Understanding The Roots of Terrorism And Its Base in The Gulf of Aden Region

President Barack Obama’s first signature as President was appended in an order decreeing the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year. Started under the notorious tenure of former US President George W. Bush, the prison that contains 90 Yemenis, together with humiliations in Abu Ghraib and now Bagram has been a rallying point for extremists across the world. The 44th President of the United States inherited the war against terror in Afghanistan and the ‘unnecessary’ war in Iraq. Apart from his elevated rhetoric, analysts have pointed out that the policies followed by Obama’s administration are the same old ones that his predecessor applied.

Right from his inauguration, the threat of terror has never gone down. The New York Times has reported that Canadian Somalis plotted to blow up the inauguration ceremony at the steps of Capitol Hill on January 20, 2009. That is why Defence Secretary Robert Gates kept away from the ceremony in case of any contingency.

Conflict prone

Somalia has been notoriously conflict prone since the overthrow of dictator Siad Barre in 1991. Last year, it was voted by The Economist as the worst country on Earth. Yemen has emerged as another front in the fight against terror with al-Qaeda increasing its influence there. The Nigerian teenager who tried to blow up a plane on US soil last Christmas is said to have been trained by al-Qaeda cells in Yemen.

The knee-jerk reaction from London and Washington at the growing threat in Yemen reflects a deep misunderstanding of the Horn of Africa. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced an international conference on Yemen and Iraq commander General David Petraeus visited Sana’a and promised more tax dollars for military purposes. Like it has been in Somalia for two decades, the West has focused on ‘security’ alone to neutralise terror.

Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian peninsula is genetically weak with a President who has stacked government posts with family. Now faced with a rebellion in the North from Zaydist Shiites, and secessionist forces in the South.

With little help from the region, al-Qaeda is officially welcome in Yemen as a counterweight to President Abdallah Ali Saleh’s enemies. In a toxic confluence, Iran is also hungry with hegemony instincts and is said to be sympathetic with Shiite insurgents in Yemen while Saudi Arabia is keen not to be slighted in the Gulf.

Any policy wonk will tell you that banking on the Yemen government to fight the same al-Qaeda that supports it is like chasing the wind. But this is not a surprise, the same desperation is what has driven the West in its counter-terrorism effort against the Taliban in Pakistan.

Focusing on security alone, like drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the badlands of Somalia has long shown the limits of military power to solve crystal clear political problems.

Kenya appears to be a clear target of fundamentalist forces and that is our own doing. For more than a year now, western navies have been stationed at the Gulf of Aden in an effort to stump out piracy. As more and more ships continue to be hijacked, most pirates who have been captured and tried in Mombasa in line with an accord signed between the Kenya, US, France and Britain.

In a report broadcast live by BBC, the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa analyst Rashid Abdi says al-Shabaab is slowly infiltrating Kenya and recruiting Somali teenagers to fight their war. In Eastleigh for example, money, weapons and even Shabaab leaders pass unnoticed enroute to Somalia thanks to our lax security apparatus.

With a possible pirate — Shabaab alliance, our porous borders are a walk in the park for insurgents. When US and western interests have been attacked in the past such as the embassy bombings of 1998 and the Kikambala attacks of 2002, it is innocent civilians who bear the brunt.

Playing the devil’s advocate here would illustrate the point:

what is our government’s policy in the Horn of Africa? Are there any contingency measures incase there are plots to attack our country? And for how long will we continue to carry the sins of the West? Kenya, as a leader in the region must commandeer the role of working for stability in the Horn. Rumours of the government recruiting young Kenyan Somalis in North Eastern to fight al-Shabaab harm our standing as an honest broker and endanger the whole country.

The West must be advised that their policies are outdated and that a comprehensive policy addressing the socio-economic situations in conflict prone countries would produce better results than the narrow policy of military doses to political tumours.

The Horn of Africa is not Al-Qaedastan. There are hardly 500 Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and most of them have fled from Saudi Arabia. Though the al-Shabaab are said to be working with Al-Qaeda , there are few cells in Somalia.

Their funding networks stretches back to Saudi Arabia and as long as we ignore this, the imbroglio will worsen. Unless we change our view of the situation, our globalised world will ensure that terrorist threats become increasingly invisible with diaspora communities acting as conduits of Somalia’s fundamentalist ideology.

Bussiness Daily

Nyawachi is a fellow at the Institute for African Progress.