Ugandan colonel with AU mission likens Somalia to a ‘pig’: Report

By The Star Staff Writer

MOGADISHU — A Ugandan colonel serving under the African Union peacekeeping mission in the country has likened Somalia to a “pig” that gets dirty whenever it’s cleaned, according to a report by the Foreign Policy magazine on Tuesday.

Associating Somalia, a Muslim nation, with a pig is sacrilegious and height of disrespect. In Islam, pork is prohibited. When Somalis want to insult someone they call him a swine.

The unidentified colonel’s rude – and culturally insensitive — remarks underscore the mutual distrust between Somalis and the African Union peacekeepers in the Horn of Africa nation. While Somalis like to rail against the presence of foreign forces in their country, the AU peacekeepers continuously gripe about Somalia’s insolvable problems.

“Somalia is like cleaning a pig,” the Ugandan colonel told the magazine, “You clean it, and it gets dirty.”

In 2014, another Burundian soldier told a Kenyan researcher-cum-analyst with the Southlink Consultants, a consulting firm based in Nairobi, Kenya, that he didn’t want the Qaida-linked militants of al Shabab to be defeated because that would be tantamount to going against his own interest.

“I would rather scatter them to prolong my mission,” the soldier told Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad during a trip to the Burundian capital, Bujumbura.

The FP report by Amanda Sperber, a journalist who’s based in Somalia and Kenya, was scathing of the international community’s “failed blueprint” of statebuilding and training national armies in failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan.

“The West has trained the three most abysmal armies in the world: the Iraqi Army, the Afghan Army, and Somali Army,” Stig Jarle Hansen, who wrote a book on al Shabab, told the magazine.

Headlined “Somalia Is a Country Without an Army,” the article argued that even if the African Union mission left Somalia, “there will be private security firms, peacekeeping missions, and mercenaries in the country for the foreseeable future.”

Its subheading pretty much summed up the grim reality in Somalia: “the United Nations and foreign powers claim they are dedicated to building up the Somali National Army. Instead, they have become complicit in its dysfunction.”

On July 30, the United Nations security council gave the AU mission in Somalia — popularly known as AMISOM — until December 2021 to hand over security responsibilities to Somali forces. The continental force has been in the Horn of Africa nation since 2007.

The article accused the West of “turning a blind eye to the rampant human rights abuses” committed by African Union peacekeepers in Somalia, such as sexual assaults — “another element that aids the jihadi group’s propaganda mission.”

In 2014, the Human Rights Watch said in a report — entitled “‘The Power These Men Have Over US’: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by African Union Forces in Somalia” — that soldiers from the AU mission in Somalia have sexually abused and exploited vulnerable Somali women and girls on their bases in Mogadishu, the capital city.

According the HRW report, AU soldiers used humanitarian aid and other tactics to coerce vulnerable women and girls into sexual activity. They have also raped or otherwise sexually assaulted women who were seeking medical assistance or water at AU bases, said the report.

The Foreign Policy magazine said the status quo — in which militants are active and able to carry out attacks on their targets and the African Union peacekeepers are unable to “fully” flush out the militants — has “fueled rumors—even among some educated, worldly Somalis who don’t support al-Shabab—that such chaos is in fact the Somali federal government’s end goal, allowing foreign forces to remain on the ground and in control while government officials take their share of the spoils.”

During his recent visit to Somalia, the UK’s State Secretary for Defense, Gavin Williamson, warned of premature exit of the AU troops from Somalia, saying such a move could have an adverse effect on gains already made.

“The role they play is one that has sometimes been a little bit forgotten around the world, but it should be something that should be highlighted and should be celebrated because without the decisive action that has been undertaken, without the work that they have been doing to deliver security, Somalia would be in a very difficult place,” said Williamson after meeting with AU Force Commander Lt. Gen. Jim Beesigye Owoyesigire, Deputy Head of the mission Simon Mulongo and other senior officials in Mogadishu.

The magazine quoted an unidentified Somali army trainer who told the writer that Somali government officials “don’t want to solve any problems because they want the money to keep coming.”

The trainer talked of how the Somali government and donor countries are feeding barefaced lies to their respective citizens, saying: “The Somalis lost the war and the world is trying to pander to their every need to show to their home nations they are making progress; meanwhile, [Somali government officials] are laughing all the way to the banks and meanwhile secretly supporting al-Shabab.”

The writer said many Somalis are now starting to call for a reconciliation with the extremist group, while Western governments say they do not engage with terrorists.

“The result,” she wrote, “will be band-aid armies like AMISOM or a country overrun with mercenaries.”

A foreign advisor to Somalia’s ministry of defense told the writer that “it’s an open secret that members of the government—and even members of the international community—will hire al-Shabab to kill or intimidate their political rivals.”

The unidentified advisor also said “bluntly” that, “you can buy an army here,” Somalia, adding: Collectively, we as the international community have been supporting nothing but a criminal patronage network for years.”

But the words of E.J. Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for Africa, was even blunter.

“Building the SNA (Somali National Army) is more of a priority for the international community than it is for Somali politicians,” said  Hogendoorn.