Mogadishu (Commentary) — One week after the UN Security Council renewed the armed embargo on Somalia, many Somalis wonder why successive Somali federal governments’ pleas to lift the arms embargo have fallen on deaf ears. Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, two countries involved in the opaque, rival security apparatuses of Somalia, votes against lifting of the embargo.
Supplying militias with arms from government armouries, contrary to what the Somalia National Security Advisor Hussein Sheikh said recently, points to the risk of reviving intra-clan hostilities as shown by the subclan-feuding in Middle Shabelle region, putatively President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s constituency.
That the Federal Government of Somalia adopted a controversial policy to use clan militias in the fight against Al-shabaab, a policy supported by the United States, which supported warlords in 2006 before the emergence of the Union of Islamic Courts, leaves no one in doubt that Somalia is long way from forming an inclusive national army.
Security experts in Somalia are alarmed by dormant hostilities that will come to fore once militias return to their fiefdoms. Some clans are complaining of not receiving more logistical support and ammunition from the government. The assumption that rag-rag militias can fight a well-established and proscribed outfit that terrorised Somalis for more than a decade is, on one hand, based on the thinking that more weapons for locals could force Al-shabaab to flee from areas they control, and the view that armed clan militias are preferable to a terrorist organisation on the other.
Since 2018 the United Arab Emirates has sent light weapons and armoured cars to different entities in Somalia. This policy lays the groundwork for a destabilising policy that can undermine modest progress made on state-building in Somalia. Federal Member States will grapple with competing forces driven by opposing agendas.
Ten years ago, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was hailed as a peace-builder on account of his background in the post-conflict education sector. A decade after he was first elected a President in an indirect election similar to the 2022 one, his decision to empower clan militias serve not the interests of Somalia. It keeps Somalia in perpetual dependency on African peace-keeping forces. Somalis, it seems, have missed another stabilisation opportunity.
The Author of this article was a senior NISA officer between 2014-2018.