Foreign Affairs Committee on Dec. 10th, 2018

[Jay Bahadur]

Sure.

As you pointed out, the arms embargo was partially lifted in 2013 to allow the federal government, and theoretically federal member states as well, to import arms up to a certain calibre—essentially, small arms up to 14.5 millimetres and mortars up to 82 millimetres, I think.

The problem, as you point out, is that this weaponry often quickly gets into the hands of al Shabaab. The logistics arm of the Somali National Army is notoriously corrupt, on both a large scale, in terms of the head of logistics diverting weapons directly, and on a smaller scale, whereby unpaid soldiers will simply go to the market to sell their weapons.

Since 2015, the federal government has been marking weapons, which has made it easier for us to determine diversion rates. In this past report, we noted that 60 weapons we found in markets in Mogadishu and in Baidoa had markings of the federal government. That's just a very small sample of what's going on.

Our view is that with al Shabaab, as Dr. Menkhaus pointed out, it's not really a military problem per se. Greater and higher-calibre weapons will not help them solve that problem, as the federal government insists. The problem is that even if the arms embargo were completely lifted and they were allowed to import whatever weaponry they wished, history suggests that the weaponry would quickly find its way into the hands of al Shabaab and there would be some sort of parity again. Our view as a group is very strongly that the federal government is not ready for a lifting of the arms embargo. In fact, as noted in this report, not one of the consignments they received legally over the course of our past mandate was properly notified to the Security Council as per the requirements set out in the Security Council resolution. That remains a significant concern for us.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I'm wondering if you're seeing any kind of an age divide in Somalia. Is there any greater hope with the younger generation coming forward and pushing more for engagement in civil society, or a more democratic regime, or more rule of law, or is it the other way around?

[Jay Bahadur]

I think that's one for Dr. Menkhaus.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

All right. This is going to be a speculative answer. I wish we had better data. We do have some public opinion polls of youth, which give us some clues to this question, but I don't have a definitive answer.

I think the first thing to point out is that 75% of the Somali population is under the age of 30. That means that three-quarters of the population or more have no living memory of a functional state, and that's a really important point of departure. We are talking about people for whom good governance, rule of law—all the things we take for granted—is a pretty alien concept in their frame of reference.

They are also now much more accustomed to a degree of Islamism in their lives, in politics and in justice systems, which would have been relatively unknown for the older generation. I think that's going to mark them into the future. I think this is a generation that will look for Islamic solutions in some form to a much greater degree than their older counterparts did in Somalia.

As for whether they are more inclined to see a solution, I don't know. I suspect that over time, Somalis who grow up in this environment will learn how to manage it. Somalia is a gigantic, horrible experiment in risk management—10 million people who have figured out a way to live in a chronically insecure and poorly governed context—and risk aversion is one of the ways you stay alive. Risk aversion, in this context, usually means not taking chances on a proposed dramatic new system of political rule, but rather living with the devil you know.

That is discouraging in some ways to me. I think it's going to be harder to promote real political reform because its risks are just so high for Somalis.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

You've called for innovative aid. Do you know of any brilliant, innovative ideas for how to address that?

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

There is a huge danger in calling out aid agencies and their projects and saying, “Look how well they're doing”, because that immediately elicits counter-responses: “Oh, no; they messed up here and here and here.” I'm a little reluctant to give a shout-out to specific aid agencies.

When I'm in the field, there's no question that some are certainly looking harder than others at new ways of doing business in Somalia. To the extent that aid agencies can build and retain top-notch national teams, they stand to have a much greater rate of success. Somalia is very inaccessible to outsiders. It's almost impossible for outsiders to program effectively in Somalia without a national team that really knows what it's doing, and that's a lesson many have learned long ago.

Many have been innovative in the ways they have allowed their national staff to take global issues—such as human rights or women's rights—and repackage them so they don't appear to be our agenda being foisted on Somalis, because that's a great way for these programs and agendas to fail. National staff know how to nationalize these issues, to indigenize them—to draw on Islamic traditions, for instance, as a way of arguing for women's rights. That's very effective and innovative.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

MP Vandenbeld is next, please.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much to both of you.

I'd like to pursue a little bit more this idea of the transition to federalism and the way in which Canada, a country that has a long history of experience with federalism, might be able to help in that transition. I understand, of course, that it's a very difficult thing to do in a clan-based society, where you do have huge parts of the country that don't have national government control. Is there something specific that Canada can do?

Dr. Menkhaus, I know you talked about the donor flexibility in being able to target aid toward some of the regional governments.

Mr. Bahadur, you talked about the building-block solution, that we want to be focused on the regional governments.

Could each of you please talk specifically about what Canada might be able to do, given our experience and history with federalism?

Go ahead, Dr. Menkhaus.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

The question of federalism in other countries and what Somalis can learn from that has been around since the late 1990s. There was a publication called “A Menu of Options”, which was produced by the European community, I think. It looked at countries like Switzerland and elsewhere not so much to provide solutions to Somalis, but to provide them with a lesson in comparative politics so they can understand that there are a lot of other ways that other countries have managed decentralization and have managed identity politics in a federal context.

I think what Canada could do—and as long as you're extending these lessons to Somalia, you could certainly help us out here in the United States as well—is find a way to help Somalis understand the notion of cosmopolitanism.

One of the problems in Somalia is that federalism has been devolved into a very crude form of ethnofederalism—that is to say, each of these member states is viewed as the domain of one dominant clan, which replicates minority groups in those same areas, which in turn creates grievances that al Shabaab exploits in every single member state.

The question in Somalia of who has the right to live where—the Somalis talk about u dhashey and ku dhashey, or rights by birth, rights by blood, rights by citizenship—is entirely unresolved. In Somalia, no one is going to dispute that a particular clan has domain over a particular pasture; they know that. It's in the cities that they haven't figured this out. They haven't figured out which cities are cosmopolitan places where everyone has the right to live, to do business, to run for office or to be a policeman. If that discourse could be advanced....

You have wonderful cities, such as Montreal and Toronto. These are great lessons for many of the rest of us. I think Somalis would benefit from that. Of course, you have the advantage of having a very large Somali diaspora from those kinds of cities in Canada, who presumably can go back and help promote that idea in Somalia.

The solution in Somalia of federalism and identity tensions, ethnotensions, is going to be solved city by city, in my view.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Go ahead, Dr. Bahadur.

[Jay Bahadur]

I'm not a doctor yet, and probably not soon to be.

I don't think I have quite as comprehensive an answer on this, but I would say that in terms of federalism, one very significant issue is the provisional constitution, which is yet to be finalized after years and years of constitutional review. Within that, there's the issue of resource sharing and transfer payments with which I think Canada deals, given its lessons with richer and relatively less rich provinces. That sort of knowledge could be extremely helpful for the federal government to reach a final decision and a final framework for resource sharing that includes oil and gas and fisheries, which are things I think Canada has a great deal of experience with.

To expand on Dr. Menkhaus' point, given the number of Somalis in Toronto and the cosmopolitan knowledge of how different competing interests can live together, those young people can be encouraged to go back, even, and enter politics in Somalia or at least enter the political discourse, but it's a very difficult sell.

Coming back to the point earlier on the older and younger generations, one of the fears I have in Somalia is that the older generation, which knows the culture, which grew up before the civil war, which knows how to interact with the diaspora, with donors and with locals, is in their 60s and 70s and is dying out. You need to encourage young, educated Somalis to go back and have a stake in the system. Frankly, there are some, but you don't see that widespread interest in going back into that environment if you're an educated doctor or lawyer. As I said, it's obviously not an easy sell, because as a politician there, you face the extreme risk of assassination, of other bodily harm, and certainly a lower living standard.

However, if Canada could find some way to encourage its educated youth to take an interest and a stake in Somalia's future, I think that's one way you could have a very positive impact.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

We're going to have two last questions. We'll have MP Baylis, followed by MP Alleslev, please.

Please proceed, Mr. Baylis.

[Frank Baylis, Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.]

Thank you.

I'd like to follow up a bit on some of the questions my colleague Anita was asking.

It seems that you both said that a top-down federalist approach didn't work because, from a political perspective, the Somali national government isn't very good at doing things and the national army wasn't very good. Is that correct? Have these two attempts been tried, and they failed?

I'll start with you, Ken, if you would like.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

Top-down approaches in Somalia have not succeeded. There's no question. That's where the vast majority of external support has gone and that's where the vast majority of foreign aid dollars have been lost.

The federal government has a number of built-in problems. One is that it's essentially a constituency-free government. It resides in Mogadishu. It answers only to itself. It is the main catchment point for foreign aid, and as a result it attracts.... It does attract some really good people. There are some wonderful Somalis working in the government and trying very hard. They do have pockets of competence there, but generally it hasn't added up to anything more than chronic political paralysis and some of the worst corruption in the world.

The Somali National Army is not a true army; it is a set of divisions or brigades that answer to a clan commander. They are essentially clan paramilitaries that are not answering up a civilian chain of command. As a result, they are not trusted. In some cases, they are advancing clan interests at the expense of local populations, who turn to al Shabaab for protection.

Ironically, we provide support to an armed force that is driving people into al Shabaab's arms. That is about as frustrating a thing as you can tell a taxpayer.

[Frank Baylis]

Do you have something to add there, Jay?

[Jay Bahadur]

I would agree with that completely.

We did a lot of work on taxation this year, as I mentioned. The universal response from local inhabitants who had to conduct trade, such as truck drivers and businessmen, was that they prefer to deal with al Shabaab rather than take routes that would take them through government checkpoints. That could be either SNA—whatever the SNA is, which is often, as Dr. Menkhaus said, just militia that answer to their clan chain of command—or regional forces, which will set up checkpoints haphazardly on an ad hoc basis and essentially serve as extortion rackets.

Al Shabaab is an extortion racket as well, but it's a predictable one and one that honours its own system. That is extremely worrying.

In essence, I agree completely that the top-down approach has led to the greatest waste of donor money in Somalia.

[Frank Baylis]

We take that approach because we think of Somalia—even as we're talking about it—as a country, but it's not actually a country in a real sense. We try to deal with it as a country, but it's really just a group of people in Mogadishu. The money goes in there, and there's too much money for them to even effectively use it, so it gets stolen, and people show up.... It doesn't work. We've been at this for decades, not for years.

It then means that we have to go the other way around: bottom up. You're saying that these are clan groups and we should try to turn them into cosmopolitan people. There's a value that young people are far more cosmopolitan than older people and the world is going that way, if we look at it in general. Are Somalis also outward-looking, or is their situation so unique that these young people don't know...or they're not exposed to it like western youth, who I would say see national borders a lot less firmly than their parents would?

How do they see the world?

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

Do you want me to go first, Jay?

[Jay Bahadur]

Yes.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

That's a great question, and a really challenging question.

Somali political culture is fascinating in that you can simultaneously have a really enduring, extreme level of parochialism around clan; a very powerful undercurrent of Somali nationalism, despite everything that has happened there in the past 30 years; and a pretty impressive level of cosmopolitanism.

Somalis travel extensively. The diaspora are vectors of all kinds of ideas from east and west and everywhere else. Somalis are, on average, extremely avid consumers of news and anything from the media, so they can simultaneously be all three. The key for them is finding a way to tap into the best of all three of those things and not to demonize clanism, for instance, because clan has had some really valuable functions as a social security net in a country with very little security. That has been one of the sources of resilience.

However, you're right that working with the subnational units does run the risk of reinforcing parochialism, inasmuch as many of them are dominated by a single clan, but there are towns and cities where multiple clans coexist. It's a place where they do business and where good schools are available, so people from every clan are making use of those services. Those, I think, are the hot spots of a solution in the country.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much.

We're now going to move to the final question.

MP Alleslev, go ahead, please.

[Leona Alleslev, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to have a summary, if I could.

We've been putting billions of dollars in since the 1970s, but often with few results, and often unintentionally making things worse. We've heard that conventional approaches are not working and that there are parallel governments that are often both colluding and contrasting.

We've heard that ISIL is increasing. Al Shabaab is well established and therefore potentially increasing. I'm not exactly sure where the actual government is. Could you give me a feel of the trend since the 1970s, or at least in the last, say, five years? Overall, are we seeing it staying the same? Are we seeing it getting better, or are we seeing it getting worse?