THE HOTEL MUNA lies close to the presidential palace in Mogadishu, in a district nominally under the control of Somalia’s western-backed “Transitional Government”. But “government” is a misnomer. The authorities’ writ runs no more than a few blocks; most of the capital and of the country are controlled by the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab which made the point only too effectively on Tuesday in an attack on the hotel that claimed 31 lives, including six MPs. Fighting in the area has taken over 80 lives in the last few days.
Somalia has been in a state of almost constant war since the collapse of the government of Siad Barre in 1991. Its weak and incompetent administration survives by virtue of a 6,000-strong, increasingly unpopular African Union (AU) force. Al-Shabaab, which was repulsed again yesterday by the AU in an attack on the presidential palace, killed 76 in a bombing of Kampala last month in protest at Uganda’s involvement in the AU force. And it has made much of the latest in a long and bloody succession of failed “foreign intervention”, from US marines in the early 1990s, to the UN mission that followed, and the Ethiopian intervention in 2006.
The AU force was initially appreciated for standing up to al-Shabaab but has made enemies by shelling crowded neighbourhoods in response to insurgent fire, killing civilians. The group, which has fought a three-year campaign against the government, is thought to number up to 7,000 armed men, not a few of them foreign militants with experience of attacks on western and other targets in Africa. It has an armed wing, known as the “army of suffering”, and a religious police force, the “army of morality”, which has enforced a severe form of sharia law through its courts.
More than 21,000 Somalis have been killed in fighting since the start of the insurgency, 1.5 million uprooted from their homes and nearly half-a-million are sheltering in other countries in the region. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said in a report on Monday that a quarter of the country’s population – two million people – are in need of humanitarian aid.
The latest attack will reinforce the view held by some international analysts that Somalia’s government should be allowed to fall. Their rationale is that the country would tire quickly of an al-Sabaab government which clan militias, less extreme Islamists, and businessmen would overthrow. The result, they argue, would at least be a government with a support base. It might, but Somalia’s history would suggest it might not last long.