By Odhiambo Franklyn
Humanitarian intervention has been defined as a state’s use of “military force against another state when the chief publicly declared aim of that military action is ending human rights violations being perpetrated by the state against which it is directed.– Wikipedia
Any individual with a sufficient amount of interest or knowledge in diplomacy and international relations should be able to immediately conclude that the above description is not only limited in scope; but wholly ignorant to other subtle practices of intervention; including but not limited to such acts as humanitarian aid and international sanctions and embargoes.
This definition too is not exhaustive of other “special” cases of intervention particularly the type discussed here.
This definition though serves sufficiently in my dissection of Kenya’s intervention into Somalia which is cloaked in the name of “Operation Linda Nchi”; the progress of which has since been carefully concealed from the public domain. One more thing about the above definition though; notice that it is limited to one state intervening on another state; an issue of sovereignty and not in another state, an issue of mutual consent or diplomatic pressure; therein lies the special
twist to the diplomatic tango between Kenya and Somalia. The real motivation for Kenya’s intervention in Somalia though seems to have been a dogma of diplomacy held widely in the west that has now affected even African nations in their dealings with one another; one that if not checked threatens to soil the diplomatic fabric in Africa.
The dogma I speak about is nothing new; it is the widely applied label of “Failed State.” The first question by an intervening nation is whether there is moral justification of the intended intervention into another country. Kenya seems to have found the answer in the assumption that Somalia is such a “failed state”, and that the continued conflicts between the Al-Shabaab and the internationally recognized TFG would spill into Kenya and destabilize the East African region as a whole, and thus destabilize the region.
This “failed state” ideology in regards to Somalia is not native to Kenyan leadership; in fact it is one of those policy stereotypes that are yet to be satisfactorily answered in international diplomatic circles.
Let me state here that state failure is a debate with not just ideological challenges, but also empirical, normative and practical shortcomings of considerable magnitude.
The Knowledge of Non-Being
The debate on state failure seems to center on what these so called “Failed states” are not and not on what they are. This is the knowledge of non-being, a fault adopted by many respected news and opinion leaders globally. Consider these two; “That Somalia is a failed state is beyond dispute,” claimed Fareed Zakaria in a column about terrorism and Somalia, in connection with the bombings in Uganda’s capital Kampala in 2010. Fareed is Editor-in-Chief for TIME and anchor at CNN hosting the show GPS. Also claimed The Economist in 2011: “not a single [African state has] peacefully ousted a government or president at the ballot box.”
The knowledge of non-being is wonderful at making generalizations and audacious assumptions. This theory assumed, in the case of Somalia, that the legitimacy of TFG was an established fact, that democracy was the best rule in Somalia, and most fatally that Kenya had to act the big brother role to save Somalia from itself.
The theorists and strategists at state house and DOD made two fundamental assumptions; first was that there was no possibility of supporting the TFG to protect its side of the border from Somalia and contain the insurgents from the south of Somalia.
The second assumption was that at the end of the intervention, Kenya would be able to spearhead the division of Somalia into eight autonomous regions, including Somaliland, and Puntland, in addition to Galmudung (also known as Hiran), Jubaland (also known as Azania), Bay Bakool, Shabelle, Gedo and Mogadishu (also known as Banadir) (Reported by Fred Oluoch; the East African of December 12th it as buffer between Kenya and Somalia (Daily Nation; Sunday December 5, 2010) according to a leaked US diplomatic cable (What was known as the Jubaland Initiative), causing some discomfort between Nairobi and Addis Ababa (Daily Nation; Sunday April 3, 2011).
Kenya was proposing something akin to the Rhineland between Germany and France at the conference of Versailles in 1919 at the end of WWI. This theory that TFG had utterly failed was then bolstered by the promised support from the international community. KDF was confident of a triumphant entry into Somalia.
The “Failed state” was considered by Nairobi to be in no position to decide whether it should remain united, or if the people preferred to remain united and work out their differences in more amicable ways.
With the cost of $233,000 a month for keeping its troops on the ground in Somalia, it is no surprise DOD at Nairobi preferred to resort to the good old divide and rule tactic in the Linda Nchi intervention.
What then is state failure? In his A Definition of a State Chandran Kukathas of the London School of Economics makes this observation (Try Substituting a standard definition of “failure” in this definition); 2011).
In fact Nairobi proposed Jubaland’s independence so as to use “To define the state is…no easy matter for a number of reasons. First, the state is a form of association with a history, so the entity that is to be described is one that has evolved or developed and, cannot readily be captured in a snapshot…not all the entities that claim to be…states are the same kinds of entity, since they vary in size, longevity, power, political organization and legitimacy..”
Finally regarding the “Failed State” label in Africa, consider these; why would another African country want to label another “Failed” when the challenges we face are fundamentally the same? Was Kenya a poster child for western diplomatic arm-twisting?
If it is so easy to label a neighbor a failure, how long till Kenya appoints herself East Africa’s big brother in diplomacy and regional security?
Something tells me our policy makers in Nairobi know zilch about history and the curse of fighting another man’s battle. They should ask the Serbians of Sarajevo.
The full effect of Operation Linda Nchi still remains to be seen, but mark my words, we haven’t heard the last from Mogadishu.
The writer is a student at African Leadership Academy, South Africa.