In mid-November a murder took place in Bosaso, the largest city and chief port of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia. Sheikh Mohamed Abdi Aware, a senior member of Puntland's judiciary, was shot dead outside a mosque. Why was the judge killed? For doing his job by sending Somali pirates and Islamist terrorists to jail. Both groups were keen to end the judge's activities. One or the other sent the assassins who killed him.
Puntland may be home to the infamous Somali pirates, but it also has a functioning regional government, which has made some efforts to curb their activities. This has been done in spite of the fact that the annual income of the Somali pirates vastly exceeds that of the Puntland adiministration. The pirates rule the Indian Ocean coastline of Puntland, but the local government has had some success in reducing their use of the region's coast along the Gulf of Aden.
West of Puntland is the self-declared independent state of Somaliland, which has enjoyed comparative peace since the collapse of Somalia's central government in 1991. Neither pirates nor Islamist terrorists have a foothold in Somaliland where the local government has achieved a remarkable level of order and stability.
Thus, contrary to the picture of war-torn Somalia usually presented in the Western media, the northern half of the country consists of two small states that enjoy a measure of stability, though more in Somaliland than in Puntland. Neither state is particularly hostile to the United States and its allies, unlike the Islamist insurgents who plague southern Somalia, and both have at various times appealed for support from the international community. Anyone hoping to restore a functioning national government embracing the whole of Somalia would want to use Somaliland and Puntland as basic building blocks to achieve that aim.
However, rather than use real governments that already exist, the United States and the rest of the international community seem determined to pursue the fantasy of re-creating a national government for Somalia from scratch. In this fairy tale, the national government, once established in the capital Mogadishu, will use its Western-trained soldiers to defeat the Islamist insurgents and reduce the regions of Puntland and Somaliland to obedience, restoring law and order throughout Somalia.
The current Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu is at least the sixteenth attempt since 1991 to re-establish a central government in Somalia. It is the only government in Somalia recognized by the United Nations and the rest of the international community. The problem is that the TFG does not even control the whole of Mogadishu let alone any significant area of Somalia outside that city. Only the support of the troops of the African Union peacekeeping force keeps the TFG in existence as its own military forces are weak and ineffective. There is no danger of a TFG judge being shot down for jailing pirates or terrorists as the TFG has no functioning judiciary inside Somalia.
Recently the European Union declared it will be sending a military mission to train the new army of the TFG which is going to restore law and order to Somalia. Of course such training will not take place in Somalia, which would be far too dangerous, but in Uganda. Similarly, when the present head of the TFG, President Sharif Ahmed, was chosen earlier this year, the process took place not in Somalia, but in Djibouti. A government which can only carry on its functions outside the country it is supposed to rule must be considered a pathetic sham, but apparently the international community wants to continue wasting money on it. There is not the slightest chance that it will take control of all the national territory of Somalia.
It is often said the Somali pirates cannot be beaten at sea, no matter how many foreign warships are cruising off the coast of Somalia. The only solution is a return to law and order on land in Somalia. The only realistic possibility of this happening is if the international community provides support for the existing governments in Somaliland and, in particular, Puntland, rather than wasting time and money on a sham government in Mogadishu that is totally ineffective. Then men like Sheikh Mohamed Abdi Aware who have stood up to pirates and Islamist terrorists will not have died in vain.
