ANALYSIS

By Gitau Warigi

Nairobi, January 7, 2007 – Despite the negative international image it acquired of being extremist, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was not entirely a bag of rotten apples. Indeed there were high-ranking moderates within.

One of them was the movement's chairman Sheikh Sharif Ahmed. Another was Sheikh Noor Barud, a blind cleric who initially was the courts' ideologue before his voice and that of fellow moderates got increasingly drowned out by hardliners like Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.

In the 1990s Aweys was in an Islamist outfit called Al-Ittihad, which frequently clashed with Ethiopian troops. His name appears on a US shortlist of wanted terrorists.

Unrelenting international pressure is probably what radicalized the ICU and led to the moderates losing out. The utterances and actions of the extremists like Sheikh Aweys only fanned the pressure.

Another source of equally inflammatory rhetorical jihad was the self-styled Sheikh Yusuf Inda'adhe, a Hawiye warlord who converted to the ICU cause and held the defense portfolio in the movement. However, some Somalis consider Inda'adhe an opportunist, and he is reputed to have worked before with the Americans when they were trying to capture Farah Aideed.

Fighting broke out

When fighting broke out last month, Inda'adhe went to Mecca ostensibly for the Hajj. He has not been sighted in Somalia ever since.

" Ethiopia does not consider that there is any distinction between the radicals and the moderates. Actually Ethiopia is responsible for the current situation [in Somalia]. It had armed the opposition to Siyad Barre. Ethiopia's policy is one of divide and rule, which has meant arming different warlords," argues former Lagdera MP Farah Maalim.

" Ethiopia wants a weak and divided Somalia. Even if it was some other group other than the Islamists which had tried to unify the country, Ethiopia would still have found other ways to divide Somalia."

Under the new balance of power, the attitude of the Hawiye, the most dominant clan in Mogadishu, will matter a great deal. The Hawiye thrived under the ICU where they retained control of the all-important port.

Indeed virtually all of the ICU's top leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed and Sheikh Aweys are Hawiye. The only outsider in the top Islamist leadership was Mr. Hassan Turki, an Ogadeni.

The Hawiye is the same clan to which the archetypal Somali warlord, the late Aideed, belonged. His son Hussein, who is a former US marine, is now the Interior minister in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

The Hawiye are also well represented in the TFG. Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi is Hawiye, but he was strongly disliked by the ICU not least because he was the most outspoken in calling them terrorists.

In fact it is understood one of the conditions the Islamists had put for talks with the TNG was the removal of Mr. Ghedi from office. Mr. Ghedi's father was once a senior intelligence officer in Barre's government and it is claimed that he was the "handler" of Ethiopia's current President, Meles Zenawi.

At the time Zenawi was leading the armed Tigrayan rebellion against the Ethiopian government of Mengistu el-Mariam.

Barre was a key financier of the insurgency, as he was for the Eritrean secessionist movement led by the current President of Eritrea, Isayas Afwerki.

President Abdillahi Yusuf is from the Merjeeten clan, while the fallen dictator Barre was a Marehan. The two clans fall under the Darod clan cluster.

Autonomous region

The TFG itself has many ex-warlords in its ranks, including President Yusuf himself. He had been the self-declared leader of the autonomous region called Puntland, and for years has had close links with the Ethiopians. The inclusion of the warlords was meant to bring on board everybody who had clout in the country.

A few weeks ago a delegation of four Kenyan MPs led by Mr. Paul Muite visited Hargeisa at the invitation of the government of Somaliland, the self-governing northern province that was formerly British Somaliland and which the international community has refused to recognize.

Mr. Muite says Somaliland's position was that as long as they were not attacked, they would keep off the goings-on in their sister neighbor in the south.

"They were uncomfortable with the ICU, but they believe dialogue with the TNG is the necessary course to follow. The extremists are only a small minority. It is the moderates in the ICU who should be embraced," argues the MP.

Last year, talks brokered by the Arab League in Khartoum broke down amid recriminations from both sides. A ceasefire had initially been agreed upon but the ICU continued expanding the territory it occupied as the TFG protested.

The TFG had also come to distrust the Arab League brokers whom it believed were sympathetic to the ICU. But what in the end triggered the Ethiopian intervention was when the ICU moved militarily against Baidoa, the seat of the TFG.

The Islamic Courts had quite innocent beginnings. Initially they were set up by businessmen who wanted someone to catch and punish thieves and people who did not respect their contracts. They quickly became the agents of law and order in a country that has seen no central government in 16 years. Later, some of these courts joined to form the ICU and their small groups of armed enforcers became Somalia's strongest fighting force.

Caused a stir

Some Somalis say that the people were sooner or later going to turn against the ICU due to the irksome and puritanical regulations they introduced.

"Somalis are moderate even in their religion. They get very wary of hardline elements. The idea that the ICU were popular was a misconception. People were only reacting to the fact that there was law and order," says Mr. Ahmed Adan, a Kenyan Somali and law partner of Foreign Affairs assistant minister Moses Wetangula.

When the ICU romped into Mogadishu in June last year, they immediately caused a stir when they banned the watching of the soccer World Cup in Germany on TV.

Radio stations were told not to play foreign music or local love songs and cinemas showing foreign films were closed.

Source: The Nation