Transitional Government of Somalia

This article needs to be revised: Under the introduction with Transitional Federal Government there is currently a joint article also on Transitional National Government (2000 to 2004). Either both should be mentioned in the introduction and the story and the difference / transition to TFG should be made clear, or (probably better) split into two articles.
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The transitional federal government ( Somali Dowladda Federaalka Kumeelgaarka , English Transitional Federal Government , abbreviated TFG, literally Federal Transitional Government ) represented an attempt from 2000 to 2012 to re-establish functioning government structures in Somalia , which had previously been unregulated since 1991 and was fought between different warring parties end the Somali civil war .

In fact, the power of the transitional government was limited to parts of the capital Mogadishu , and Puntland in the northeast and various groups in central Somalia were allied with it. In August 2012 the transitional government was dissolved and replaced by a federal government .

history

After the deployment of international troops ( UNOSOM , UNITAF , UNOSOM II ) 1992–1995, which could not bring about an end to the war in Somalia, the international community tried on various occasions to help resolve the conflicts through diplomatic channels. She concentrated her efforts on forming a government for Somalia, which should then stabilize the country.

In 2000, a peace conference was held in Arta , Djibouti, on the initiative of Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh . It was led by IGAD and soon also supported by the United Nations, the EU and the USA. Above all, civil society representatives from various clans were invited , including clan elders, clergy, intellectuals (people with higher education), artists and women. Warlords , however, were hardly represented. An unsolved problem was to check the sometimes questionable representativeness of the participants. Of the 245 people selected for the meeting, a good 60% are said to have been former members of the (bogus) parliament under Siad Barre . The seats were distributed to clans, with the clan families of Darod , Hawiye , Rahanweyn and Dir each receiving 44 seats and various minority groups together 25 seats. Another 20 were reserved for women, and 20 could be occupied by Ismail Omar Guelleh by chance. This assembly elected Hawiye Abdikassim Salat Hassan as President of the Transitional National Government (TNG). For the first time since the beginning of the war, Somalia had an internationally recognized government.

The hope placed on Abdikassim Salat Hassen that he would find acceptance by the Hawiye warlords fighting in Mogadishu , however, was not fulfilled. Due to opposition from most of the warlords, the TNG was never able to settle in Somalia. Two years after its founding, it had essentially collapsed, but was still touted as the legitimate government of the country, especially by the United Nations and the former colonial power Italy . Various warring parties formed the SRRC in 2001 with the support of neighboring Ethiopia as a "counter-government" based in the city of Baidoa in south-west Somalia .

In 2002, renewed negotiations began in Mbagathi , Kenya , this time with warlords taking a leading role. In these negotiations the problems of representativeness and fraud were even greater, and there was extensive corruption and vote buying. Again a "transitional parliament" was set up with seats distributed according to clans. After two years, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed - former leader of the SSDF and president of the de facto autonomous region of Puntland - was elected President and Ali Mohammed Ghedi as Prime Minister. Both enjoyed the support of Ethiopia, and Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed is said to have had the most extensive means of buying votes of all candidates. In 2005, this new government, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG, Federal Transitional Government) and parts of the parliament moved to Somalia for the first time, initially to Jawhar near Mogadishu under the protection of the warlord Musa Sudi Yalahow , after a rift between Yalahow and Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed to Baidoa. The transitional government never succeeded in establishing a functioning administration or in bringing large parts of the country under its control. It was rejected by parts of the population, in particular because of the support from Ethiopia, especially since many Somali people see Ethiopia as a “traditional enemy” because of the conflict over Ogaden .

In contrast, in 2006 the Union of Islamic Courts , a loose coalition of Sharia courts, succeeded in significantly improving the security situation in Mogadishu and other parts of southern Somalia. Radical sections of the Union also called for jihad against the transitional government as well as against Ethiopia and the USA, and advanced militarily towards Baidoa in the course of the second half of the year. This threat to the transitional government prompted Ethiopia to declare war on the Islamists at the end of 2006 and to march on the side of the transitional government. After the Union was quickly deposed, the transitional government was able to move into Mogadishu for the first time in early 2007.

There she was greeted by some, but after a few weeks armed resistance began from remaining Islamists, clan militias and other armed groups. The troops of Ethiopia and the interim government responded to their attacks with counter-attacks, which also resulted in numerous civilian casualties. In particular, fighters from the transitional government committed looting, assault and rape. As a result of the heavy fighting in Mogadishu in 2007 and 2008, around 700,000 of the original 1.3 million people fled the city.

A national reconciliation conference in 2007 was also unable to strengthen the transitional government. At the end of 2007 it controlled around 20% of the national territory, according to its own information. There were also internal differences. On October 29, 2007, Prime Minister Ghedi announced his resignation because of differences with President Yusuf. Nur Hassan Hussein became the new prime minister . In December, the latter dissolved the cabinet comprising 73 ministers and their deputies and reassembled it. In 2008 there were differences between the president and the prime minister when Nur Hassan Hussein wanted to sack the controversial mayor of Mogadishu Mohammed Omar Habeb Dhere and then President Yusuf tried to sack Nur Hassan Hussein. On the part of the government opponents, radical Islamists - above all al-Shabaab - gained the upper hand.

In 2008, parts of the transitional government led by Nur Hassan Hussein, who were ready to negotiate, held talks in Djibouti with moderate Islamists from the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia under Sharif Sheikh Ahmed . They were able to agree on a power division and on the withdrawal of the Ethiopian troops . Parliament was doubled with another 275 seats and elected Sharif Sheikh Ahmed as the new president, and the Ethiopian troops withdrew in early 2009. The new president also announced that he would introduce the Sharia .

Situation at the time of the transitional government

The hope that a more broadly based transitional government could be created by including the moderate Islamists and that this, together with the withdrawal of Ethiopia , would lead to a marginalization of more radical Islamists, was not fulfilled in the course of 2009. This was particularly due to the fact that the moderate former government opponents under Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who were newly involved, were no longer very important militarily. Rather, the particularly radical al-Shabaab led the way in this regard. It controls large parts of southern Somalia and continues to fight the new government.

Soon after the withdrawal of the Ethiopian troops, al-Shabaab took the previous seat of government Baidoa. Numerous parliamentarians fled the country, so that the parliament is practically no longer a quorum. In June 2009 the government formally declared a state of emergency . The US sent 40 tons of weapons to prevent the complete collapse of the transitional government, but parts of this shipment are said to have ended up in al-Shabaab's hands. There are signs that the population does not support the fundamentalist Islam of al-Shabaab and rather sympathizes with the transitional government, but this has so far not had any military effect.

Other parts of southern and central Somalia were contested between forces loyal to the government and their opponents. Somaliland has been practically independent in the north-west of the country since 1991, while the de facto autonomous Puntland in the north-east was loosely allied with the transitional government.

Problems of the transitional government

One problem with the attempts to form transitional governments for Somalia was their questionable legitimacy : They did not come about through democratic elections, but are determined by bodies whose representativeness and legitimacy are in turn controversial. Also, none of these governments has so far been able to bring about peace and security for the population. Rather, attacks by troops serving the transitional government had diminished its reputation.

Some Somalia specialists like Ioan M. Lewis fundamentally questioned the approach of wanting to create a central government first. Lewis referred to the traditional Somali form of society , which has no centralized political structures and thus imposes a decentralized approach in the individual regions and “from the bottom up”. He also criticized the focus on forming a government without ensuring that those involved actually make peace first. As a positive counterexample, he saw Somaliland , where the creation of peace and the formation of government structures with traditional methods of peacemaking succeeded. Ken Menkhaus also criticizes the international community for a lack of understanding of the reality in Somalia. During 2007 and 2008, she treated the transitional government as if it had been entrusted with rebuilding after a conflict, although this conflict was and still is in full swing. In addition, she downplayed the humanitarian situation and human rights violations by government troops so as not to damage the government's legitimacy.

In addition to the traditional form of society, which has never been conducive to the formation of a central government, other experiences in Somalia's recent history contributed to the difficulties in establishing state structures. Most of today's political actors in Somalia had their last experiences with statehood under the dictatorship of Siad Barre . From 1969 until his fall in 1991, Barre secured the loyalty of various clans through extensive clientelism , for which he had the means because during the Cold War first the Soviet Union and later the USA gave Somalia massive support for strategic reasons. Under him, the state did not serve to provide certain services for the population, but to enrich the ruling elites and to repression against their opponents.

As a result, on the one hand, the ideas of a number of management personalities were shaped by the fact that the state bought the loyalty of important actors through privileges, awarding offices, etc. Somalia will hardly be able to afford a correspondingly inflated state apparatus, even in the new federal government, since its own resources are scarce and the international community will no longer provide such extensive funds for this. On the other hand, business people in particular are skeptical of the restoration of statehood. They benefit from not having to pay taxes or being subject to regulation, and they do not want a state like the one under Barre, which has brought them little benefit. They do support certain groups and warring factions that they believe can create a minimum of necessary security for their business - for example the Union of Islamic Courts at times - but by no means necessarily linked to the establishment of a central government ("governing without government") ). Some actors also oppose the establishment of government structures because they believe that total lawlessness best serves their interests. Such interests of individual actors also change again and again.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://allafrica.com/stories/201208220474.html
2. ↑ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13830470
3. ↑ http://www.somalia-aktuell.de/aktuelle_meldung.aspx?ID=37&Meldung=neues_parlament_und_neuer_staatschef_in_somalia_gewaehlt
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Ioan M. Lewis: Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History and Society (pp. 81–85)
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Ken Menkhaus: Somalia: 'They Created a Desert and Called it Peace (building)' , in: Review of African Political Economy Vol. 36, No. 120, 2009
6. ↑ Lewis 2008 (pp. 85–90)
7. ↑ BBC News: Mogadishu crowds greet Somali PM
8. ↑ IRIN News: Somalia: Prime minister to name new, leaner cabinet
9. ↑ ^{a b} Somali leader agrees Sharia law , in: BBC News, February 28, 2009. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
10. ↑ Somalia's parliamentarians are fleeing the country , in: Nachrichten.ch, June 25, 2009
11. ^ Deutsche Welle : Somalia in a State of Emergency of June 22, 2009
12. ↑ Jeffrey Gettleman: In Somalia, a Leader Is Raising Hopes for Stability , in: New York Times, September 16, 2009
13. ↑ Lewis 2008 (pp. X, XI, 91, 115), Lewis 2002
14. ↑ ^{a b} Ken Menkhaus: Understanding the state failure in Somalia: internal and external dimensions , in: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Ed.): Somalia - Old Conflicts and New Chances for State Building , 2008 ( PDF )

Web links

• Voices of Somalis to the transitional government at BBC News (English.)
• Tobias Hagmann, Ulf Terlinden: Somalia's fictional peace processes , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 3, 2005 (PDF; 93 kB)