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ARTICLES & OPINIONS
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Think tribally, act globally
Apr 05, 2007 - Hugh Graham
When the West points a finger at the anarchy in the world's trouble spots, it's
easy to forget that the West itself helped to destroy the tribal arrangements
that once held those places together. Tribe and kinship, however frayed, are
still the basis on which much of the world's population still functions.
A case in point is the war in Somalia between the Union of Islamic Courts and
the United States and the Ethiopia-backed transitional government.
When African Union peacekeepers came under fire, it wasn't the Islamic Courts
that called off the attacks; it was elders of the Hawiye tribe.
It's among the Hawiye that the Islamic Courts has found most of its membership.
But the hard-core Islamist elements among the Hawiye are probably small and the
Al Qaeda links tenuous.
The Hawiyes' biggest concern is that Yusuf Ahmed, president of the transitional
government, is a member of the Darood clan from northern Somalia.
The southern Hawiye tend to see the war as an attempt by the northern Darood to
subjugate and dominate them.
Now, if the United States wants to perpetuate a tribal civil war, all it has to
do is recast it as the "war on terror" by linking the Darood with Ethiopia and
the West and the Hawiye with the Islamic Courts and terrorism. Indeed, that is
what Washington has been doing.
Even this north-south bifurcation has been a product of western intervention.
In the north, the British wisely preserved the tribal framework as an adjunct to
colonial government.
As a result, the north retained the traditional Somali tribal constitution, the
"Xeer," while in the south, Italian colonizers decimated the tribal system in an
attempt to set up a centralized state. But the state never held.
Later, in the humanitarian intervention there in the 1990s, the United States
also failed to back the Xeer. Hence, Mogadishu and the south have remained
ungovernable, to this day.
A similar thing has happened in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was never a state in the normal sense. Historically, it was ruled
from Kabul through accords between a weak monarch and powerful tribes.
But the Soviets, invading in 1979, and the Americans, in 2001, backed the Tajik
tribes in the north at the expense of the Pashtun tribes in the south who had
their own historical claims to ruling Afghanistan.
Having exploited ethnic and tribal rivalries in order to invade, the U.S. and
NATO left the Pashtuns to the Taliban. Now NATO and President Hamid Karzai are
trying to bring the Pashtuns back in order to govern.
In the end, tribal systems cannot be exploited for expediency. They must be
respected as they are. Nor can security and development work without proper
tribal arrangements, a fact which the Atlantic alliance has also been slow in
learning.
If anyone knew this, it was, paradoxically, the U.S. Special Forces commandos
who spearheaded the invasion in 2001.
They worked successfully with the tribes and are now bitter because the U.S.
Army abolished tribal contacts in favour of its own military bureaucracy. Like
Karzai in Kabul, the Americans don't trust local government by the tribes.
The resulting chaos is there for the world to see.
It is the British, however, who are coming to accept the tribal reality, as they
did in Somalia in the 19th century. They've tried handing security arrangements
down to tribal elders in Musa Qala. But the U.S. and Karzai refused to support
the British strategy and Musa Qala was overrun by the Taliban.
With much of the damage done, NATO is only beginning to understand the tribes.
Meanwhile, the Noorzai, one of the largest Pashtun tribes, continues to handle
almost all of the Taliban's funding and supply lines into Baluchistan.
It's in Iraq, however, that failure to understand the tribal reality has been
most damaging.
Washington began its attempt to rebuild Iraqi nationalism without realizing that
nationalism was rooted, not in Saddam Hussein's Baath party or in the various
U.S.-backed governments, but in the tribes.
The strongest Iraqi tribes are multi-ethnic, made up of Shiite and Sunni and
even Kurds.
But Washington, through general ignorance, emphasized religion and ethnicity
over tribes and so helped create ethnic rivalry and civil war.
The tribes, with their own system of collective decision-making, were also a
natural foundation for democracy. That is why Saddam tried to manipulate or
destroy them.
Now, by ignoring them, the U.S. lost a democratic asset and source of stability.
As a result, a new and unforeseen enemy has emerged on the scene: In the Shiite
south, a tribal, Arab, Sunni-Shia nationalist resistance. Its target is not just
the Iranian-backed Shiite government but also the U.S. occupation.
The irony is that while resistances in Iraq have mainly been ethnic, the new
resistance is becoming tribal. How long will it take us to learn?
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Source: Toronto Star
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