against al-Shabab. This force would be divided among Mogadishu and al-Shabab’s strongholds in Kismayo and Beledweyne, with the rest dispersed throughout the countryside to harass al-Shabab’s counteroffensive. And they would need to stay beyond five or 10 years.
Though this many troops may create the very backlash against their deployment, it’s still possible for the AU to expand beyond 20,000. But the only way this will happen - other than a large-scale terrorist attack - is if Somalia begins to demonstrate indisputable signs of progress, and the chances appear low.
As of this moment only trace elements of counterinsurgency can be found in the AU/US strategy. Already surging more troops to prop up a weak and unpopular government, the very idea of reacting on the offensive indicates a conventional response shrouded in an international COIN wrapper. Carson was recently asked pointblank, “The option being pursued in Somalia now is a military one. Why don’t you encourage Muslim religious leaders in the region to pursue another course of action?”
His response: “With respect to Somalia, I would characterize the efforts there in very different ways; it is not a military solution under way but AMISOM’s efforts to stabilize the situation in favor of a political process that was agreed to in Djibouti, an agreement which is under assault by the al-Shabaab, the Hizbul Islam and other violent extremist groups.”
This is exactly the problem - using internationalism to vouch for a weak government and create the false impression of counterinsurgency.
Meanwhile Carson has become a shield for Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Himself fending off a 2005 article in which he insinuated Museveni is a dictator, Obama’s reformed position is also attracting scrutiny. Andrew M. Mwenda writes in The Independent, “when he came to power, US President Barack Obama showed a cold attitude to Museveni; quietly despising him for clinging to power and presiding over a corrupt system. Now, with Ugandans paying with blood for American geo-strategic interests in this region, Museveni is indispensable to Obama's plans for this region.”
More definitively, Carson has become a denial spokesman for the AU when it comes to civilian casualties, showing total disregard for counterinsurgency. He’s argued numerous times since Kampala, "I think that some of the tactics employed by al-Shabab are responsible for some of the civilian casualties that have been reported in the press. Al-Shabab moves in and out of market areas, in and out of civilian residential areas...”
Though governments instinctively place the blame on insurgents for operating in civilian environments, counterinsurgency proves the opposite on the ground. US officials in Afghanistan admit the onus is on coalition troops to prevent civilian casualties even when baited by Taliban forces, yet discount the same theory in Somalia. Carson and AU officials are bent on denying indiscriminate shelling, but they never actually deny the casualties. Only the blame. This may play in America and Uganda, but Somalis feel somewhat different when an AU shell lands on their house and no one from the TFG ever arrives.
Foreign governments simply don’t want to fight the war being presented, but they cannot bend Somalia’s counterinsurgency into conventional warfare.
The West and the AU occupy an admittedly tough situation: how to balance the need to respond with the need to de-escalate. The regional and international community justifiably fears that no response will embolden al-Shabab, to the point where the TFG may prematurely collapse. But this fear of non-action has translated into strict offense and retaliation, mentally anchoring the West and Africa to conventional warfare when counterinsurgencies are better waged by not firing.
Thomas Hammes, a career US Marine, recounts in The Sling and the Stone that Marines made great beat cops in Mogadishu during 1992, canvassing the city and getting to know the people. Offensive actions were limited and the city returned to a semblance of normalcy. The UN then did what many military analysts warned against when it took over control of the city - it withdrew into bases and rely on superior firepower. UN forces lost control of authority in and information from the streets, leading to inevitable retreat.
Currently, there’s no talk of using additional troops to saturate Mogadishu so that the AU may intimately connect with Somalis and begin real counterinsurgency. All that’s heard are war-cries to attack al-Shabab.
While the positive effects of Washington and the AU’s expanding policy have yet to be seen, the negative consequences are already beginning to manifest. Civilian casualty reports in the media have tainted and thus limited AU troops during the entire process. And while many analysts predict that al-Shabab would fragment if left to its own devices, a conclusion far from certain, more accepted is that foreign forces unite Somalia’s various militias. Rather than stem the insurgency virus, it quickly internalized in Puntland.
"Sheikh Mohamed Saiid Atom has been recruiting Islamists in those hilly areas since 2005," said resident Hussein Ali of the now famous al-Shabab spinoff. "He has indoctrinated the youth using three means: a huge amount of money from the sales of weapons, sharia law and convincing his clan they have little political influence on Puntland's administration.”
Now Atom, who believes “we are part and parcel of al Shabaab,” has decided to throw his full weight into the war. Both al-Shabab and Atom would later deny working together as insurgents sometimes do, one more sign of collaboration.
Elsewhere Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, chief of Hizbul Islam, has apparently switched back to al-Shabab’s side. Aweys, who has feuded with al-Shabab since 2009, entered negotiations with the TFG last month after half of Hizbul-Islam reverted to al-Shabab. Lately he’s been renegotiating with al-Shabab too, announcing the other day that “their discussions were continuing in good form.” Aweys subsequently attacked government forces near the presidential palace.
Conversely the Sunni militia Ahlu Sunna, once allied with the government and al-Shabab’s only non-state enemy, has been a non-factor in recent weeks. Having split from the government in June and demanded international mediation, it has given no indication of repairing the damage.
Without an immediate emphasis on counterinsurgency and non-military operations, al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage may not be far off when he predicts, "We are telling the African populations not to get duped by the mirage peddled by your leaders. Let your sons not be annihilated in Mogadishu. Those who are pushing your leaders such as the U.S. and Europe and the like are in agony in areas they invaded. All they want is for you to share with their people the loss, mourning and cries."
James Gundun is a political scientist and counterinsurgency analyst based in Washington D.C. Contact him in The Trench, a realist foreign policy blog, atwww.hadalzone.blogspot.com.
Global Research Articles by James Gundun
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