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Reading a rationale behind ruthlessness

Thursday, July 15, 2010

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF, as a journalist, making Cassandra-like predictions, there’s horribly little satisfaction when you see them come true.

In a January edition of THE MEDIA BEAT I was complaining about western media’s lack of attention to Somalia and its extremist Islamist force Al Shabaab “as a developing security threat - with Al Shabaab taking up the Al Qaeda mantle”.  I ended that column by asking: “will we have to wait for some horrific terrorist attack originating from there to land on the front pages?”

We didn’t have too long to wait. A scant six months later, the front page of (just for instance) The New York Times carried the following headline on the 76 deaths and countless injuries caused by Al Shabaab bombs that were exploded more than a thousand miles from Somalia: “After Uganda Attacks, Worries of a Militant Group’s Reach”.

“Worries” puts it mildly. These two simultaneous, and evidently suicidal, attacks in Uganda’s capital, Kampala – one of my most-loved cities in the African continent – may not have been Al Shabaab’s first actions outside of its home-country (its cross-border raids have harassed Kenyan frontier towns like Liboi for some time) but its targeting of mass civilian gatherings in locations one entire country further away across East Africa marks a significant tactical shift, and a sizeable - if predictable - expansion in offensive capacity.

And for the Times’ editors, merely on a professional note, it maybe provided a salutary lesson on the risks of planning predictive in-depth features; on the day of this attack the paper’s Sunday Magazine section had carried a fulsome report under the headline “THE NEXT AFGHANISTAN?” about, not Somalia, but Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula.
 

 

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SINGLING OUT FOR ATTACK football fans, of all people, who had gathered for big-screen TV viewing of the World Cup Final, has rightly been seen as an outrage around the entire globe, including among Muslim populations. (Islamic nations, after all, are hardly immune to the charms of “The Beautiful Game” - I was recently deafened by the fervor I encountered in Parisian streets supporting Algeria’s team … so much better than the French!)  Hateful violence aimed against the planet’s most popular sport is certainly of a piece with Al Shabaab’s fundamentalist behavior throughout the stretches of Somalia that it controls. Football, whether played or watched, is as punishable an offence there as a woman revealing her ankles or a radio station playing music.

It’s also obvious, and was clearly signaled by Al Shabaab ahead of time, that Uganda as a country could expect to be hit by Al Shabaab, since it is prominent in providing troops for African Union forces that are trying to support Somlia’s interim government, against Islamist forces that include Al Shabaab.

But less remarked-upon has been Shabaab’s likely rationale for choosing the specific locations. While one site, the Kyadondo Rugby Club was simply an avowedly (western) sports-based venue - it had, like other Ugandan rugby grounds, switched its loyalty to soccer for the big occasion - the other target can be seen as more overtly political, indeed bitterly nationalist, in its significance for Al Shabaab. This was The Ethiopian Village (pictured above) a restaurant with extensive outdoor seating that has until now justifiably counted itself among the best of Kampala’s blossoming Ethiopian eateries, catering to Ugandans, expatriates of all kinds and of course in particular the growing population of Ethiopian immigrants.

It’s emblematic of a trend I noted some time ago, beginning with the Speke Café, staffed by Ethiopians and situated just downhill, through the gardens of the Independence Monument, from the Sheraton Hotel where I used to stay (beginning way back in the appalling President Idi Amin’s day, when it was the International Hotel, and he like to swim there – sometimes, alarmingly, among us journalists). Nowadays the once-posh, but now over-built and utility-strained district of Kabalagala is full of pubs and restaurants, and Ethiopian establishments are prominent among them, not least “The Village”.

With a giant flat screen dominating the restaurant’s terraced areas, I can imagine the raucous delight of that evening, until - at the game’s half-time break - the explosion turned everything into a twisted, bloodied mass of tables, chairs and body-parts.

For the jihadists of Somalia, though, the pleasure-purveying entrepreneurs from Ethiopia represent an object of hatred. In the confusion of territorial gains and losses for years now across and around the Somali capital, Mogadishu, it’s easy to forget – but of course Al Shabaab won’t – how the Ethiopian government stepped into the fighting for over 30 months, on the side of the Somali “interim government”. It stayed until discretion came to form the better part of its valor and it withdrew, allowing the African Union troops to take its place, nominally labeled as a “peace-keeping force”.

So Al Shabaab - “The Youth”, in Arabic, we should remember - can certainly draw upon its own numbers, its militancy, its countrymen's anti-western disposition in general, but also on a deep well of anti-invader hatred among Somalis, now that this violent faction has begun … so determinedly and fatally … to take up the mantle of Al Qaeda.

 

And we can be pretty sure its target range will widen. Early this morning in Mogadishu, an audio-tape released by Al Shabaab but yet to percolate through many US newsrooms, carried a statement from its Emir, Sheikh Muqtar Abdelrahman Abu Zubeyr saying "The incident in Kampala is just a prelude".

 

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