Somalia invasion is ill-advised

By Billow Kerrow

Without any pretence, I do not like wars. I am not a member of the ‘Stop The War’ movement in the West but share the view that most wars in our age are not fought for national interest. And governments invariably lie about it. When the UK and US kicked off the Iraq war, the world was told of the stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

Nearly a decade later, Iraq is in tatters, over a million of their people are dead and no weapons were found. It turned out to be a massive deception.

I do not believe that Kenya invaded Somalia to fight Al Shabaab because the later has placed our nation’s security at stake. Nor do I believe that it is because of the tourists and aid workers kidnapped by bandits from inside our territory in recent weeks. The militia and pirates have held hundreds of foreign nationals in recent years but no nation has invaded Somalia to free them.

Equally, the lives of the two Kenyan soldiers held in Somalia are unlikely to have been upmost in the minds of our planners. Indeed, these two men were taken away months ago but we have not seen our Government pound its chest for their release. One would have thought that Ethiopian Toposa and Merille militia, who have killed many Kenyans in cross border attacks in recent weeks, are more deserving of the invasion had territorial integrity been the reason.

According to the 2010 report of UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, Kenya joined the war in Somalia on the side of Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2009 when it recruited hundreds of Somalis to be trained in our country to fight the Al Shabaab. The group reported that some of the trainees, now assisting the army in the invasion, were Kenyan Somalis, a fact reported extensively by our own media.

Prof Saitoti announced at the time that our Government wanted to see a ‘Jubaland’ state set up in the areas around our border to act as a buffer zone against the militants.

It has since come to pass. The buffer ‘state’ known as Azania was launched in Nairobi a few months ago and Kenya played a key role. When the TFG and Ethiopian forces took Bula Hawa recently, the fight was lodged from Mandera, inside Kenya with our Government’s tacit approval and support. Despite denials, Kenya’s role as a peacemaker in Somalia ended more than two years ago and we have been unwittingly recruited by Ethiopia and US as a combatant in a proxy war against terrorism.

Who are we fighting in Somalia? Al Shabaab is not a uniformed military with bases and designated camps that you can attack. It is said to be a ragtag militia that melts into the population when it is necessary. How do you fight bandits with air force jets, tanks and infantry to the boot?

When Ethiopia overran Somalia in 2006 to do the same thing, the militia group was then insignificant. Two years later, that invasion had helped Al Shabaab recruit thousands more Somalis whose nationalist feelings were inflamed by indiscriminate attacks on civilians by the Ethiopians. In the two years, over 20,000 Somalis were dead, thousands more displaced and Al Shabaab even stronger.

A war is not a picnic. There are both human and economic costs. Both US and Ethiopia know only too well the folly of engaging militarily in Somalia. Certainly, for a poor country such as ours, we can ill afford a long drawn-out war with an amorphous enemy. We will create more refugees, headed to our borders. With corruption part of our culture, maintaining security along the border has been a failure. There is still time for our leaders to rethink and pull out of this war.

—The writer is political economist.