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August 5, 2009
Australia now has its own home-grown terrorism. Australian police have detained four men suspected of planning to assault an army barracks in Sydney and charged three. The suspects from the Somali and Lebanese Australian diaspora are said to have links to Al-Shabab in Somalia, which is understood to have affiliations with al-Qaeda. Thankfully, we have a counter extremism strategy that does not involve the ramping up of the terrorism alert to red, the deployment of the politics of fear, and the strident rhetoric about the war on terrorism and al-Qaeda associated with the Howard conservative regime that made political Islam the Other that had to be destroyed.
In Australia Somalia is represented as a failed state and a dark and dangerous pirate theme park where American ship captains and US special forces go to gain their 15 minutes of fame.This is a world of pirates, Islamists, refugees, anarchy, civil war. This is the world of al-Qaeda not modernity.
The ABC report I saw talked about Islamic extremists trying to overthrow the government of Somali without mentioning that the previous Somali Transitional Government was allied with Ethiopian forces backed by the US; that Ethiopia's occupation was an unprecedented disaster; that the U.S.-Ethiopian intervention s fanned the very extremist flames it intended to extinguish; and that the current Government in Somalia is a moderate Islamist one with Sharia law; President Sheikh Sharif is a former chairman of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).
The UN backed national unity or transitional federal government that emerged from the Djibouti peace process faces a hostile opposition from radical and insurgent Islamists, which include Al-Shabaab. This has developed into fighting between the transitional government and the hard-line Islamist factions in Mogadishu. The two (loosely allied) Islamic groupings--- al-Shabab and Hizb-ul-Islam---are in effect splinter groups of the former Islamic Courts Union and they are strongly opposition to the new transitional government.
So the lengthy civil war continues. Somalia is still in crisis. Another Afghanistan, in that the countless foreign interventions have made Somalia a terrorist hotbed?
The International Crisis Group argues that these oppositional Islamist groups/militias need to be drawn into, and become part of the political process to build a functioning federal state:
The biggest obstacle to peace in Somalia this time may in fact not be Somalis' infamously fractious politics but the reluctance of the international community to engage with the Islamist opposition. However, if there is going to be a lasting settlement that returns even a semblance of stability to the country, Islamists cannot be excluded.vIf they are kept out of the process, the extremist Islamists will maintain the upper hand and, quite simply, there will be no process. In that case, peace would, yet again, remain a distant illusion for Somalia's suffering population.
If people who have a political grievance are not at the discussion table, they will find some other way to get noticed or to derail the political process. Hence the pattern of Islamic radicalisation in Somalia opposed to the current government that represents a confluence of western-backed secular governance and moderate former members of the Islamist-led insurgency.
There is little doubt that a growing threat to Australia's national security from within stems from Australia's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Australian nationals of Muslim background, who are frustrated with the perceived injustices committed against Muslims in the two countries, have joined extremist Islamic groups in protest against Australian foreign policy.
Australian citizens of Somali origin are being recruited and radicalized by al-Shabab, which appears to be increasing its recruitment in diaspora communities in North America, Europe and Australia in an effort to become a trans-national network on an al-Qaeda model.
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Somali - like many other "failed states" are creation of Western World. Dangerous products were dumped in its waters by European nations, its fishing industry ruined and its citizens diseased. It is natural for a person to take up arms when his existence is threatened.