Somalia in the Collimator

The United States launched the idea months ago. Before the peak of piracy on the horn of Africa, the Pentagon announced that it had studied a much more aggressive approach to the phenomenon, which did not rule out a land operation to confront the refugee groups in the coastal zones of Somalia, an chaotic area without a central government for the last 19 years. The North American top military commanders were very clear: The “solution” to piracy was to launch an operation from terra firma with the aid of the United Nations, as it had done in 2008 to guarantee the presence of NATO ships and the European Union in the region.

But neither the war ships of the Atlantic Alliance nor the European air and sea operation (EU NAVFOR, also called Atalanta) held back the modern pirates that attack ships laden with goods and even petroleum, which cross the Gulf of Aden, one of the preferred routes due to its connection with the Red Sea, Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Now the European Union has come to the same conclusion as Washington: “The problem starts on land,” said the Swedish defense minister, Sten Tolgfers, who hosted a meeting with his 27 counterparts a few days ago in Gothenburg, Sweden. In the meeting, they discussed the latest details of a mission to train 2,000 Somali soldiers in Uganda. The contingent will provide support to the weak Federal Transition Government (GFT), which barely controls Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

The United States has not only been doing the same thing for months, but has even given money and arms to the GFT in order to confront the opposition militias of Al Shabaad, included in the long list of “terrorists” compiled by the White House. NATO also decided to extend its naval operation Ocean Shield in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia until the end of 2012.

These are not isolated actions. The parties are in agreement. At the beginning of March, officials in the military command of the U.S. for Africa (AFRICOM) met with European colleagues in order to analyze the joint cooperation in Somalia and in other regions of the continent such as the Sahel (mostly in Mali, Niger and Mauritania). During the dialogue, the North American party said that it was deposed to help the European Union in the training of GFT forces.

The big powers in this conflict have other motives, one of which is to restore the peace. Another is to control the important trade routes of the region and, as is to be expected, natural resources. Therefore, it is important for them to confront the new pirates. In the early 1990s, geological studies labeled Somalia as a possible petroleum producer, before North American transnational companies like Amoco, Chevron, Phillips and Conoco helped themselves to the banquet there.

The conflict in Somalia, which was not discussed much until it was exacerbated by piracy, and the contributions Washington can make to stabilize the region, were also matters discussed by the commander of AFRICOM, General William “Kip” Ward, who pitched it as a fight against terrorism to other African Countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda (where a major oilfield was also discovered in 2006). He reaffirmed the speculations that the foreseeable military operations of the Pentagon in Somalia are not solely for the purpose of recovering territory from the hands of insurgents and to appoint a weak government. It is a sad preface to what might take place in the rest of Africa later on; the last thing it needs is new wars or the aggravation of old ones.