A Hijacking, new film on Somali pirates

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing this film. The president of the shipping company, the ship's captain, and the primary negotiator for the pirates are all in my book, Pirate State: Inside Somalia's Terrorism at Sea.
--Peter

Toronto Film Fest: Somali Pirates

 

Everyone is talking about a Danish film called “A Hijacking,” whose screening on Sunday afternoon was completely full.
A taut psychological thriller written and directed by Tobias Lindholm, tells the high pressure story of a Danish freighter captured and held for ransom by Somali pirates. The drama follows the pressure cooker of weeks of high-stakes negotiations that recalls Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” or even the classic “Das Boot.”


 

Al-Shabaab's deadly strike

It was only a matter of time.

Some 74 innocent people are now dead in the Ugandan capital of Kampala in the wake of two vicious suicide bombing attacks by the al-Shabaab militia, which controls almost all of southern Somalia.

This is the kind of deadly disaster that I feared would happen in my forthcoming book, Pirate State: Inside Somalia's Terrorism at Sea. Sadly, it won't be the last.

Although Pirate State is ostensibly about Somalia's pirate horde, the pirates and the al-Shabaab militia have emerged from the smoldering chaos that has gripped Somalia for the past two decades.

Remember Black Hawk Down? Al-Shabaab does. But they're not waiting for another invasion of U.S. marines. They've exported their war. Expect it to get worse.

That al-Shabaab attacked two locations in Kampala, Uganda, is no surprise. Uganda provides the bulk of the African Union's 4,000 or so troops now hunkered down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

These Ugandan soldiers, accompanied by a much smaller contingent of soldiers from Burundi, are all that prevents a complete take-over of southern Somalia by the fundamentalist al-Shabaab militia.

The Ugandan soldiers are kept alive by a life-line of military and logistical support from the U.S. and protect the fragile and pro-western Transitional Federal Government that is holed up in corner of Mogadishu.

This is not the first time that Uganda has been hit by al-Shabaab. On September 17, 2009, al-Shabaab militants, some of whom were reportedly American converts, drove a couple of stolen UN vehicles into the Ugandan's compound and detonated themselves, killing more than 20 people.

Because of the notorious Black Hawk Down debacle, the U.S. has been more than happy to let the Ugandans hold out as the final bulwark of defence for the teetering transitional government.

But clearly there is a price to pay, while Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni relishes his role as the pro-western posterboy for the few African governments that still claim to be "democratic."

After altering the constitution to allow himself unlimited terms, Museveni faces yet another re-election bid in early 2012. Uganda's presence in Somalia has already been challenged, and this bloody tragedy will certainly rouse Museveni's opposition.

The suicide bombing at the private club in Kampala where hundreds had gathered to watch the World Cup final only underscores al-Shabaab's fundamentalist doctrine, which has forbidden such entertainment as anti-Islam.

The attack on an Ethiopian restaurant was also a reprisal, since Ethiopian forces, with U.S. help, defeated the Islamic Courts Union and occupied much of southern Somalia for a couple of years after.

Al-Shabaab, which means "the youth," grew out of the former Islamic Courts Union, which controlled southern Somalia for most of 2006 and at the time was the only law and order the country had known in 15 years.

Al-Shabaab was the ICU's militia. When the ICU was defeated in the opening weeks of 2007, the al-Shabaab scattered, licked its wounds, and regrouped.

Despite the defeat, the militia had established strong ties with the militant and deeply fundamentalist Islamic network that grips the region, including Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Using suspected links with the Somali pirate clans that control the coasts, al-Shabaab has been supplied and staffed by a cadre of seasoned militants who serve as instructors and mentors for the al-Shabaab recruits.

These recruits have included disenchanted American converts, some from the Minneapolis area, but also many from Nairobi, Kenya's sprawling Somali neighborhoods.

I spoke at length with a former al-Shabaab soldier in September of last year. The man had volunteered, been trained by al-Qaeda- and Taliban-linked commanders, then fought for more than a year against the Ugandans in Mogadishu and other towns in Somalia.

Seeing the futility of the killing, he had left, and was on the run in Kenya, convinced that al-Shabaab agents, bent on revenge, would soon kill him.

He told me that al-Shabaab militants permeated Kenyan society and it was only a matter of time before the would begin to strike.

At the time, it was widely rumored that Kenyan authorities has barely been able to foil an al-Shabaab plot to strike hotels in downtown Nairobi during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit in August 2009.

The attack on Uganda shows that al-Shabaab has a long reach that extends through Kenya, Uganda's strongest ally and neighbor. Is Burundi next? Or is Kenya?

Why Kony will never be captured

When I was reporter covering government, I learned that to understand what was behind any particular bill being debated in Congress, one should find out whose cow was being gored.

It was a gruesome, but clear depiction of what propels most government action.

In the case of Uganda's fugitive militia leader Joseph Kony, no one's cow is being gored by his continued existence. On the contrary, Kony's continued existence has been beneficial for Uganda and President Yoweri Museveni.

For the duration of the war in northern Uganda from 1986 to 2006, Museveni used Kony and the LRA to keep the north in a virtual state of war. As I explain in my book, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, Museveni applied a limited number of soldiers to fight the LRA.

Museveni was distracted by a much more lucrative proposition: toppling the Mobutu regime in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beginning in 1996, Uganda took control much of northeastern DRC and plundered gold, diamonds and timber until 2003, when Uganda was forced to withdraw from eastern DRC due to international pressure.

This has been well documented by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and forced a judgement against Uganda by the International Court of Justice.

As Museveni applied just enough pressure to control the LRA, he rounded up all of the Acholi people in northern Uganda, his traditional opposition, and put them in refugee camps.

As long as the LRA was alive and well, Museveni controlled and isolated the north, leaving him to plunder the eastern DRC.

Additionally, the LRA irrationally attacked, killed, and mutilated the Acholi people, the same ones who Kony said he was fighting for, claiming that the Acholi were being punished for not joining the LRA's rebellion.

As long as the LRA was alive and fighting, Museveni and Uganda received millions of dollars in foreign aid, with much of the money going to his generals, not soldiers or equipment.

Meanwhile, hundreds of private aid groups from the US, EU, and UN dumped time and money into caring for the people in the camps. This relieved Uganda of its responsibility to care for these Ugandans, who had been put in the camps under the guise of solving the situation in the north.

The LRA has been a cash cow for Museveni and Uganda.

When Kony left northern Uganda, and Uganda failed to kill or capture Kony in the DRC in December 2008, Museveni and Uganda repeated past behavior.

Their failures allowed Museveni to ask for yet more money to fight the LRA, which the US and EU countries continue to give happily.

While humanitarian aid continues to flow into northern Uganda, the latest incarnation of financial support, to the tune of $10 million a year, is in a bill that recently passed the U.S. Senate titled, "The Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009."

Many of the bill's supporters think it means an end to Kony and the LRA, despite the fact that bill only calls for the developing of a multi-lateral "strategy" to bring Kony to an end.

The reality is that as long as Kony remains in remote and inaccessibly places, he will never be killed or captured.

The LRA's brutality affects people who neither control valuable resources nor are connected to events or issues of concern on the world stage. This is not heartless. It is a fact. No one's cow is being gored by Kony.

The only reason anyone knows about Kony is because of the outrages he continues to commit, which continue to shock the world. But to a limited extent.

While the International Criminal Court has indicted Kony and LRA commanders, nothing concrete has been done in five years to bring an end to the LRA. This is the fault of Uganda, not the international community, and certainly not the U.S.

Yet, the international community perpetuates the situation by giving Uganda money and relieving Uganda of doing what it should be doing to capture Kony and help rebuilt the north.

The international community should force Museveni and Uganda to capture Kony and put an end to the LRA using the millions of dollars that Uganda has already received, most of which have disappeared due to corruption.

But, we all know this will never happen.

The international community will not act against Uganda because Uganda is very useful in other ways.

Uganda provides the bulk of the troops for the African Union force in Mogadishu, Somalia, that protects the weak transitional federal government there, and the only line of defense against the rising tide of militant Islam there, embodied in the al-Shabab militia.

For the US and the EU, Somalia is much more critical to regional security than Kony will ever be. Since Uganda is willing to fight in Somalia, the international community is willing to forgive and forget about Kony and the LRA.

Riots a dangerous distraction

The rioting that has rocked Kampala is sad, not only for the needless loss of life, but because it is a dangerous distraction for a country that is in midst of two critical wars beyond its borders.

The last thing Uganda needs right now is a war inside its border or its capital.

One is the only recently acknowledged war against the Lord's Resistance Army which has moved from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Central African Republic.

The second is in Somalia where the Ugandan army is the main component of the African Union's peace keeping mission and is the only thing that is keeping the Somalia's Transitional Federal Government from being wiped out by Muslim extremists of the al-Shabab and Hizbul Islami groups.

While Uganda certainly is the "pearl" of Africa in many ways, the recent riots have exposed the Achilles heel of the continent: ethnic conflict.

As noted scholars have said and as Africans confess, ethnic conflict is the basis of every major war and conflict on the continent. Rather than countries going to war to assert dominance, or ideologies clashing, Africa is continually mired in ethnic-based warfare that has no regard for political boundaries.

Look at the Rwandan genocide, the on-going conflict in Darfur, and the post election violence in western Kenya in 2008.

In Uganda, now, we have the Buganda tribe, the country's largest, clashing with the government forces directed by President Yoweri Museveni, who is part of a neighboring ethnic group from southwestern Uganda.

Museveni's excessive response to the Buganda's desire to conduct rallies was clearly uncalled for, but it also raises questions about the Bugandan motives.

There is historical precedent here. When Uganda first became independent in 1962, the constitution made the Bugandan king, the "kibaka," the constitutional president, while the prime minister was elected and ran the country. It was a variation of England's constitutional monarchy in which the prime minister is elected, but formally appointed by the ruling monarch.

The Ugandan experiment soon failed when the Bugandan king had a shoot-out with the late president Milton Obote and eventually fled the country, dying in exile in England.

When Museveni took power in 1986, he recognized the Bugandan king and "kingdom" but did not grant the king any power other than ceremonial.

When I lived in Uganda in 2005 and 2006, similar clashes occurred because the Bugandans, unfortunately, believe they have been robbed of their right to rule.

As difficult as it may be, most African countries will be unable to progress politically and economically unless they can transcend ethnic jealousies and begin to function as states.

The riots, meanwhile, are particularly troubling for Uganda which currently is fighting two wars.

The Ugandan mission in Somalia is critically important. Uganda is supported and supplied by the US and others in the international community who want to keep Somalia from becoming a safe haven for Muslim extremists.

The significance of this grows daily as Pakistan and the US put pressure on the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their allies, forcing them out of Pakistan's lawless northwest province.

Increasing numbers of these fundamentalist fighters are fleeing to Somalia, bringing weapons and money that fuel a likely take-over of war-torn Somalia.

An extremist takeover in Somalia would have disastrous consequences for East Africa, the entire continent, and the world at large. The extremists are looking for their next new safe haven, and Somalia has been selected.

Uganda and the international community need to focus efforts on containing the terrorist threat in Somalia, as well as tracking down Joseph Kony and his militia.

Riots in Kampala, meanwhile, are a dangerous and needless diversion.