By Larry Luxner, Washington Diplomat
Somalia doesn’t have much of an embassy here. But after 24 years in the dark, it does have an ambassador at last: Ahmed Isse Awad.
A soft-spoken yet passionate man, Awad nearly became prime minister of his war-ravaged East African nation. But as fate would have it, he instead ended up as Somalia’s envoy to the United States, a post that had largely remained vacant since 1991 — the year its fragile government collapsed amid tribal chaos and the very word Somalia became a watchword for “failed state.”
The Washington Diplomat caught up with Awad on Sept. 10, one week before he presented his credentials in a White House ceremony that made his presence here official. (The country’s current prime minister, Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, briefly served as ambassador to the U.S. this past summer before returning to Somalia.
Somalia’s modest little mission — a third-floor suite in an office building along DeSales Street, NW, around the corner from the Mayflower Hotel — was still awaiting furniture, so we interviewed Awad sitting on packing crates.
Awad’s priorities as ambassador, he said, are “to cement our relationship with the United States, to raise the profile of Somalia and to improve the image of our country.”
That’s a tall order, especially when all most Americans know about Somalia is the unflattering way it was depicted in two highly popular movies based on true events.
The first was Ridley Scott’s 2001 film “Black Hawk Down” chronicling the 1993 humanitarian mission by U.S. forces to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid and restore U.N. relief to the country. That raid killed 18 Americans and more than 1,000 Somalis, leading President Clinton to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia in a debacle largely viewed by history as an embarrassing failure.
The second was “Captain Phillips,” a 2013 thriller starring Tom Hanks as the captain of a containership taken hostage by bloodthirsty pirates off the Somali coast.
“Somalia is seen as a place of piracy and al-Shabaab terrorism, but we want to give Americans a complete picture,” said Awad. “While it’s true these issues have bedeviled Somalia for some time, there’s been a lot of improvement, and Americans are witnesses to that. With the support of the African Union, Somalia has been able to rejoin the international community and to defeat al-Shabaab.”
Both piracy and attacks by al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot that took over most of southern Somalia in late 2006, have gone down dramatically. A 22,000-strong African Union (AU) peacekeeping force has helped the fledging Somali government steadily claw back territory from the clan-based Islamist insurgency, including key al-Shabaab strongholds in south and central Somalia.
Along with the peacekeeping push, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took office in 2012, ushering in Somalia’s first functioning government since 1991. His Western-backed administration restored some semblance of order to a country wracked by two decades of anarchy, famine, warlords and Islamist extremists.
“[I]n August 2012, the current government of Somalia came into being, and the international community, led by the United States, saw it as the most representative, legitimate government that Somalia has had since the collapse of the Somali state in 1991,” Awad said. “The Somali desk at the State Department has been absolutely supportive, and I have already received commitments from the U.S. administration.”
In 2013, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially recognized Mohamud’s government. More recently, the State Department upgraded its Somali mission to embassy status, although it continues to operate out of nearby Kenya and does not yet have a full-fledged ambassador.
While Mohamud’s presidency was greeted with widespread optimism in 2012, those hopes have since been tempered as Somalia struggles to achieve key political and security goals. A former academic, Mohamud has ruled out holding popular elections next year, citing the tenuous security situation. His government has also been riven by political infighting and its reach remains limited in this Texas-size desert nation dominated by a patchwork of clans, militias and an unwieldy “elders-based” parliamentary system. And without the AU peacekeeping mission maintaining a fragile calm in cities like Mogadishu, the weak central government likely wouldn’t survive.
Though cornered, al-Shabaab is far from defeated. Its fighters retain control over significant tracts of land and are still capable of launching spectacular attacks. Militants have killed dozens of AU peacekeepers, overrun its bases and maintained a steady diet of suicide bombings and other attacks inside Mogadishu.
Al-Shabaab is also responsible for a string of murderous attacks throughout East Africa, including neighboring Kenya, a primary backer of the AU force. A 2013 Westgate shopping mall massacre in Nairobi left scores dead, while a university assault in Garissa this past spring gunned down nearly 150 students. Al-Shabaab has pledged more attacks, while Kenya has bombed its camps in retaliation and vowed to continue its military offensive.
Read more: Long-Neglected Somalia Comes in From the Cold
Source: Washington Diplomat
