What role may ill-conceived, externally driven stabilisation efforts play in prolonging the Somali conflict? What can be learned from disarmament and demobilisation efforts in southern Somalia, Puntland and Somaliland? This article finds that externally driven initiatives have been viewed with suspicion and alarm, while Somali-led, locally owned initiatives have achieved some success. Conventional international approaches to state-building in Somalia must be reassessed. Security sector issues must be treated not as purely technical, but as integral to the political process.
International efforts to rebuild Somalia have historically focused on the restoration of central government. However, restoration of state institutions represents both an apparent solution to the conflict and its most obvious underlying cause. The predatory, corrupt and often brutal nature of pre-war institutions has instilled Somali society with a profound suspicion of the state’s coercive power. Successive initiatives aimed at reviving Somalia’s central government have all too often prompted even greater violence.
Somali-led disarmament initiatives based on painstaking consultation, negotiation and confidence-building between the parties, (however imperfect or incomplete), have achieved tangible and enduring successes.
- In Somaliland, for instance, lack of international assistance led the National Demobilisation Commission towards a self-reliant and community-based disarmament and demobilisation strategy. This involved the active mobilisation of clan and community leadership and resources within a broad NDC structure and disarmament process.
- Though not as successful as in Somaliland, the measures introduced by the government of the Puntland State of Somalia did help to improve the security situation. As in Somaliland, the Puntland government secured the consent of clan elders before banning unofficial roadblocks and the carrying of weapons.
- While greater international support has been given to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in south-central Somalia since 2004 than to previous transitional governments, the mistakes of previous stabilisation efforts have been repeated.
- The international community once again favoured and funded a state-centric approach to security. The ‘national’ Somali Police Force, for example, was viewed as an imposed, clan-based force in Mogadishu. By mid-2009, the TFG controlled a few districts of northern Mogadishu and was fighting against a vigorous, Eritrean backed insurgency.
Security arrangements must be subject to careful and detailed negotiation at the local, regional and central levels if they are to be effective. Principles include the following:
- Coercive efforts to stabilise Somalia, including forcible disarmament, undermine the balance of power between clans and communities and will always be met with resistance
- A negotiation strategy that leads to legitimate, and therefore in the current Somali context, decentralised political authority, needs to incorporate agreed security arrangements, including a process of disarmament
- Such a strategy should be built around a framework of mutual threat reduction and security guarantees.
