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In Somalia, another day another deadly bombing

A suicide bomber dressed in women’s clothes blew himself up at a university graduation ceremony in the Somali capital Thursday killing three government ministers and at least 16 others.

Bloody attacks hit Mogadishu on an almost daily basis as the U.N.-backed government defends itself against an onslaught from Islamist extremists but suicide attacks have been on the increase since the start of the year.

In February and again in September suicide bombers targeted the more than 5,000 African Union peacekeepers. In the latter attack, two suicide car bombers drove into the heart of the AU base before exploding their devices in an attack that killed 17 peacekeepers including the force’s deputy commander.

The most deadly attack so far was carried out in June when the national security minister and around 30 others were killed in a suicide bombing in the regional city of Beletweyne.

Intelligence sources have for months warned that the main Islamist group, al-Shabaab, which the US calls a terrorist group and says is linked to Al Qaeda, is drawing support from foreign jihadists hundreds of whom are thought to have come to Somalia from the U.S. and Europe as
well as the frontlines of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The increasingly lethal effectiveness of suicide bombing may be an indication of that malign foreign influence. In any case today’s bombing deals a serious blow to the fragile interim government led by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed and adds a few more bodies to the dizzying pile built up during 18-years of war.

US talks (and writes) tough

America’s top Africa diplomat has written to 15 Kenyans telling them they will be banned from traveling to the U.S. if they continue to block reforms aimed at preventing a re-run of the deadly violence that followed elections in late 2007.

The letter signed by Johnnie Carson read: “I am writing to inform you that your future relationship with the United States is directly linked to the degree of support for urgent implementation of the reform agenda as well as clear opposition to the use of violence.”

Delivering this rather undiplomatic message, U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, said it was a sign of how frustrated Washington had become with the leaders of Kenya, the country in which Barack Obama’s father was born and where the presidential grandmother still lives.

Ranneberger said travel bans for some of the 15 “ministers, Members of Parliament, permanent secretaries and other prominent officials” would follow in the next few weeks. This will hit the political elite where it hurts as trans-Atlantic trips are a popular pastime and many have children and relatives studying and working in the U.S. Ranneberger said family-members would also be banned.

The pressure is needed. A raft of reforms to the electoral commission, the judiciary and the security forces, as well as measures to end impunity and curb corruption were all tabled in an agreement brokered by Kofi Annan that ended the political violence that followed the last polls. Progress has been pretty much non-existent since then.

The letters and the impending travel bans might be the kick that Kenya’s complacent elites need to change the downward direction in which the country is headed.
 

Threatened backlash hits Somalia

Days after U.S. Special Forces killed a wanted Al Qaeda terrorist in Somalia’s south, Islamist militants have made a deadly strike right into the heart of the African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu.

The double suicide bombing killed at least 14 AU soldiers stationed there to keep a peace that does not exist. The dead included Major General Juvenal Niyonguruza, the Burundian deputy commander.

At least 15 others — including the force’s Ugandan commander Nathan Mugisha — were wounded when two Land Cruisers painted in United Nations insignia were waved through security at the compound and blew themselves up.

The 5,000-strong AU force is the only thing that stands between Al Shabaab fighters and the weak Western-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

The timing and style of the attack were not chance. On Monday the U.S. sent in helicopter gunships to take out a wanted terrorist with Al Qaeda links. Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was killed and his body whisked away for identification in an operation that marked the first time U.S. troops had stood on Somali ground since the disastrous Black Hawk Down battle of 1993.

Today Al Shabaab responded with deadly efficiency and using a battle technique — suicide bombing — analysts say were taught by Al Qaeda operatives.

“We took revenge on the enemy and avenged for our brother Saleh Ali Nabhan who was killed by infidels," said an Al Shabaab spokesman.

The death count is likely to rise but already outstrips that caused by a previous suicide attack in February in which 11 AU soldiers were killed.

Al Shabaab had vowed a backlash, and this was it. Or at least the start.
 

Kenyan police give and take a kicking

It’s proving a torrid year for Kenya’s police and security forces. Today New York-based Human Rights Watch released a report detailing the wholesale torture, beatings and rape of communities in the far northeast of the country during a disarmament exercise.

This followed hot on the heels of damning criticism of the police force’s callous and illegal treatment of refugees from Somalia (again contained in a report by Human Rights Watch), which came only weeks after a United Nations investigator lifted the lid on police death squads and yet another brutal disarmament exercise, this time on the other side of the country.

Police reforms are now underway but the country’s top policeman — a military man by profession, handpicked by the president — remains in place. It remains to be seen whether the promised reforms actually change anything or are just used as a fig leaf to mask the status quo.

The context for all of this is a pervasive official impunity in Kenya, seen nowhere more clearly than in the complete failure of anybody of any significant rank or position to face justice for the violence that took about 1,500 lives following the December 2007 elections.
 

Somalia/Somaliland

A hectic, pushing, shoving, heaving, shouting mass of heavily laden Somalis crowds the check-in desks of African Express Airlines in Nairobi. It’s an unusual scene: dozens of people hustling for a space on a plane to Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia. From there it continues to Berbera, a boiling cauldron of a town, then on to Aden and Dubai.

One-hundred-dollar notes change hands as passengers pay for the inevitable excess baggage. For a formerly nomadic people Somalis don’t travel light.

The stopover in Mogadishu is less than an hour but no one is allowed off the plane. An abandoned plane lies in the bushes near the terminal, African Union peacekeepers man either end of the runway that stretches across the dirt only meters from the edge of the sea.

The next stop, Berbera, is — depending on your point of view — either one of a number of coastal towns in Somalia or the main port in independent Somaliland. The self-declared republic of Somaliland broke away from the rest of Somalia in 1991 but not a single nation in the world has recognized it.

Somaliland is in limbo: It functions and has many of the trappings of the state (unlike it’s southern neighbor Somalia), yet legally it does not exist so has no access to international financial facilities and very limited donor support.

In the first half an hour outside Berbera the bus passes one house — a stick and rag dome in the distance — one woman seeking the scant shade of a thorny acacia tree, four camels and six donkeys.

The rest is a landscape of white sun-bleached rock, brittle thorn bushes and bone-dry riverbeds set against a backdrop of mountains cut by desiccated ravines cut when the rain occasionally comes.

The bus driver slumps sideways as he drives, cigarette in his left hand, mobile phone in his right. Occasionally he clenches the cigarette butt between his protruding brown khat-stained teeth and gives the steering wheel a nudge with his left hand to adjust the direction.

Among the fellow passengers making for the capital Hargeisa are Said, an entrepreneurship graduate from Malaysia on his way back to Bosaaso, the notorious pirate haven, to do "business"; Hassan, the Nairobi-based geology student and shyster claiming to have 10 kilograms of platinum for sale — he avidly reads his book on the world’s wondrous minerals as the bus races along the potholed road; and Rashid, a development studies masters student from Kampala with a transparent bag of duty free chocolates that have proved no match for the 40-degree heat.

All are keen to emphasis that this is Somaliland, emphatically not Somalia. Here, they say, is peace and security. They have a point: Were this south or central Somalia a lone white man on a public bus would not be given good odds to last very long.

Tristan McConnell traveled to Somaliland with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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