Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Nov. 8th, 2017

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

Yes. I would just add that, in addition to the existential threat that al Shabaab poses to journalists, state laws, at both the national and the federal level, the regional level in Somalia, have really cracked down on journalists. We've seen some serious backsliding in parts of Somalia that used to have a relatively robust, vibrant, and free press but now are much more restrictive.

Somalis are increasingly relying on reporting from remote news sources. We have Somalis abroad in the diaspora who essentially run stringers or informants. They can write safely online from Toronto or London, but not so safely from inside Somalia itself.

[Dr. Ian Spears]

If you'll allow me, I'll add just one more thing, one interesting dimension about this. Professor Menkhaus has talked about Somaliland, the self-declared “Republic of Somaliland”, which in a comparative sense is much better than Somalia—or at least to the south. There's a lot of promise there.

Ironically, because it has not been recognized, I have had Somalis tell me that there is pressure on them not to disagree and not to have anything that becomes too public, because they are trying to sustain this relatively peaceful and united region and they're quite desperate for the international recognition that comes with that, so the fact that it hasn't been recognized also has the effect of keeping everybody in line, for better or for worse. I think that probably saves Somaliland from becoming more violent than it is, but it also probably has an effect on freedom of speech and a free press.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

MP Tabbara.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To both our witnesses, thank you for coming in today and sharing your experiences and expertise on this file, which needs some attention at this moment.

Mr. Spears, you mentioned in your earlier testimony errors in strategy and tactics that could have led Somalia in a different state. I want to go back a bit to the time of independence, which was in 1960, when you could see early signs of the crisis that Somalia would be facing very shortly; it showed signs of a fractured state. Then we can fast-forward towards the 1990s, when we saw a bloody civil war, with the U.S. invading and then withdrawing. Can you elaborate a bit on the errors in strategy and tactics that you mentioned earlier in your statement?

[Dr. Ian Spears]

I'm probably more cynical than most. What I am acknowledging is what others have said, that there have been errors. To be more cynical than most, I would say that I'm not sure. A lot of the time with issues of conflict and conflict resolution, the way forward is always doing what wasn't done the last time. There have been people who have said that some things should have been different and that there should have been more patience.

When I talk about the state in Africa having problems, or at least structural problems that give rise to conflict, I'm not sure that there is any way around those structural problems. Mohamed Sahnoun, who is deeply involved in the peace process, was quite critical afterwards saying that the Americans, I believe, were rushing too much and insisting on a conflict resolution process that would move more quickly. He was eventually let go, and the view is, well, if they had kept him in, maybe things could have been different. No doubt, patience is required in any sort of conflict resolution process.

I don't know how long you would have to wait, and I don't know how generous you would have to be in your funding for the peace process in order to get success. Getting a national government with an army or armed forces that represent the country and that act on behalf of the country would basically require Somalis to turn their backs on the entire Somali experience, which is focused on clan, not on national identity. I'm not optimistic. I do say that there are people who say, probably including Professor Menkhaus.... But I'm not confident that there is a clear strategy or path out of here, I'm sorry to say.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you for being very forward on that. We understand, from your testimony, that it is very, very clan based, and the loyalties lie within clans and, as you mentioned, that when individuals vote, they vote based on their loyalty to their clans.

My second question is for Mr. Menkhaus. You mentioned the 22,000-man African Union force that has been in Somalia for the past 10 years. You mention that, in the near future, it may be pulling out of Somalia, and you talk about a vacuum being created for al Shabaab. Part two of that question is, if you can answer, from where is al Shabaab being funded? Are they being funded by a rogue state or other militia groups somewhere else in Africa? Could you elaborate on that?

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

Al Shabaab is mostly funded by its own ability to tax everything and everyone in Somalia. It has a very effective network called the Amniyat that knows every Somali civil servant, every business person, and every plantation owner. They tax them systematically. Not paying the tax is not an option, because that will create a significant security problem for you. It's an extortion racket, but it's a very, very effective one. What that means is that any resources introduced into Somalia, whether by the Somali diaspora, USAID, or the World Bank, al Shabaab is getting a cut, and they're quite good at figuring out how to do that.

They do not have major flows of external money coming from, for instance, al Qaeda. The diaspora, once, years back, was a more significant source of funding, but that's largely dried up. This is a pretty self-sufficient group. We do hear that they have received funding from some interest in the gulf, but we don't know how significant that is. I don't think it's decisive. Given how much they're able to tax in Somalia, they have more than enough resources to conduct the kind of asymmetrical urban guerrilla war and terrorist attacks they're currently doing.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Just to sum up, what can Canada and the international community do to help Somalia with its state of insecurity and to stabilize the country? I'll just wrap up with that. I know that could require a long answer.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

It's the critical question right now.

As the African Union peacekeeping forces begin to redeploy, the current strategy is that we have to accelerate support to Somali armed forces and the Somali security sector, so that they can step in and assume the very important roles AMISOM has been playing, protecting key installations and preventing al Shabaab from retaking major towns that they lost over the past five years.

The challenge there is, as Dr. Spears said earlier, that we have already been spending billions of dollars on the Somali security sector, with very little to show for it. The problem comes back to massive corruption. Somalia is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. People are making millions of dollars diverting foreign aid. We have got to find ways to combat corruption.

We won't eliminate it in Somalia; we have to be realistic. But we have to have enough of the money flowing to the soldiers and the police who are waiting for their salaries so that they don't defect, desert, or double hat, which many of them are doing. They're police by day and al Shabaab informants by night. That of course gives al Shabaab all kinds of opportunities to penetrate the security sector and know more about what's going on there than the security commanders themselves do sometimes. That's going to make it very difficult.

For me, it starts with combatting corruption. The bad news is that we're on the clock. The African Union peacekeeping forces, as they redeploy, are going to be doing so over the next two to three years. We could be facing a major crisis in Somalia if the security sector can't be minimally stood up to do the job it's expected to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

We're going to hear now from MP Fragiskatos.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to both of you for being here today.

I want to get back to something that has been raised already, but only in a very basic way. I think for most Canadians, perhaps even for most Canadian politicians, we think of the world in the way we think of Canada, with a central government, a cohesive social framework, established identities, and established conceptions of citizenship. Can you leave us with some thoughts on how you would hope the Canadian population and Canadian political representatives ought to understand Somalia?

Professor Menkhaus, you've written at length about the fragmented nature of authority in Somalia and other societies like it. I wonder if you could go into that again. We've heard about the clan-based structure of the society.

And Professor Spears, you talked about the Christmas tree analogy, which I think is very apt.

Can you talk about how that fragmentation actually impacts upon authority, how authority is divided as a result, and what that has meant for Somalia? Somalia is divided in this way, but so are other societies. I think through Somalia we can understand a little bit more about some of the key human rights catastrophes taking place in the world today, and their root causes.

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

The reality is that in places like Somalia, whether we like it or not—and reasonable people can differ about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, or just a thing—the government is going to remain weak for the foreseeable future. We know that state-building and institution-building take a long time.

Meanwhile, what we have in Somalia by default is a negotiated state, or a mediated state. That's the way to try to understand it. The state is just one of a number of armed actors. Most of the rest are non-state actors, or they're kind of quasi-state, in that they are planned paramilitaries that are hatting themselves as the military to get some ammunition and salary once in a while, but they're really acting as autonomous groups.

The state has already been engaged in negotiations with this galaxy of non-state and sub-state actors. It forms a hybrid kind of government. It's messy, it's fluid, it's often illiberal, and in some cases it's profoundly distasteful if it involves warlords and war criminals. In other cases, it involves municipalities that are actually run reasonably well and trying to do the right thing, or a district commissioner or a mayor somewhere who's a reasonably legitimate leader.

We need to be thinking of Somalia as that kind of negotiated state, involving hybrid governance, formal and informal, in partnerships, for the foreseeable future. That is a major challenge, not so much for the Somalis. They know how to deal with this; they've been doing it for years now. It's a major challenge for international actors, because we have plug-in mechanisms for formal authorities. We struggle a lot more with the informal actors: how to deal with them, when to deal with them, and when not to deal with them. I would say that is generally a question to leave up to the Somalis. For us, it's important not to get in the way of those negotiated relationships that, as Dr. Spears said, do keep the country from in fact falling into anarchy.

There is order there. It's a very complex political order that requires an awful lot of energy from the Somalis to figure it out, day to day. But they are capable of doing it.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Professor Spears, with that in mind, and building upon some of the work that you have done as well, to what extent is fragmentation a root cause of the bloodshed we have seen as whole in Somalia, but particularly in recent years? Societies can be fragmented, but they are not necessarily predisposed to conflict. Why is it that there has been so much conflict in Somalia? Is it because of this fragmentation of authority?

Professor Menkhaus talks about a galaxy of non-state actors. Is that the cause of the instability and the suffering we're seeing?

[Dr. Ian Spears]

I'm not sure. I would maybe reverse what you just said.

I think with fragmentation, inevitably there is going to be conflict. Political theorists have talked about this for a long time. In an anarchic situation, it's difficult to trust anybody.

I would maybe rephrase it, though, to say it may not be that fragmentation is the root cause as much as an effort to rebuild the state. I'm not sure I know the way forward here, but there is a case to be made that the problem isn't just the fragmentation, but trying to make a federal government that looks like, as you said earlier on, what we westerners expect a country to look like.

We assume that every state should have a federal government that should speak on behalf of all of its people. I'm not sure that's possible in such a massively decentralized state where there can be very profound suspicion of any effort to create any sort of federal government. As I outlined in my opening remarks, if you read, for instance, a series of International Crisis Group reports, each one will often say there is a need to make it more inclusive. In the next one, there would be another effort to be inclusive, but somebody would say they were left out, or be unhappy about being left out.

The problem may not be just the fragmentation, but maybe the effort to build a centralized state structure. The more resources you give it, the more desirable it becomes to control it, and, therefore, the more likely it is that people will contest it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

For the last question, we're going to go to MP Sweet.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for the education.

Just because Professor Spears said he tended to be less optimistic, I'm going to pose this question to you, Mr. Menkhaus. The UN Secretary General said, in the not too distant past, that he's very confident that Somalia will be one of the great success stories.

What would be the basis of a statement like that? Do you believe that's possible?

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

I do believe it's possible, even though I'm quite pessimistic right now. I think Somalia is rolling towards a potential major crisis. In the long term, what I have found is that Somalis, as fragmented as they are politically, are more economically integrated nationally, regionally, and globally than ever before. The business partnerships that transcend clan lines and other fault lines have produced partnerships across the country. The entrepreneurship that Somalis show in navigating this incredibly challenging environment gives me reason for hope.

My vision of a Somalia that emerges from this crisis and becomes a success story is the moment when Somalis, maybe with international friends helping them, but mainly Somalis, learn how to harness all that positive energy they put into the private sector partnerships and entrepreneurialism into the public political arena.

Right now we have two very different logics there. Politics is highly dysfunctional and divisive, and economics is very integrative and creative. We just have to find a way to tap that energy positively.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

I'm certainly a believer in the miracle of capitalism, so I appreciate that, although the situation on the ground there seems to be profoundly urgent. Most of this year they also teetered toward famine as well. Not only do we have the “galaxy” of other players, as they were called, but also the fact that existence or subsistence is sometimes a major issue in Somalia.

I may very well run out of time here, so the most important questions I wanted to ask both of you are these. I know these will be tough to answer, but for a country like Canada that has invested a lot in Somalia.... In fact, I understand from our briefing note that six ministers in the present Somali government are dual citizens of our country, I believe. What would be the most prudent steps we could take, as one of the players internationally, to make as substantive a difference as possible today in moving forward to get to that dream of a miracle of Somalia, Mr. Menkhaus?

[Dr. Ken Menkhaus]

To draw on a carrots and sticks analogy, I would say that we must have sticks to threaten with legal action the Somalia diaspora that are misbehaving and are part of the problem, then we need to focus on what carrots we have to incentivize good behaviour there.

Some of the best governance I've seen across Somalia, I would say, has tended to occur at the municipal level. That is where, like everywhere else in the world, the practical day day-to-day things happen, like who's going to pick up the trash and who's going to run the market, and is the school going to open? Municipal government tends to attract really practical, pragmatic, people-oriented leaders. Not always, as we've had some really bad mayors there, but we've also seen some really good ones.

I would not focus too many resources there, because once you start to flood an area with foreign aid, you end up attracting the wrong elements. But with very calibrated support to those local authorities, that could start to create islands of stability. We may end up seeing Somalia as really a league of city states, little by little, rebuilding itself with towns and cities, and increasingly governing themselves effectively.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Professor Spears.

[Dr. Ian Spears]

I would start by asking why it is so important to have a centralized government. Of course, there has to be government on some level, but I do worry that part of the problem is the idea that there has to be a strong central government. I think that creates lots of problems.

Maybe it is important to refrain from state building at the national level, and to allow Somalis to build local structures that are effective and where the stakes are lower. That does create problems of its own. How do you enforce compromise when everything is from the bottom up? But when you focus on low-level politics, the stakes are infinitely lower. There aren't the same resources involved, so politics don't matter as much.

I often tell my students that for democracy to work, people have to care, but they cannot care too much. Caring too much is when we start getting into trouble.

The other part of that, as has been pointed out a couple of times now, is that there are lots of Somali Canadians. I think they are an important asset and can probably do a better job than non-Somali Canadians. They'll know the territory and are more likely to be accepted there anyway. They're often enormously talented, skilled and entrepreneurial, and I think they offer the most promising avenue forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank both of you for laying some very solid foundations today for our second session tomorrow. I want to thank you both for coming and testifying before us.

With that, it looks like we've run out of time.

I will adjourn this meeting.