Is Somalia our Waterloo?

The news of the week was certainly the execution of the former Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi after he was captured by the National Transition Council fighters in his home town of Sirte. As I wrote this, three major questions still lingered. Where will he be buried and when? Where is his heir apparent, Saif Al-Islam? And more importantly what exactly had happened during Gaddafi’s last moments? The UN is already calling for a thorough investigation into the death of Gaddafi. In all wars, propaganda is very crucial and nothing nails it like the images depicting a heavy victory on the enemy. Footage of Saddam Hussein’s statue being pulled down did it in Iraq. We have also been treated to gruesome images of Gaddafi’s body and that of his son Mo’tassim. Closer home, the footage of a dead American soldier being dragged in the streets of Mogadishu at the back of a pick-up truck was more than the US needed to pull out of the troubled country in 1993. I am bringing this up because as all news channels were running uninterrupted footage of events in Libya on Thursday, word came in that Al Shabaab militants in Somalia had killed (call it massacred) over 70 African Union troops largely belonging to the Burundian contingent. In typical war style, the militants displayed the bodies of the dead soldiers in full military uniform in the town of El Ma’an outside Mogadishu for the local population as well as the media to see the “infidel crusaders” with their bibles and rosaries. Pictures of the same were posted on a Somali-language radio news website. “We have killed more than 70 of the enemy soldiers today…We have inflicted heavy losses on them and you can see their dead bodies,’ Al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told AFP. Although the massacre is said to have occurred in the morning hours of Thursday by Friday morning none of the Ugandan daily newspapers had covered the story yet Uganda has the biggest number of troops in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). The African Union initially disputed that account claiming that it was all nothing but propaganda by the Al Shabaab fighters. However it later conceded that it had suffered some casualties. Lt.Col. Paddy Ankunda, the spokesman of AMISOM, said on Friday that the mission had lost 10 soldiers and not 70. AMISOM is often accused of trying to conceal its losses due to the political considerations back in Kampala or Bujumbura. Personally, I am not interested in how many were killed but the fact that more and more lives keep being claimed in this endless conflict. Since the fall of Siad Barre in 1991, Somali has not seen peace and many who have come in to restore normalcy have paid a heavy price after being branded invaders and killed. In 1993, it was the Americans who were humiliated while on what they termed a “humanitarian” mission. Uganda and Burundi have lost many soldiers in their peacekeeping efforts. Uganda also lost civilian lives in a terrorist attack claimed by the Al Shabaab. The Kenyans joined the fight and have also been promised body bags by the Al Shabaab who said they will target Nairobi’s tall buildings. Already one of the Kenyan combat helicopters crashed on the first day killing five soldiers. A Kenyan colleague has assured me that although the Kenyan forces may not be as combat-efficient as what he called the real armies in Africa (Rwanda, Ethiopia or Nigeria) he expected them to do a good job. According to him, the key thing is that Kenya’s is a fighting force while the AU force is a peacekeeping one. Ever since Napoleon’s defeat at a place called Waterloo many have talked of how hard it is to secure military success away from home pointing to recent examples like the US in Vietnam, Russia in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It must also be quite telling that Ethiopia which has arguably the toughest fighting force in this region entered Somali and flushed out the Islamic Courts Union and left soon after and has never gone back. Is Somalia really the region’s waterloo where foreigners have no chance to succeed? What should be done to this country whose instability continues to be a real threat to the prosperity of the East African Community? And did Kenya really have to wait for tourists to be kidnapped before seeing the need to assist in pacifying its northern neighbour? Email: ssenyonga@gmail.comBlog: www.ssenyonga.wordpress.comTwitter: @ssojo81